This sounded exactly like the intended application of the new pet-centric tags and I had to go back to find this posting discussing them:
Anyway looking at the new answers, it seems like I was wrong and these tags are actually NOT searchable/filterable. I had assumed they would be and I’m deeply disappointed that they are not. Fingers crossed that the tags are just the first step of a searchable system!
Well anyway, back to the original question. Seems like some people have already suggested the animal type filtering, but if I may add: I’ve done my share of searching and inviting sitters and honestly, sometimes I do a CTRL+F search on the sitter’s page for keywords before committing to reading the entire profile. It’s not a perfect system and you do have to expand all the text fields first (why oh why on earth are they truncated??), but it helps speed things up a little bit because I’m looking for something very specific!