Dog Days for $1,300 a week

Hello, mother. Hello, father.

Went canoeing today with Maui. We got our tails and paws wet and barked at the kids on the dock. It was really fun.

I’m learning to fetch pine cones and chase squirrels.

Camp is cool.

Love, Nevis

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It is early afternoon at Sierra Mountain Doggie Camp and the campers, Nevis and Maui, are doing crafts. Pressing Maui’s right front paw onto a purple ink pad, camp director Suzy Scully reminds the pup to stay inside the lines of the 101 Dalmatians coloring book. Maui gnaws at the book spine.

Earlier, Scully and camp counselor Bob Pearce had taken the campers--15-week-old golden retriever-lab mixes--the half-mile through the woods to Lake Tahoe for their daily spin in the camp’s red canoe, the Finally Sinking In.

Four days into their week at camp, the pups were happy campers. At $1,300 a week per pup, homesickness is not an option. It’s their owner, Sue Taylor, who’s suffering separation anxiety. Already, she’s visited camp twice.

“It’s truly like turning over your children,” she says. The pups had never before been away from home. “When I found out Suzy slept with them, I said, ‘OK, I’m out of here.’ ”

True, Scully says. “The first night I kept waking up to make sure they were breathing.” By midweek, they had made themselves at home in her bed.

If a $1,300 camping experience for Fido ($1,500 for those requiring round-trip air fare, cargo class and airport pickup) seems a bit of a luxury, well, to dedicated dog people it’s right up there with doggy fitness centers, sheepherding classes and four-star dog cuisine.

“They had a wonderful time,” says Taylor, and weren’t ready to leave when she and husband John came to take them home. “They wanted to swim one more time, so we did that. And they showed us how they could fetch a ball in the water, which for them was a big step.” Now, “They’re back to life in a fence,” in the yard of the Taylor home in Hayward, Calif.

Was it worth the money? “Definitely,” says Sue, as it allowed her husband and her to enjoy their own Lake Tahoe vacation worry-free.

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Dog-lover Scully, 40, whose shar pei, Leo, is the year-round camper-in-residence, began thinking about a dog camp while working as an independent restaurant systems consultant. She’d brought Leo to Santa Monica on a job and “was paying a busboy $100 a day to take my dog to Malibu in my own jeep.”

She moved to the Tahoe area in 1989 to help open the Resort at Squaw Creek and, quickly pegged by friends as an animal lover, found herself dog-sitting for free. One told her, “You have a business here.”

When Scully told Pearce--who’s both camp counselor and her significant other--that she planned to open a camp for dogs, he said it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard of.

Scully didn’t think so. “I know enough people who are crazy like I am,” she says. Crazy enough to buy every dog book from “Mondo Canine” to “Bone Appetit.” Crazy enough to bake gourmet dog biscuits. Crazy enough--yes--to prefer dogs to people.

Sure, they could put their dogs in a kennel when they go away. But Scully is banking on “dog guilt. They look at you with those little eyes--’Don’t leave me here.’ ”

Thumbing through her many dog newsletters and magazines and catalogs, Scully says, “This is what people do who have dogs. They throw money out the window.”

*

The Taylors’ pups are, basically, urban dogs, living with their lighting company executive master and their mistress, West Coast sales manager for a book printing company.

“I’m really big on new experiences for them,” Sue Taylor says of her pups, which are named for islands where she and her husband vacationed and honeymooned. “A lot of things they do up here, we can’t teach them.”

For Nevis and Maui, those new experiences included chasing bubbles, “writing” postcards home--”Mom, I just learned to swim. . . . You’d be so proud”--slip-sliding in the snow at Squaw Valley and earning the obligatory summer camp certificates of achievement.

When they settled down for nap time on little mattresses on the floor of the roomy, woodsy house that is camp headquarters, the pups had reminders of home by their pillows. “I always ask the parents to send pictures of themselves,” Scully says. “Like children, the dogs have to have good self-esteem.”

On Scully’s kitchen counter sits a footed dish that holds rawhide bones; a cookie plate is heaped with dog biscuits. Nearby, campers choose toys from a big basket.

There’s dance time to Jimmy Buffett music. And story time with a selection of dog-themed children’s books. Come nightfall, there may be a camp sing around a fire with visiting pooches or a little star-gazing. “The dogs don’t look too much, but we point,” says Scully. Summer campers go hiking; winter campers will go snow-shoeing.

At camp’s end, “parents” get a photo album recording their dogs’ experiences. Scully laughs. “People say to me, ‘For $1,500 you could be putting my dog in a kennel.”

Preregistration, Scully requires that owners complete a 12-page questionnaire detailing their dogs’ sleeping, eating and barking habits. It asks, “Do they have their own blankie?” “How do they ride in a car?” “Can they hike?”

Camp is not for every dog. “It’s for happy, healthy dogs who are athletic,” Scully says. Dogs must be at least 15 weeks old, and she’ll take any breed except standard poodles. “Leo hates them,” she explains.

Only two campers may come at one time, ensuring one-on-one attention. “This is 24-hour care,” she says. “I’m like a nanny.” Indeed, the camp is a member of the National Assn. of Professional Pet Sitters.

Since opening June 1, Scully has had five paying pooches. The first were a pair of L.A.-area cocker spaniels whose owners went to Europe and, says Scully, “were worried about dognapping.”

This week’s camper is Elvis, a black lab mix. Coming in August will be Stoli, a Siberian husky owned by Benson Ford of the Detroit Fords, who’ll be vacationing in Tuscany, Italy. Stoli’s sister, Mattie, a Dallas dog, also booked--”So brother and sister could be together on a vacation,” Scully says.

* Other options for your pet

If camp isn’t your pup’s preference, how about a doggy gym, a bakery or even herding lessons, E8.