You lose a dog. You open the app and record him as deceased — that is already a hard thing to do. And the next morning, he is still there. In the list. Between two living dogs.
On the phone it was worse than we thought: the "Kennel" screen and the "Pack" screen drew no distinction at all between a dead dog and an available one. Your dog showed up as an ordinary row, availability pill and all, in the middle of the pack. Every day.
That is fixed, and it is now yours to set.
The setting
Settings → My kennel → Deceased dogs. One switch. Off, your deceased dogs no longer appear anywhere — not on the web, not on the phone. Back on, they return.
It belongs to the kennel, not to you personally: if you share your kennel with a handler or a vet, you all see the same thing. Only the owner can change it.
What it does not erase — and this is the important part
Nothing. Your dog's record still exists. His past outings are intact. The kilometres he pulled still count in your statistics and your kennel's. His races stay in your history, under his name.
We hide a list. We do not erase a life.
Turn the switch back on whenever you want, and he will be there, exactly as before.
What it does not do
It hides deceased dogs only. A retired, sold, given or rehomed dog stays in "Former dogs". That is not "not yet": it is a choice. A retired dog sleeping in your kennel is one you actually walk past every day — there is no reason for the app to go quiet about him. Death is the one status you should not have to read again each morning.
It does not delete the dog. There is no "delete permanently" button, and there will not be one: your kennel's history rests on these dogs.
On the phone, a hidden dog becomes unreachable. Since no list carries him any more, you cannot open his record from the mobile app. To get back to it: turn the switch on, or use the web, where his record stays reachable. We would rather tell you than let you find out.
One decision made against our own rule
By default, the switch is off — your deceased dogs are hidden.
The obvious choice was the opposite. A new setting should start on the old behaviour, so that nobody sees their app change without asking. That is the rule, and we follow it almost always.
We did not follow it here. Because the musher who asked for this did not ask for "a choice": he asked because he met his dog every morning. Making him find a setting before he could stop meeting him would have been asking him to pay twice.
So yes: when this goes live, if you had visible deceased dogs, they will vanish from your lists without you doing anything. That is deliberate — and it is why the Settings card tells you plainly how many are hidden: "3 deceased dogs hidden". A dog missing without explanation would be worse than the problem we are fixing.
If you would rather see them, the switch is right there, and it does not forget.
Also, while we were in there
The phone's "Pack" screen now keeps loaned dogs and former dogs in two separate sections below your active pack — the way the web already did. A loaned dog is not a dog who left: he comes back. They did not deserve the same block, and neither belonged among the dogs you can harness tomorrow.