What are the responsibilities and job description for the Kennel Assistant position at Mamaroneck Veterinary Hospital?
Position Overview: The Kennel Assistant plays a vital role in the success of a reputable animal care organization. Key responsibilities include assisting veterinarians and technicians with daily tasks, ensuring the quality of care and exceptional service to pets. These duties include cleaning and maintaining equipment, feeding, exercising, and grooming pets, preparing and sanitizing surgery suites, restraining and handling pets, monitoring their well-being, and performing basic administrative work.
Essential Functions:
Essential Functions:
- Provides compassionate care to animals
- Feeds pets as prescribed by the attending Veterinarian or owner requests; records appetites, water intake, fecal and urine production
- Recognizes unusual conditions or abnormal behaviors and monitors pets for signs of distress or disease
- Gives baths to and brushes pets
- Assists Veterinarians and technicians with medication administration or pet restraint
- Maintains hospital cleanliness daily; cleans equipment and facilities using chemicals and supplies; ensures safe chemical use
- Follows regular cleaning and sanitizing schedules for cages, runs, wards, and related areas; changes litter boxes and food/water bowls
- Completes weekly and monthly chore lists for hospital cleanliness, equipment, and appearance
- Prioritizes tasks correctly
- Maintains laundry for kennel, grooming, and hospital
- Provides patients with fresh bedding when necessary
- Walks or brings dogs into the yard for exercise
- Maintains property grounds including waste disposal; responsible for light maintenance of landscape upkeep and general building maintenance
- Understands and carries out oral and written directions
- Performs other duties as assigned
- Remains professional and courteous to clients and co-workers while handling multiple tasks with many interruptions
- Learns and understands services and health recommendations, able to clearly communicate these to clients
- Deals effectively with difficult or aggressive patients, ensuring safety for all involved
- Performs other duties assigned by Manager
- Organization
- Multitasking
- Communicating
- High school diploma or GED required
- Experience working at a kennel or animal hospital preferred; may consider equivalent combination of education, certification, training, and/or experience
- Ability to work with or around sick animals, hazardous materials, cleaning chemicals, gas anesthetics, zoonotic diseases, and unpleasant odors
- Must be flexible with scheduling and able to work some weekends and holidays
- This job requires strenuous physical activity, lifting, cleaning, and constant motion
- Tasks may involve extended periods of keyboard work, standing, walking, climbing, balancing, stooping, kneeling, crouching, or crawling
- Periodically performs moderately physically demanding work involving lifting or carrying moderately heavy animals (up to 50 pounds)
