Jenn Tidrow’s business is on a mission to build relationships – with you and your pets – by providing services from pet sitting and walking to puppy courses and safety training
By Brooke Dougherty
Over the past decade, Jenn Tidrow has worked to create lasting bonds with the people and pets in the community through her business, Laughing Dog Pet Care.
In the past, she’s focused more on pet sitting, walking and training. This year, she’s focused on expanding her services to include puppy courses and more proactive and compassionate safety animal training.
Jenn, who grew up in Cedar Creek, North Carolina, just outside of Fayetteville, previously worked as a vet tech at The Animal Hospital of Carrboro. She struck out on her own in summer 2015, creating Laughing Dog as a part-time pet sitting and dog training business.
The concept was inspired by Jenn’s blind 13-year-old Australian shepherd, Piper. “She’s kind of our origin story. … She was my first adult dog, and we learned everything together,” Jenn says about getting Piper at 24 years old. (She also owns an 8-year-old Pomeranian-chihuahua mix named Zelda.)
Not long after its creation, Jenn quit her job to focus all of her energy on Laughing Dog. Since its opening, she’s been able to help hundreds of dogs at her Chapel Hill home on a little more than 3 acres.
Over the years, Jenn has built relationships with long-term clients. Katherine Kramer, a client for more than 10 years, has entrusted Jenn with the care of more than six of her older rescue dogs. She says that Laughing Dog is able to meet each client’s individual needs. “It’s not just a job to her,” Katherine says. “She really truly loves dogs. And because she has a vet tech background and trained as a dog behaviorist, she’s much more experienced than a lot of people.”
While the mission to help pets and their owners hasn’t changed, Laughing Dog has adapted throughout the years. A team of seven employees before COVID-19 is now down to Jenn, an assistant trainer and her manager/pet sitter. But that hasn’t slowed them down. Laughing Dog services various types of animals including goats, chickens and lizards.
The main focus of the business is offering private one-on-one training sessions, pet sitting and most recently, puppy classes.
Currently, Jenn says that she’s working with 13 active training clients at one time and has over 100 active pet sitting clients.
With years of experience under her belt, Jenn has noticed a gap of necessary resources and proper education in dog training and a general stigma surrounding owning an unruly pet. She’s made it her mission to address the need.
This spring, Laughing Dog began offering a variety of puppy training courses, including a 90-minute, four-week class that is taught on Saturdays, aimed to start teaching clients and their puppies early in order to prevent incidents from happening.
Jenn wants to expand the safety training this fall by offering e-course safety training courses, focused on kids and canines, that come with an accompanying in-person companion course.
Ultimately, she hopes that these new classes and resources will help make the proactive dog training information accessible and less intimidating. Meeting her clients where they are at is important to her.
“I like working on a small scale. So, I don’t ever foresee having a fancy facility,” Jenn says. “Your dog is with my pack on my land. And, I love that. It’s such a more intimate approach. And I think that’s when you have that kind of connection with the families. It’s so much more of a deeper impact.”
