A kennel attendant resume is one page of animal-care evidence: whose animals you cared for, doing which of the job's core duties — cleaning, feeding, exercising, overnight watch — and how reliably.
Most animal care and service workers learn the job through on-the-job training, so the resume's role is to evidence safe handling and dependability — the rest is learned on the clock.
Below are a complete resume example, the wording that makes kennel duties land, and a matching cover letter.
What should a kennel attendant resume include?
One page, five blocks, in this order: header (name, phone, professional email, city), a two- or three-line summary, experience, education, skills.
The order matters — summary and experience lead because that is where your evidence lives.
Know what the reader is screening for.
BLS says most animal care and service workers learn through on-the-job training — the training happens on the job, so the application turns on the raw material you bring on day one: calm handling of animals that aren't yours, reliability with schedules and instructions, and willingness to do the unglamorous half of the work.
Every line on the page should evidence one of those three.
Beyond paid jobs, include any animal care that wasn't yours: shelter or rescue volunteering, boarding or daycare shifts, regular pet-sitting for other households, farm chores.
Include a customer-facing job too — BLS's description has attendants caring for pets in place of their owners, which means dealing with those owners, and a service job doubles as evidence you can handle that half.
Education stays short; a high school diploma or equivalent is a fine single line.
Leave off clinical titles and tasks you haven't performed — write the title you actually held and let duties carry the claim — along with an "objective" statement about loving animals, references-available-upon-request filler, and any desired-pay figure (more on that below).
If the posting says "animal care technician" instead, the strategy doesn't change: use the posting's title and mirror its nouns — the animal care technician guide covers where that title shows up.
Two pointers before the example: this page stays kennel-specific, while the resume and cover letter guide for veterinary assistants covers the broader first-clinical-job application in depth; and for the role itself — duties, settings, pay — see the kennel attendant career guide.
Kennel attendant resume example
The example below is written for the applicant this page is for: hands-on animal experience in boarding or a clinic kennel, moving into the next kennel or ward role.
Copy the skeleton, replace every bracket with your own facts, and cut any line that wouldn't be honest for you.
[Your Name] · [City, State] · [Phone] · [Email]
Summary
Kennel attendant with overnight experience caring for boarding dogs and cats: cleaning and sanitizing kennels and runs, feeding and exercising to each animal's schedule, keeping shift records owners actually read, and staying calm with the animals who find boarding stressful.
Experience
Kennel Attendant — [Boarding facility or veterinary hospital], [City, State] · [Year]–[Year]
- Cared for boarding dogs and cats on overnight shifts — feeding, fresh water, exercise and play sessions, and a full walk-through of every animal before closing
- Cleaned and sanitized kennels, cages and dog runs between animals, following the facility's disinfection protocol
- Recorded appetite, condition and behavior in shift notes and flagged changes to the manager on duty
- Gave owner-directed medications on each animal's written schedule, per facility protocol
[Customer-facing role] — [Employer], [City, State] · [Year]–[Year]
- Worked fast, accurate shifts under interruption; opened and closed the location on weekends
- Trained new hires on the register and the house service standards
Skills
Dog and cat handling · overnight shifts · kennel sanitation and disinfection · feeding and medication schedules · shift records · client service
Education
High school diploma or equivalent — [School], [City, State]
[Any completed training] — [Issuer], [Year] (only training you have actually completed)
Three choices in that sample are worth keeping.
The summary names scope — whose animals, on which shifts — instead of claiming qualities, so the reader can picture a shift in two sentences.
The bullets are verb, task, protocol: what you did and to what standard, which is what separates an attended kennel from a merely cleaned one.
And the non-animal job stays, because customer-service evidence is reliability evidence.
The omissions are deliberate too: no "passionate about animals" objective, no clinical titles, and no pay expectation — negotiate from the posting instead.
To anchor what's realistic before you do: as of October 22, 2026, VeterinaryHires listed 318 open kennel attendant jobs from 117 employers in 42 states, and employers advertised a median of $15.00 an hour (75 employers, 83 listings stating hourly pay — a small sample, so treat it as a rough anchor rather than a rate card).
Browse open kennel attendant jobs to see how postings near you phrase duties and pay.
How do you describe kennel duties on a resume?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' description of the job is your vocabulary list.
BLS describes kennel attendants as caring for pets, often overnight, in place of owners — cleaning cages and dog runs, feeding, exercising and playing with animals — and notes that experienced attendants may also provide basic healthcare, bathing and basic grooming.
Write your duties in those verbs, and a practice manager skimming a stack of resumes lands on familiar words.
Then give each duty a scope:
- Weak: "Cleaned kennels." Stronger: "Cleaned and sanitized every kennel and dog run on shift between animals, following the facility's disinfection protocol."
- Weak: "Fed the animals." Stronger: "Fed boarding dogs and cats to each animal's written schedule and portions, and logged who ate what for the owner's report."
- Weak: "Took dogs out." Stronger: "Ran individual exercise and play sessions on overnight shifts, and walked the kennel floor before close to check every animal."
Overnight deserves its own line.
"Often overnight" sits inside the BLS description for a reason: BLS notes that in facilities operating 24 hours a day — kennels and shelters among them — animals may need care around the clock, including evenings, weekends and holidays.
If you've worked those shifts, put the word "overnight" in your summary and your skills line, and name the shifts you actually covered.
Be equally disciplined about the experienced tier.
Scope "basic healthcare" — BLS's phrase for the experienced tier — to what your facility actually let you do: giving an owner-directed medication on a written schedule is a task; "medical experience" is a claim an interviewer can take apart.
Describe the task, name the protocol you followed, and never list clinical work — restraint for procedures, lab samples, anesthetic support — you haven't performed.
If the goal is the assistant role, the same resume gets reframed rather than rewritten — which duties carry over, what to add, and whether the AVA credential pays off are mapped in kennel attendant to veterinary assistant in 12 months.
Kennel attendant cover letter example
Three or four short paragraphs, under a page.
The resume proved you can do the work; the letter's only jobs are to show you understood this facility and to connect your evidence to it.
Here is the sample that pairs with the resume above — same candidate, same facts.
Dear [Facility name] hiring team,
I'm applying for the kennel attendant position at [Facility name]. Your posting asks for someone to cover overnight and weekend kennel care — that has been my actual schedule at [Boarding facility], where I run the floor solo after close.
Overnight, the job is noticing: who isn't eating, who is restless in a run that should be settled, which kennel needs a second cleaning before morning. I keep the shift log owners read at pickup, follow the disinfection protocol between every animal, and hand anything unusual to the manager on duty rather than sitting on it.
I'd rather work somewhere I can grow, and your posting's mention of [whatever the posting names — ward support, helping the medical team] is exactly the direction I want to move. What I bring on day one is the husbandry half, done reliably.
I can start [availability]. Thank you for your time; my references can speak to my animal handling and my attendance.
Sincerely, [Your name]
Why it works: the opening quotes the posting back instead of announcing the application; the second paragraph proves overnight experience with specifics an applicant without overnights can't fake; the growth paragraph names what you bring and what you want, in that order.
If you haven't worked overnights, swap in your truest equivalent — a shelter shift, back-to-back weekend doubles, the busiest boarding holiday you've worked.
Mechanics: applying by email, the email body is the cover letter — same rules, slightly shorter.
Address a real person when the posting or the facility's site names one; "Dear [Facility name] hiring team" beats "To whom it may concern."
And use the posting's exact title in your first line — kennel attendant, kennel technician, animal care technician — so the reader matches your letter to the posting in seconds.