A Baltimore story about dogs, work, and doing right by both.
I’ve been a dog person since before I knew what that meant — literally since birth. My family’s miniature poodle, Buffy, slept under my basinet. I grew up with dogs in the house almost continuously. Boxers, mutts, big ones, small ones. Each one a chapter. Each one a teacher.
That’s Taz — the boxer I started training when I was 12. Those after-school walks were where I figured out that moving through the world with a dog is one of the most grounding things a human being can do. Time to migrate. Time to bond. Time to just be a pack. That lesson has never left me.
Then came Mia. Then a string of dogs that each meant the world in their own way. Then Neptune.
Neptune was my soul dog. A once or twice in a lifetime connection — the kind where you don’t fully understand what you had until it’s gone. When I lost him, I lost the walks too. The morning routes, the Druid Hill loops, the way a dog makes a neighborhood feel like yours.
I’d spent years in a corner office doing marketing, built a career, and then lost my job due to a health condition. I was figuring out what came next, on my own terms, without a safety net. Walking dogs professionally started as a way to keep that part of my life alive. To pay Neptune back for everything he gave me. And somewhere along the way it became something bigger — a business, a community, a co-op.
Every walk I take is, in some small way, for him.
The dog walking industry has a labor problem. Apps and platforms take massive cuts from the people actually doing the work — the ones out in the rain, the ones building relationships with your pets, the ones showing up every single day. The people with the most skin in the game take home the least.
I’ve lived that. I know what it feels like to work hard and watch the value of that work disappear upward into someone else’s pocket.
Deez Muttz is built differently. Every walker in our co-op sets their own rates and takes home 100% of what they charge for their services. We share infrastructure, we cover for each other, we build something together — but nobody extracts from anybody else’s labor.
A co-op isn’t just a business structure. It’s a statement about who deserves to benefit from work. We think it’s the people doing it.
We don’t think a business can be separate from its values. Here’s where we stand:
We are proudly LGBTQIA+ affirming. Your identity, your household, your family — all welcome here. No exceptions, no asterisks.
We are pro-immigrant and anti-ICE. We believe in the dignity and safety of every person in our community, regardless of documentation status. We will not cooperate with immigration enforcement in any capacity. In fact, we’ll work as hard as we can to obstruct their immoral activities nonviolently.
We are committed to community-rooted development. We support local businesses, neighborhood organizations, and initiatives that build wealth and opportunity for the people who actually live here — not outside investors extracting value from our neighborhoods.
We believe empathy for animals and empathy for people are the same thing. If you treat one well, you probably treat the other well too. That’s the kind of people we want in this co-op, and the kind of service we want to provide.
We believe in worker power. We are unapologetically pro-labor. Every person who works with Deez Muttz deserves a living wage, autonomy over their own work, and the dignity of self-sufficiency — supported by a community that has their back. We didn’t build a co-op because it’s a cute business model. We built it because we believe the people doing the work should own the means of doing it. No bosses extracting profit. No platform taking a cut. Just workers, supporting each other, building something sustainable together.
This isn’t a marketing position. It’s just who we are.
When you book with Deez Muttz, you’re not feeding a platform. You’re paying a neighbor directly for a real service, and that neighbor is taking home every dollar you pay for that walk.
Because we don’t pay fees or percentages to bosses, investors, or platforms, we can be genuinely price competitive. You’re not subsidizing someone else’s profit margin. What you pay goes directly to the person walking your dog — and that means we can charge less than the platforms while our walkers actually take home more. Everybody wins except the middleman.
You’re also getting consistency. Same walker, every visit. Someone who knows your pet’s name, their quirks, their routine. Someone who shows up because they chose this work — not because an algorithm assigned them to you. You hire a worker who will be there no matter what, unless they’re sick or on vacation, and you’ll be notified and introduced to our substitute in advance of that absence.
And you’re supporting a model that we think makes the world a little better. Not in a preachy way. Just in the way that choosing where you spend your money always matters.
We’re glad you’re here. Your pets are in good hands.
