Unleashed Family,

As you know, our community is dealing with an atypical dog respiratory illness/cough. This cough continues to create difficulties among our daycare dogs and our strategies for stopping it’s spread do not seem to be working. For some dogs, the cough goes away for several weeks with no apparent symptoms and then comes back which means the 14-day symptom free rule will not work. We also have cases of extremely mild or asymptomatic spread and very long incubation periods which means that dogs who appear completely healthy could still be causing other dogs to become sick.

We have made the difficult decision to close our daycare operations for one month starting this Monday, July 6th.

We must to do everything we can to stop this cough.

We will continue to offer boarding services for our families who have travel plans this month. Limiting attendance to only boarding dogs will limit the overall risk and make it easier to fully separate dogs who are showing symptoms from those who are not.

Daycare will remain open Thursday and Friday (July 2nd & 3rd ), but only at our UA- Dempster location.

If your dog attends daycare at UIE-Greenwood, and you still need daycare, you can bring them to UA-Dempster this week instead. Please email us to let us know if you DO want to bring your dog to daycare this week, so we can plan
accordingly. There will be no charges for last minute cancellations.

We will automatically cancel all daycare subscriptions and extend the remaining
credits on your accounts to be used any time before the end of the year.

We will be offering mid-day dog walks as an alternative to daycare for those of you who are interested. Please email info@unleashedinevanston.com to schedule this service. Daycare credits can be applied toward these walks as well.

We know how stressful and frightening it is to have a pet who is ill, and for those of you caring for a sick dog at home, our hearts go out to you, and we are sending your dogs our wishes for a full, speedy recovery.
 

We understand that our closure of daycare services is a major inconvenience. Many of you rely on us daily to balance your work and personal schedules, and we truly apologize for the disruption this creates for your family. However, our top priority must be breaking the cycle of transmission to protect our beloved dogs. We hope our new
mid-day dog walking services will help to ease this burden.

 

How you can stop the spread. Because this illness can linger invisibly during its long incubation period or in asymptomatic dogs, we urge all our clients to practice social distancing with their dogs. Please consider keeping your dog isolated at home for the month or limit their interactions exclusively to a consistent, small quarantine “pod” which you might all remember from the Covid pandemic. Please do not bring your dogs to other daycares or dog parks in the community. This will only increase the risk for your dog and others.

We are very hopeful that this one-month closure and temporary social isolation will allow the cases in the community to subside while we maintain our rigorous facility sanitation procedures. We will keep you updated throughout July on our reopening progress.

Thank you for your understanding, flexibility and partnership in keeping our neighborhood pups safe.

Warmly,
Unleashed in Evanston & Unleashed Academy