Anyone who’s met our dogs will know they are not exactly the poster children for effortless dog-friendly holidays.
One is very nervous. The other chases deer. Both have big personalities.
So when we go away, the one thing we absolutely do not compromise on is having somewhere properly secure to stay. We can muddle through pretty much everything else. Bad weather, crap coffee, questionable mattresses. Fine.
But wherever we end up during the day, we need somewhere we can come back to, shut the gate and know that everyone can unclench.
Some of you will have read about our stays with ERC in Norfolk. We love those properties, largely because the ERC team are absolutely crystal clear about what you are getting, what you’re not getting and what ‘secure’ actually means.
That kind of reliability took us quite a long time to find.
This time, we fancied somewhere a bit quieter once the kids were back at school, so we picked a random Welsh valley.
And we did our homework.
Google reviews. Airbnb reviews. Social media posts. Every mention we could find. YouTube footage. I spoke to the owner beforehand and checked a few details.
I deliberately kept the booking short because experience has taught me that if somewhere turns out not to be what it claims, the last thing you need is to feel like you need to endure another six nights of torture because you’ve already paid for it.
But we felt pretty confident. Very in fact.
Four hours after leaving home, after some truly biblical traffic and the usual military operation involved in travelling with our two dogs, we arrived.
We had a good fifteen-minute chat with the owner and headed up to the accommodation.
And there, standing in the middle of the secure fenced area we’d specifically booked because we needed somewhere secure, were three sheep.
Two more were wandering around by the water.
Five sheep.
Inside the secure dog area.
Excellent.
To say we were fuming would probably be underselling it.
Because in that moment, something became really obvious.
Every glowing review we’d read had been written by people whose definition of ‘secure’ was clearly very different from ours. They either didn’t have dogs with the challenges ours have, hadn’t noticed, hadn’t cared, or had simply accepted that the occasional surprise sheep was part of the ambience.
And these weren’t vague reviews either.
Previous guests had written things like:
“The area was completely closed off and he had full roam, with no worries that he would get out.”
Another said:
“Having the area secure for my two dogs (one of whom is dog reactive) was a real treat for them and me, to be able to relax and not worry about them.”
And another:
“It was absolutely ideal for a couple and our wee dog. Monty was able to roam free very securely.”
Those are exactly the sort of reviews I would normally rely on.
If you’ve got a nervous dog, a reactive dog, an escape artist or a dog with serious prey drive, words like “completely closed off”, “no worries that he would get out” and “very securely” carry quite a lot of weight.
But clearly, they don’t necessarily mean the same thing to everybody.
Secure for whom? Déjà vu
And this is probably the bit that stayed with me most because it took my straight back nearly 8 years ago when I wrote my first ‘secure’ dog field review.
Clearly, at some point, this place may have felt perfectly secure to some people.
Those reviewers weren’t necessarily wrong. Their dogs may have been absolutely fine there. The conditions may have been different. The dogs themselves certainly were.
But anything, anywhere, where a sheep can get into the area your dog is supposed to roam freely, I struggle to see how it can reasonably be described as secure.
That doesn’t mean something hasn’t changed.
Fences move. Gates settle. Ground levels alter. Vegetation grows. Weather does weird things. Animals find gaps that nobody knew existed.
The countryside is spectacularly good at refusing to behave like a controlled laboratory and in this case there were three boundary ‘weaknesses’ that resulted in the whole house of cards coming down.
But that’s precisely the point.
Security isn’t something you establish once and then assume exists forever.
It has to be continually true.
And for people with dogs like ours, there’s a massive difference between:
“Most dogs probably won’t go anywhere.”
and
“Your dog cannot get out.”
Those are not interchangeable statements.
And, fairly obviously, the owner hadn’t quite understood the assignment either.
We looked at each other and knew immediately that we couldn’t stay.
We didn’t even open the accommodation door.
Local Dog Field to the rescue
Instead, I sat in the car and started hunting for the nearest dog field because our poor dogs had already spent hours travelling and we were now sitting in the middle of Wales surrounded by what appeared to be approximately 87 million hill sheep, all apparently enjoying unrestricted access to our supposedly secure holiday accommodation.
Thankfully, I found a field nearby with availability.
And that owner understood the assignment.
They don’t know it yet, but that booking gave us a massive bit of relief when we badly needed it. I’ll be messaging them personally because it was one of those moments that reminds you what a genuinely well-run dog field actually gives people.
It isn’t just a patch of grass behind a fence.
Sometimes it’s the first moment all day that somebody can stop worrying.
Then we got back in the car and did the four hours home.
Eight hours driving.
Five sheep.
Two extremely confused dogs.
Zero nights in Wales.
Why I’m sharing this
The ending doesn’t particularly matter although it is, at the time of writing ‘unresolved’ to our satisfaction.
What matters is what this says about dog fields, security and the way we describe things to customers.
If you run a dog field
Be absolutely crisp about what your field is and isn’t.
Don’t just ask yourself whether you think it’s secure. Ask who it might not work for.
A Labrador who potters about ten feet from its owner is one thing.
A terrified rescue dog, a determined escape artist, a Teacup Yorkie or a dog with serious prey drive is quite another.
Look at your field critically from their point of view.
Because a bad experience doesn’t just mean one irritated customer. It can knock confidence, create genuine stress and damage trust in the whole secure dog field sector.
If somebody raises a concern with you, take it seriously.
They may be an outlier. Equally, they may just be the first person who’s bothered to tell you – the rest might have just decided never to go again.
And keep your photos and videos up to date.
Your fencing may have been immaculate when it went in. Your gates may have sat beautifully flush on day one.
Three winters, a wet summer, a bit of settlement and several thousand enthusiastic dogs later, things can look rather different.
If you’re not going to fix something immediately, at least show people what they’re actually booking.
If you book dog fields
Reviews are useful.
But reviews are only ever as useful as the person writing them, at the time they wrote them.
And now dog fields have become more mainstream, plenty of reviewers are, for want of a better word, muggles.
They may have perfectly lovely dogs who don’t spend their lives scanning the horizon for an opportunity to disappear into another county or be permanently on the brink of having a total meltdown.
I’ve also started to see a bunch of ‘influencers’ getting in on the game on socials, promoting dog fields – one I saw just the other week who visited a dog field that I had been to in the same month, failing to point out that the gate didn’t close properly, which you can even see in her video. I quote “so secure – they’ve thought of everything”. WTF.
If security genuinely matters to you, ask direct questions.
- Ask how high the fencing is.
- Ask what the aperture of the holes is (if you’re a dog field owner and you don’t know, go and measure… today)
- Ask about gaps under gates.
- Ask about predator aprons
- Ask whether livestock are visible
- Ask where you can see recent photos or video of the fence line and gates
A good field owner won’t think you’re being difficult. They’ll understand exactly why you’re asking.
Some may even let you visit out of hours before booking.
And on that note: never just turn up to inspect a dog field.
Book a session or arrange it with the owner.
The last thing somebody using a secure field needs is a stranger appearing at the gate halfway through their session because they’ve decided to conduct an impromptu fence audit.
The real cost is trust
For us, the biggest knock-on effect isn’t the wasted drive or the disappointment.
It’s trust.
A source I previously relied on is now firmly off the Christmas card list because I can no longer trust that their reviews tell me what I need to know.
And worse, we’re back to second-guessing places again after we’d finally started to relax because of brilliant operators like ERC (they are still brilliant BTW).
It has also reminded me exactly why our own team is so uncompromising when we review dog fields.
We review fields for the people using them, not the people owning them.
I know that occasionally rubs owners up the wrong way.
I’m comfortable with that.
Because standards matter.
And they matter even more now.
People are putting fences around bits of land everywhere at the moment. You’d think that would automatically mean dog fields were getting better.
Sadly, absolutely not.
So to those of you doing a genuinely cracking job, maintaining your fencing, fixing your gates, being honest about your facilities and understanding why people are trusting you with dogs they might not be able to safely exercise anywhere else…
Keep trucking.
There are an awful lot of people quietly appreciating what you do.
Including, occasionally, two very tired people sitting in a car in Wales surrounded by sheep.