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Business & Tech

Go DOG Stay: A Place for Your Dogs to Stay While You're Away

The next-best place to home for your dog.

Finding an ideal situation for your furry friends while you travel, work or take care of personal business is never easy. The good news is that there is a local business that guarantees a caring, home-like atmosphere that promises personal quality time for your dog.

Laura Casinghino, owner of Go DOG Stay, started her business based on the difficulty pet owners often find themselves facing when leaving the house for an extended period of time.

“Clients really enjoy the services we offer,” Casinghino said, citing the relief people feel upon finding a safe place for their dogs. 

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In its earliest days, Go DOG Stay started with a recess program for dogs called Go DOG Go! 

Casinghino started the program in 2004 with a van that went from client house to client house picking up dogs and bringing them to a rented space to play for an hour. 

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“I was able to share my love, compassion and caring nature with my clients’ dogs as well as spend more time with Jesse,” she said, telling the perks of her job. 

Jesse is a terrier mix who Casinghino adopted in 1998 from the Connecticut Humane Society. 

In 2004, a friend of Casinghino’s moved to Arizona, leaving a dog-care business without an owner. Having reconnected recently with her dog trainer, Casinghino jumped at the chance to escape from the corporate world. 

“I was always tired, and I felt like I could never move up,” she said, referring to her previous career as an administrative assistant. 

Starting in July of 2010, Go DOG Go LLC began construction after a five year fight to get a loan. Multiple times and for multiple reasons, banks rejected Casinghino’s applications, one of those reasons being her desire to build her business to be green.

Finally, a loan was granted, and construction began to be completed in September of 2011. 

“It was the best thing ever,” she told us. “It was hard to guess how much money to get the loan for. We sort of ran out of money.” 

Casinghino got the idea of her business name through her brother’s favorite childhood book by P.D. Eastman. 

Also involved in the business is Julie Stevens, director of Go DOG Stay. Stevens oversees all of the daily operations, having almost 35 years of experience with animals. She also partners with Go DOG Stay to provide pet sitting services through her own company, K9 Safe At Home

The plan for Go DOG Stay is to stay a small business, no more than 20 dogs at a time are allowed, although they wish they could expand the facility they currently have to include a bigger play area. 

“We want to stay small so we can cater to you and your dog,” Casinghino said. “This is not an assembly line. Each dog receives individualized care.” 

Stevens says that learning about each dog is what keeps the job so interesting. 

At Go DOG Stay, pets will enjoy a cage-free day, where they are only crated when necessary for eating or protection. Dogs are never crated for more than two hours. If you object to the idea of crating, the staff of Go DOG Stay can use alternative ways of separating individual dogs. 

There are two medium-sized outdoor play areas for dogs to run and exercise in. On days with poor weather, the animals remain inside to play in the open-space of the facility. 

Although Casinghino was unable to build her business as green as she’d have liked, she still runs an environmentally friendly business. With green cooling units and cleaners, the use of organic health products and food and consultations with a holistic vet from Manchester, your animals will escape all unnecessary toxins and unfriendly chemicals.

“We use bleach as sparingly as possible, but sometimes there are germs you need to know are being taken care of,” Casinghino told us. 

In her quest to use organic cleaners, Casinghino found that a few essential oils are capable of sanitizing and purifying the area of all airborne viruses. Ravensara, Spike lavender and radiata eucalyptus do just the trick, and she cleans with rosemary. 

With the good days outweighing the bad and a staff that would “never want to do anything else,” as Casinghino put it, you can’t go wrong. 

At Go DOG Stay, you can rest easy that your pet will be taken care of as one of their own.

“Give us a call, we’d love to meet you and your dog,” Casinghino wants dog owners to know. 

Go DOG Stay is located at 909 Stone Road in Windsor. For more information call 860.219.0154 and as for Laura or Julie. 

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