It is late afternoon on a Monday, and Teena Patel is busy rounding up her day care clients to drop off at their homes. They give her slobbery kisses and sad eyes because many of them don't want to go home. With their three acres to run, swim, dig and play, and a whole house full of beds and toys, why would the dogs at the University of Doglando want to go home?
Patel is the founder and CEO of the University of Doglando, Orlando's first kennel-free dog boarding and day care facility, which is a house rather than the standard office building.
One might expect a house full of dogs to be full of barking and chaos, but that is not the case here.
"No dog will bark here because they have what they need," Patel said. "They get attention. They get exercise all day. They have no energy to bark."
Doggy day care, cage-free boarding and doggy yoga, called doga, are just the beginning of the services Patel provides. However, as one customer put it, this is not a luxury facility reserved only for the frivolously wealthy.
Sandra McCall, owner of Pippy, a 4-year-old greyhound, finds the center down-to-earth.
"It is not [snobby]," McCall said. "Pippy needs to play and be in an open environment."
Patel explained that dogs need mental and physical stimulation, and many owners can't do that because they don't have time. That is why Patel relies on doggy day care to provide a safe environment for dogs to be dogs.
"Lexie does stuff here that she can't do at home," Janie Nelson said, a customer and owner of Lexie, an Australian Shepherd mix. "Here, she can dig in the sand, run all she wants, and swim in the pool all day long. And, believe it or not, she has friends here. She gets very excited when I say 'Let's go play with Ms. Teena."'
When one hears about the doggy yoga, it's hard to understand Patel's mission to let "dogs be dogs," but Patel explains that the yoga is "not what you think." Though the dogs are not taught to go into any strange positions, Patel said that some dogs mirror their owners yoga poses during the class.
"Doggy yoga is a way to learn to communicate with your dog through mutual understanding and trust," Patel said. "It's relationship building. It's learning to use your sixth sense and learn to connect and communicate with the dog. The key is relaxation."
The sprawling property where these dogs roam free is equipped with a pool, large sand lot for digging and an open door into an air-conditioned house where they can snuggle up to their friends on the couches or beds provided for them. However, there is much more to this facility than meets the eye.
The University of Doglando is more than a business. Patel treats each one of her about 40 four-legged clients like her own, and she wants to save the world one dog at a time.
"There are charges associated with the type of services we provide, but we are social entrepreneurs," Patel said. "We want to give back to the community and be a role model for other agencies to follow."
Patel and her staff and volunteers try to give back to the community, too. The facility is closed for day care on weekends for community work, although they remain open for boarding. One of the weekends - the last Saturday of each month - Patel and some of her clients meet with families who have children with autism.
"It [the weekend] is directed by the kids [with autism]," Patel said. "There is already so much structure in their lives. It is amazing for them to just be kids playing with dogs."
Patel is also an advocate of animal rights and welfare reform.
"We want to change our law," Patel said. "Our law defines dog as property, so if something happens to a dog, they are treated as property and not a living, breathing creature. We need to change the law so we can have higher expectations for the way people treat their dogs."
Patel spends time educating others about the controversial actions of puppy mills and preaches that it is important to get dogs from rescue organizations instead of pet stores.
To support these rescue organizations, she started a program called Second Comforts, which works with hotels to donate old linens to be distributed to needy dogs without a place to lay their head at night.
Another program Patel started saved the lives of four dogs caught in a fire on Dean Road. The University of Doglando donated 48 pet oxygen masks to fire stations in Orange County. After equipping every fire station in Orange County with three different sizes of pet oxygen masks - small, medium and large - Patel plans to move on to Seminole County and do the same thing.
"People can make their way out of an emergency, but the animals can't," Patel said.
Patel is also committed to saving the environment. All of the facility's poop bags and trash liners are biodegradable, made from corn starch. Environmentalists say this is an important step because taking something that would naturally biodegrade in a landfill, like dog waste, and wrapping it in a plastic bag will cause it to take much longer to break down into the soil.
The only cleaning materials used at the University of Doglando are eco-friendly, made from vinegar, baking soda, lemon and soy. This is for the health of the dogs and the planet.
The facility also has a very extensive Web site, www.universityofdoglando.com, partly to eliminate the need for pamphlets or brochures, which necessitate cutting down trees.
The dogs only eat all-natural, non-commercial human-grade food. Human-grade means that the food is only made from natural "human food."
"You can eat it, too, if you want," Patel said.
Patel said these measures increase her production cost, but it is worth it because her customers care about what is best for the dogs.
"It's very hard to run a business like this," Patel said. "We are as much social as we are entrepreneurs. We have cut prices for some."
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