“She looked like a lobotomy patient”: Spokane dog owner petitions for investigation of K9 Country Club | news

SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. – An online petition has garnered signatures from 2,200 people, asking for the public to lodge a complaint with the Attorney General against a local dog training facility.

The petition claims a lack of inspection and negative training methods at the K9 Country Club Pet Center and Veterinary Clinic in Spokane Valley, along with allegations of pets leaving the facility with preventable infections.

“I wish someone would’ve pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t do this, this is not right,'” Aja Owens said.

Owens is spearheading the petition to investigate the K9 Country Club.

“There are 63 pages of signatures,” she said.

On June 7, Owens took her then 6-month-old German shepherd, Soju, to K9 Country Club to board and train.

“The first page of reviews were just good things said about them, so I decided, ‘Ok, I’ll go there,'” she said.

During that time, Owens said something felt off about her training style, which she calls aggressive.

“They use the prong collar, very rough,” Owens described. “And she would whine and cry, and I didn’t like that.”

She said she thought nothing of it until they released Soju on July 25. Owens claims Soju was not the same dog.

“When I took her home, her eyes were glazed over, and she would just lay in here, or out there on the patio and shake and drool.

“She looked like a lobotomy patient,” she said.

Owens paid over $8,000. She said not only was her dog not trained, Soju came home skittish, and her health had deteriorated.

“She had a bad UTI, she was peeing blood when she got home. She had a respiratory infection,” she recalled.

The vet record is from Aug. 1, just one week after Owens got Soju back.

According to Pet Vet Hospital and Wellness Center, Soju was depressed, lethargic, emaciated, thin, dehydrated, and had an abscess, among other issues.

In the plan section was a note to report the case to animal control.

“The vet was shocked at what she saw. As a matter of fact, she called SCRAPS and made a claim because it was so bad.”

KHQ went to K9 Country Club with Owens’s concerns and spoke with the owner, Nick Lungu, and his Chief Operating Officer, Mik Kislorincz.

Founded in 2014, Lungu said he’s trained hundreds of dogs at the K9 Country Club at that time.

“Not even only local. We have dogs that literally come from all over the country. We’ve even had dogs come out of the country to be trained by us,” Lungu said.

He provided videos of some of Soju’s training sessions and explained they evaluate dogs when they arrive and when they leave.

“She was shy, skittish, very thin. I mentioned to mom that she didn’t have a lot of muscle development,” he said.

Based on records from the adjacent vet clinic that partners with the K9 Country Club, besides lameness in one of Soju’s legs, she was healthy. And according to Lungu, Soju was released to Aja not wounded.

“There are genetic things I feel like were already happening, underlying issues, and unfortunately because of the whole bill, we got blamed for it,” he said.

Lungu said this is one case of a disgruntled client.

But two former employees of the K9 Country Club and adjacent vet clinic backed Owens’s claim.

“Unfortunately, that was a common complaint from the customers when they would drop their dog off, and come back later to pick up their dog who was either thin or ill or afraid of them when it used to not be,” stated Dr. Danette Roberts, a former veterinarian for the vet clinic that partners with the K9 Country Club.

dr Roberts said she has been a veterinarian for more than two decades.

“I’ve been with a fair number of clinics, and I literally had to learn to forgive myself for the things that I saw and was asked to do in the not quite two-and-a-half years that I worked there,” she said.

She alleges they instructed her to, “Upcharge clients; some dog that was in boarding, tell the owners it had an ear infection when it didn’t; run blood work on a dog that didn’t necessarily need that.”

Emily Thompson said she was a kennel technician at the K9 Country Club until 2021.

“In the nine months I worked there, I never saw him evaluate a dog,” she said. “The dog sits in a kennel, and then every single owner that comes to get their dog, he tells them all the exact same thing. ‘Your dog is aggressive with people, food, and other dogs, it needs to be here for two to three weeks to board and train with me.'”

“It was literally word for word, the same thing to every single pet owner,” Thompson claimed.

As part of this investigation, KHQ checked Better Business Bureau (BBB) ​​reviews for K9 Country Club. The site lists a D+ rating, with 6 complaints in the past three years and half of them closed, giving them an 89 percent response rate. The business is not BBB accredited.

If you take a look at Google reviews, however, they have a 4.1-star rating, with over 500 reviews listed.

KHQ submitted a public records request to SCRAPS for current investigations, inspection records and complaint resolutions, including the final results of a 2017 report we previously looked into of a dog injury that allegedly happened at K9 Country Club.

Despite the petition and negative reviews Lungu and Kislorincz stood behind this facility.

“Everyone here is either ex-SCRAPS, volunteers from shelters, or people who are dedicating their life to animal care and to making a difference in people’s lives that way, so it’s a passion,” Kislorincz said.

They provided KHQ with a walk-through of the building, showing where dogs train, to where they’re held, and to where they play outside.

Our cameras did not capture anything out of the ordinary.

“The social media trolls, such a real thing, they can hurt a business just because you can pull on people’s heart strings and say, ‘This place hurt my dog,'” Lungu said. “We provide exceptional service, we continue to get awards for being the cleanest, the best, the most professional facility.”

Lungu is adamant about this. “That is the reputation we have, and we wouldn’t be who we are and functioning and growing if any of that stuff was true,” he said.

At last check, the public records request with SCRAPS regarding whether there are any current or prior investigations into the K9 Country Club is still in progress.

The request center emailed KHQ recently, saying a response should be coming on or around Nov. 15. We will of course update when that request is fulfilled.

Owens’ petition for investigation has over 2,200 signatures as of Oct. 9, just short of that 3,000 goal.

There is no significance to the target number of signatures. Instead, she is merely seeking enough to show a need for an investigation.

Here is what usually happens when a complaint is filed with the Attorney General’s Office:

• The AG’s office will evaluate the complaint if it is filed in a timely manner. They will evaluate each complaint, and help solve around two out of every three that come in.

• If they look at a complaint and it doesn’t fall under their guidelines for resolution, then they will refer it to an appropriate agency, such as the Better Business Bureau, to help resolve the issue.