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Andrew Rosenthal: 'Dogs Are My Sanity'

Wan Xu |
February 24, 2014 | 4:12 p.m. PST

Contributor

Andrew Rosenthal, founder of LA Dogworks, with his dog Josh.
Andrew Rosenthal, founder of LA Dogworks, with his dog Josh.

Wearing sneakers and jeans, 60-year-old Andrew Rosenthal agilely leads Josh, a German Shepherd he rescued four years ago, through an indoor dog park into the rear mezzanine and commands it to pause before entering every door.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rosenthal had an innate passion for animals since childhood. He was comfortable to pull the ears of his neighbor’s two Doberman Pinschers, and would run outside every time when he heard police horses coming down the streets. Rosenthal also spent summers at a camp in upstate New York.

“I was fascinated by snakes and frogs. So when all the kids were playing basketball and baseball, I would sneak often to the woods and catch animals,” Rosenthal said. There were times when he went missing and the camp counselors would have to go searching for him. A natural award was actually set up later because of him that was given to a camper every year.

Rosenthal’s zeal for animals was reinforced at the age of nine, when he moved to Pennsylvania suburbs, a 20-minute drive from his stepfather’s dairy farm. He spent almost every weekend in the farm all through high school, roaming through the field with twelve Coonhounds owned by the farmhands.

That was when Rosenthal first had a fleeting thought to create a camp for dogs, yet he didn’t get his own dog until working at a local pet store in high school. “We had delivery of puppies, and one of them was a Weimaraner. I loved her, she’s just sweet, and I named her ‘Shade’,” Rosenthal said.

“I asked the guy if I can have the dog, and he said you should work extra for it, so I did.”

Graduating high school, Rosenthal went to a junior college in Boston for one year at his parents’ insistence. A course on commercial photography there made him want to be a fashion photographer. “I was girl crazy, I love travelling, and I love photography, so that was a perfect career,” he said. In 1974, Rosenthal moved back to NYC to attend the Germain School of Photography

“One of my teachers, Angelo, was a very popular fashion photographer. He taught me how to shoot models and offered me a summer job working in the studio,” said Rosenthal. Travelling the country, he shot for esteemed national magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and Playboy, and celebrities including Linda Evangelista, Famke Janssen, Kelly Lynch and Brooke Burns.

However, Rosenthal found the advent of digital photography unacceptable. “I remember the picture that made me quit was two models shot in England with a castle, and there were flames coming out of the window,” he said. “I would think it would cause a fortune to create that image, but someone did all that with computer.”

“I felt it was like cheating. When I was a photographer, you had to know lighting and what you were doing with aperture, instead of using a filter in a computer to create that,” said Rosenthal, who still takes photographs and owns a personal photo website. Once the first and only official race team photographer for Harley-Davidson, Rosenthal can always grab the attention of his four-leg friends and capture their best movements.

After 9/11, Rosenthal realized that spending time with his dogs was more fun than anything else. He came to Los Angeles and saw if it was possible to open a branch of Biscuits & Bath, a New York dog service where he used to take his three Italian Greyhounds.

After the request was turned down, Rosenthal launched LA Dogworks, a 24-hour service dog care center in Hollywood, with $1 million nearly ten years ago.

“The one thing I found in most of the existing dog care centers was a lack of attention to health and safety. I knew there had to be a better way to provide proper dog care,” Rosenthal said. Spending two years online and attending training seminars and workshops held by the Pet Care Services Association, Rosenthal learned how to take care of other people’s dogs and how to build a top-notch kennel. 

A LocateTV show called “Radical Sabbatical” recorded the construction process and sold the episode to In-flight Entertainment. A big success, there were people calling all the time to ask advices on dogs and even travelling from all over the world to see the place. The International Resource Services has sent Japanese grooming students here to learn about the dog business for nine consecutive years. 

The 10,000-square-feet LA Dogworks boasts of all the care and services that a dog would need, from boarding, day care, grooming, training, to hydrotherapy, massage therapy, portraits and a retail boutique. All staff members who work directly with dogs are certified with the Pet Care Services Association in first aid and CPR.

“I built the place for dogs. They are my customers. My researches tell me that dogs don’t need all those places that appear cozy to people,” said Rosenthal. “On the contrary, they need something very basic and clean. The more stuff you put in, carpets for example, harbor bacteria and are harder to clean.”

That’s why Rosenthal don’t want others to take over LA Dogworks although he does want to open more locations. “I had a woman who had approached me. She loved dogs, and she loved LA Dogworks,” he said, “But when she started saying why should we do this, why we should do that, I think no, I don’t like her philosophies.” 

There were also bad times. In the small hours after Christmas 2009, a fire almost destroyed the rear mezzanine of LA Dogworks. More than 100 dogs kept for the holidays were evacuated, but still one died of smoke inhalation. “I cannot thank the L.A. Dogworks staff and Los Angeles Fire Department enough for their quick and lifesaving actions,” said Rosenthal, who was later busy with rebuilding work.

Rosenthal also admitted that it’s getting harder to find high-quality employees. He is in a legal dispute as well with CNBC Prime’s reality show “The Profit”. The dog business, however, is growing on the whole. There would be expansion plans throughout the Los Angeles, California area and in Yokohama, Japan.

“Not a big fan of human race,” Rosenthal never married and don’t have children. “I was raised in a different time, when people respected to each other and were responsible to their actions,” he said. “But please and thank you don’t happen so much here in this age.”

Instead, Rosenthal said dogs were his “sanity.”

“They gave me a feeling I don’t get from people. It’s different.” 

“It’s very interesting that my mother asks me: ‘how can you love a dog like a child?’ I say ‘you don’t, and usually you love the dog more’," Rosenthal said. "A child gets further and further away from his mother and family - goes to school, goes to college, gets married."

"The dog, although he doesn’t live that long, gets closer and closer, so that’s how they are to me."

 

Reach Contributor Wan Xu here. Follow her on Twitter.



 

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