Most boarding enquiries at our pet hotel in Kepong arrive with a bag of kibble and a scoop. Every so often the food comes in a cooler bag instead: twenty-eight flat packs of minced chicken and bone, or a fortnight of home-cooked chicken, rice and pumpkin portioned out every Sunday.
Raw and cooked diets board perfectly well. They just have to be settled earlier than kibble, because frozen food is the one part of a stay nobody can improvise on the morning you fly. After 15 years of pet boarding in Kepong, here is the conversation we would rather have at booking than at the counter.
Whatever your pet eats, the packing job is the same: exact portions, labelled, with spare days in the bag.
Say it when you book, not at drop-off
Freezer space is finite and shared between every guest that week, so raise it first. When you enquire, tell us four things: raw or cooked, how many meals a day, how many packs, and roughly how big each pack is. We will confirm what we can take before your dates are locked in.
Say it too if the diet is split — raw in the morning, kibble at night is a common compromise, and it changes what you pack. And if you are weighing day care against a boarding stay, a day care day is far simpler: one thawed pack in a sealed container, labelled, and that is the whole handover.
Count meals, not days — then portion before you freeze
Do the arithmetic instead of packing by eye: meals a day × nights, plus two spare days. A dog on two meals a day for ten nights needs twenty packs, so send twenty-four. Flights move, and nobody can buy your pet’s exact mix at 9pm on a Sunday. On a stay of two weeks or more that adds up to a lot of freezer, which is another reason to ask early.
Never send one big block. A frozen two-kilo slab cannot be divided accurately, and thawing the whole thing leaves the rest sitting thawed for days.
Freeze the packs flat. They thaw predictably in hours, stack in a quarter of the space, and are easy to count.
Label every pack with your pet’s name and the portion in grams — plus the date it was made, if it is home-cooked. If two pets from one house board together, one name per pack prevents the obvious mix-up.
Keep the extras separate. Oil, egg and supplements belong in their own labelled container, not mixed through.
Getting it here still frozen
This is where raw food usually goes wrong, and it is a KL problem rather than a boarding one: a car boot parked in the afternoon sun is an oven, and mince that has defrosted for forty minutes in it is not food anyone should be serving.
Move the packs straight from your freezer into a cooler bag or polystyrene box with two ice packs or a frozen water bottle, keep the box in the cabin with the aircon rather than the boot, and come earlier in the day — we are open 10am–8pm Monday to Saturday and 10am–4pm on Sunday, and a morning drop-off beats a 7pm one for frozen food every time. If a pack has gone soft on the way, say so rather than saying nothing. Refreezing softened raw is the one shortcut not worth taking: cook that pack through at home that evening, or throw it out.
Send these five lines in writing with your dates — they answer most of what we would otherwise have to ask you mid-stay.
Write the thaw routine down
Raw feeding is a routine more than a product, and the routine is yours rather than ours to guess. Send it on WhatsApp before drop-off so it exists in writing:
Grams per meal and the times. “180g, 8am and 7pm” beats “twice a day”.
How you thaw. In the fridge, 12 to 24 hours ahead; a small flat pack is ready in a few hours. Never on the counter in our weather.
How long a thawed pack keeps. 24 to 48 hours in the fridge is the usual answer.
What goes in at the bowl — warm water, a spoon of oil, a supplement, a crumbled topper.
How long the bowl stays down. For raw in this climate, 20 to 30 minutes, then lifted and washed.
One note on cost: hand-feeding a pet that will not eat on its own, like giving tablets on a fixed clock, counts as special care and is charged on top of the boarding rate. We quote it before the stay is confirmed, never after.
When a travel ration is the better answer
Sometimes frozen food is the wrong tool for a trip — a month away, a very large dog, or a diet you cannot source enough of in time. A shelf-stable ration is a fair answer, with one condition: the change happens at home, over seven to ten days, finished a fortnight before drop-off. Switching a raw-fed pet on the morning of a stay is how a boarding week becomes a week of soft stool (the method is in our guide to changing your pet’s food), and the same gradual step applies going back to raw when you land.
Freeze-dried needs no freezer and rehydrates with warm water, which makes it the usual bridge for a raw-fed pet facing an unfamiliar bowl.
A middle path suits plenty of owners: raw for one meal, something shelf-stable for the other. It halves the freezer space and leaves you a fallback if the dates stretch. If you are new to raw altogether, start it at home and never before a trip — our beginner’s guide to BARF feeding is the place to start.
What we watch, and the one limit we do not bend
Raw-fed stool is normally small, firm and pale, which makes a change easy to spot. If it turns loose, or there is any blood, we stop, tell you and agree what to do next — a conversation worth having before you fly rather than during it, as in our plan for a pet that gets sick while boarding. Say so too if your pet had an upset stomach in the days before drop-off: it changes what a loose stool on day two means.
And the limit: a seriously ill pet is turned away. There is no vet on our premises, we cannot treat an animal that worsens overnight, and a sick pet in a boarding room is a risk to every other guest. A genuinely unwell dog or cat belongs at a vet, not in boarding — raw-fed or otherwise.
Visit Honey Pet Shop in Kepong Baru
Address: No. 40, Jalan Lang Kuning, Kepong Baru, 52100 Kuala Lumpur
Open Monday to Saturday: 10am–8pm, Sunday 10am–4pm
Feeding raw or home-cooked? WhatsApp us your dates, how many meals a day your pet eats and how the food is packed, and we will tell you what we can take and what to bring before you book.
