Written by someone who lives here.

The story

From London to the Sonoran Desert.

I moved to Surprise, Arizona from the UK with my wife Liza and daughter Rae. I was a Metropolitan Police Officer for over twenty years. I knew how to read a crime scene. I did not know what a bark scorpion was, what monsoon season meant for dogs, or that you genuinely cannot walk your dog between 9am and 8pm in July without risking heatstroke.

We built Scritches Pet Sitting — now $400k in annual revenue with 40+ independent contractors — and in doing so learned everything there is to know about pet care in the Arizona climate. What vets recommend. What the pavement temperature actually does to paws. Which trails are safe in which seasons. Which HOAs are pet-friendly and which ones aren’t.

Arizona Pet Owner is that resource. Written from experience, checked against local vets and experts, and updated seasonally. It serves pet owners across the whole state — Phoenix, Tucson, Scottsdale, Flagstaff, and everywhere in between — because the desert challenges don’t stop at Maricopa County lines.

It’s also connected to a real pet sitting business — Scritches — which means when we recommend something, it’s because our own sitters are doing it in the field. Every visit report, every heat-related concern flagged by a sitter, every client question we’ve answered feeds back into the content here.