A few years ago I was laid off while recovering from brain surgery.

That’s not a sentence I expected to write, but here we are. I have a condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia — chronic facial pain that took years to diagnose correctly and longer to treat. When I finally had the surgery that fixed it, the recovery was long enough that my job didn’t wait for me. I needed income. I needed something physical, something that got me outside, something I could build on my own terms while I got back on my feet.

I started walking dogs.

What I didn’t expect was that it would become something I actually wanted to keep doing — and something worth building into more than just a way to get by.

The bridge job problem

Most people who walk dogs are doing it as a bridge. Between things. Between jobs, between tours, between semesters, between whatever the last thing was and whatever the next thing is going to be. The work is real and the need is genuine but the model — show up, get paid, move on — doesn’t give you anything to hold onto.

Dog walking is typically gig work. And gig work, whatever its virtues, is designed to benefit the platform more than the person doing the labor. Rover takes a cut. Wag takes a cut. The walker gets a rate, no benefits, no stake, no path. The client gets a stranger with an app. Nobody’s building anything except the platform’s valuation.

And it’s not just the platforms. Even small independent pet care businesses — the ones with a logo and a website and an owner who seems nice enough — often run on the same extractive logic. The owner takes a margin off every walk their employees complete. They justify it as the cost of risk, advertising, administrative overhead. And some of that is real. Insurance exists. Someone has to answer the phone. Updating a website does take a little time once the site itself is built.

Here’s the thing though: none of it costs what they charge for it.

Pet care business insurance — the kind that actually covers you, your client’s home, and their animal — runs a few hundred dollars a year for a small operation; we pay less than $50 a month for the three of us. A website costs less than $25 per month to maintain. Scheduling software, payment processing, a Google Business Profile — once these things are set up, the ongoing administrative labor is minimal. The margin the owner keeps isn’t compensation for complexity. It’s rent. You’re paying for access to the infrastructure, and the infrastructure isn’t that expensive.

The other cost the traditional model hides is what it does to the work itself. Platforms like Rover and Time to Pet route algorithmically. There’s no continuity, no neighborhood focus, no investment in the relationship between a specific walker and a specific pet. From the platform’s or the business owner’s perspective that’s fine — frictionless supply meets frictionless demand. From the dog’s perspective, and from the walker’s, it’s a grind that doesn’t go anywhere.

A walker who can’t build a consistent route can’t build a reputation. They can’t learn a neighborhood or their neighbors, can’t develop relationships with the animals they care for, or become the person a client actually trusts. They stay interchangeable by design. That’s good for the platform’s flexibility and bad for everyone else involved — the walker who never gets to be more than a contractor, the dog who meets a new person every week, and honestly the client who’s paying for a service that could be so much better.

There’s another cost the platform model doesn’t talk about. When walkers are dispatched algorithmically across a city, they’re driving. Burning gas to get from one stranger’s dog to another’s, covering ground inefficiently because the app optimized for availability, not geography. A walker who lives and works in one neighborhood doesn’t drive to get there. They walk, or they bike. Their carbon footprint for the job is close to zero. They know which blocks flood, which neighbors have dogs that set yours off, which park entrance is closed for maintenance. Hyperlocal isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s better for the environment, better for the neighborhood, and better for the dog who gets a walker who actually knows where they are.

That’s the part we wanted to change. We built something different because we needed something different.

Deez Muttz is a worker-owned cooperative. That means the people walking your dog aren’t gig workers clocking in on an app. They’re co-owners. They have a stake in the business, a say in how it runs, and something to build toward — not just a shift to get through. And they care about your pets for more than just 70¢ on the dollar minus the cost of the gas they spend to get to your house.

Who this is actually for

Tyler’s family business burned down. He needed work that was stable, physical, and his. Something he could own a piece of while rebuilding.

Mel spent years as a vet tech doing work that mattered but took a toll. She wanted to stay connected to animals without carrying the weight of the hardest parts of that work every day.

Me, I needed something that worked around a body that had been through a lot, and a schedule that left room for photography, writing, and everything else I take on as a project.

The co-op model works for all of us because it’s flexible by design. It works for touring musicians who need to pick up routes between rehearsals and recording and road time. It works for students who need income that fits around a class schedule. It works for artists, photographers, freelancers — people whose primary work doesn’t pay on a schedule that landlords respect. It works for anyone who’s ever needed an income source that doesn’t require you to sacrifice everything else you are to maintain it.

You set your routes. You build your client relationships. You own your schedule. The business infrastructure exists to support you, not extract from you.

What this means for the neighborhood

A co-op stays put. The money doesn’t flow up to a platform headquartered somewhere else and the labor doesn’t fund vacations for an ownership that isn’t doing the work — it stays with the people doing the walks, in the neighborhood where the work happens.

We’re not trying to scale to every zip code in America. We’re trying to do this right, here, in Baltimore. And we’re trying to build something that other people — people who need what we needed — can actually be part of.

That’s the whole idea. A dog walking business that’s also, genuinely, something more than that.

If you need work that supports you where you are, consider becoming a Deez Muttz comrade and joining us.

If you want to support an independent worker in your neighborhood with more than scraps from an app model or an extractive small business percentage, use Deez Muttz for your pet care needs.

Or let your current walker know about us and how we can help them make more money for themselves and less for the bosses on all our collective backs.

Loyalty to the individual is great, but it’s better if your walker isn’t being squeezed on every walk they do; better still when the work is rewarding and still leaves time for creativity, community, and the self-respect we earn by doing a job well for people and pets who matter.