Business owners Kishin Anderson and Blythe Penna feel the love every time they go to work.

The duo operates a dog-walking service on the East Side of Providence and they are greeted by excited yipping, uncontrolled scampering and, of course, loads of tail-wagging when they approach a client’s house.

“When the dogs see us, they know where they’re going,” says Anderson.

“We’re like rock stars to them,” adds Penna.

Yes, exuberance is to be expected. But the over-the-top reaction might be because Anderson’s and Penna’s business, Scratch and Sniff, isn’t an ordinary dog-walking service.

Instead of clipping a leash to the dog and walking it around the block, Anderson and Penna load dogs by the half-dozen into matching Honda Elements – license plates SNIFF1 and SNIFF2 – to shuttle them to a 4.5-acre, fenced-off field that they lease in a rural area across the Massachusetts border.

Anderson and Penna call the trips “excursions,” and they’ve gotten so popular that on certain days, the businesswomen and a few private contractors make numerous runs, dropping off some dogs and picking up others – as many as 60 in a day.

“We’ve found a great niche,” Anderson says. “They’re getting more exercise and more socialization with other dogs.”

“People treat their dogs like children these days,” Penna says. “And this makes for extremely guilt-free dog ownership.”

Penna knows of what she speaks. She was once a Scratch and Sniff client, after Anderson first launched the business on her own in 2004.

An owner of a vizsla named Roma, Penna felt the pang of guilt when she left home every morning for her sales manager job at a Boston medical-device company. “It killed me to think she was not having a good time during the day,” she says.

Meanwhile, Anderson was finding many others felt the same way. Previously a retail store manager, Anderson had started walking dogs as a way to supplement her income while she settled on a type of business she could open.

She envisioned launching a self-service, dog-washing business, but through referrals, the walking took on a life of its own.

By 2007, Anderson needed a partner. “I was freaking out because of the number of dogs I was taking on,” she says.