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Wag! dog walker charged with animal cruelty; customers concerned about industry background checks
http://www.ktvu.com/news/wag-dog-walker-charged-with-animal-...
EDIT: and the settlement letter sent from Wag: https://www.scribd.com/document/397139013/SNews-Copie1901081...
Incredibly stupid decision to respond this way by Wag. How bad to you have to be at PR to screw this up? It's not hard. Liability in the case of harmed pets is extremely limited, so you just pay it all and apologize profusely. There's no way the bad press will be worth saving a couple thousand maximum. Absolute idiots.
Its possible the walker was doing nothing terribly wrong and the dog was hit and then the walker panicked and made some wrong choices in communication.
This is mildly fascinating. Though not entirely unexpected. A quick Google for "pet sitting dog died" turns up a number of these stories. It seems a number of them are through these dog sitting services like Wag or Rover. Here's an interesting one I found not through a dog sitting service but just a roommate that had been asked to sit the dog while the owner was away. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/t7kv7…
I have to say that the problem is accountability. With this Wag incident, it appears the person selected through the platform was not the person who was caring for the pet. When I select someone to care for my pet, I know who they are, and can use my own signals to determine if they’re trustworthy and responsible. Wag doesn’t care, they’re just out to “crush it” (cost of business), and the contractor doesn’t care bec…
I don't know that it's accurate to say the contractor doesn't care. If they were a psychopath I could agree with that, but most people have had the experience of having either a pet, friend or relative die and know how deeply it affects people emotionally and to know you were responsible for that would likely generate a strong, negative visceral reaction.
Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people.
Actually this is the part that fascinates me. On some level people expect things to never go wrong. Yet things going "wrong" is kind of the default. It's extremely hard to engineer a situation in which no one ever experiences a negative outcome. To the extent that you can attribute a cause to an outcome, you do.
Infact, it's not at all clear whether the frequency of dogs dying while being sat by pet sitters is higher on platforms or higher when not through platforms. You'd actually have to do quite a lengthy, expensive analysis to compute the truth value of that.
What can likely agree on is that we want the most safe and convenient system. I'm fascinated by thinking about the various trade-offs made when organizing a system one way vs. another. Are we trading more convenience for less safety? Or are we actually getting both more convenience AND more safety, but also increased observability is skewing our perception of the risk such that we think we have got a less safe system when in fact the opposite might be true?
I don't have the answers. But damnit it's important to attempt to look at things the right way in an attempt to compute that actual reality.
> If we wanted to be compensated we had to agree not to tell anyone what happened, we could not leave any negative reviews, we could not make posts on social media, we could not hold Wag or the walker responsible, and only then would Wag reimburse us for Winnie’s cremation. When we responded that we would not sign the agreement, we were told that the agreement would remain available in case we changed our minds. The next day, we received an email stating that the agreement was now “null and void.”
What assholes. (Wag) All these gig economy apps are super shady.
My heart breaks for that dog and her family. Absolutely unbelievable.
I actively block any/all facebook domains for privacy reasons, is this mirrored elsewhere? The 'web' link here in HN is not showing anything useful.
Incredibly stupid decision to respond this way by Wag. How bad to you have to be at PR to screw this up? It's not hard. Liability in the case of harmed pets is extremely limited, so you just pay it all and apologize profusely. There's no way the bad press will be worth saving a couple thousand maximum. Absolute idiots.
It should have been the easiest decision in the world for them - a persons' dog is more important than most other humans to most dog owners, yet the law treats dogs as nothing more than property. Pay up and grovel to these people. In-action doesn't make these things go away.
EDIT: just read the non-disclosure section. I understand the impulse to do that, but it's a MUCH better gamble to just kill the story with boundless kindness.
I hope they get a lawyer and keep us posted with updates.
If this gets picked up in the news cycles tomorrow that'll be FAR more damaging.