Field journal
Cats in the morning, dogs after school: booking mix in a mixed practice
Ask a Kuching nurse when the cats come and she will say morning, before the waiting room fills with panting dogs. Ask the app and it will offer 3 p.m. for a nervous Persian because that slot was empty. The owner accepts. The cat spends forty minutes in a carrier beside a wet Labrador. Next time the owner books by phone and the app records a “leak.”
We do not lecture clinics about species corridors. We count, for one ordinary week, how many cat appointments the app placed after noon and how many of those owners later rang to move. That count sits next to the nurse’s informal rule — cats before 11, dogs after school — which has never been typed into the booking grid.
Boarding has a cousin of this pattern: bitches in season, barking dogs near the cattery wall, the one run with a fan. The app sees equivalent squares. The kennel hand does not. A reading that ignores those squares will tell you the occupancy is healthy while the cattery is loud and half empty.
If your mix is cats and dogs in one waiting room, the owner-path walkthrough should use a cat booking in the afternoon on purpose. That is the path that breaks.