Once upon a time, I was not aware of the many options for restraining your dog in the car. In fact, the idea of getting a seatbelt or other restraint for Bella never even crossed my mind.
(Hey, back in the day people didn’t even use car seats for their kids. A friend’s mom once told me that she brought her infant son home from the hospital in a drawer. Like an actual drawer removed from a dresser. Strapped into a car. With a baby inside. It was a different time. I bet if you told people in the ’70s that the future would include seat belts for dogs, they’d have laughed you out of the room.)
Anyway, when I was a kid, we never restrained our dogs in the car. Our Chihuahua rode in my mom’s lap, while my Toy Fox Terrier rode with my sister and me in the backseat. Maybe on the seat itself, maybe on the floor… wherever she decided to nest. Sometimes our Chihuahua would even take a nap in the back window. I even remember taking a trip in my parents’ Datsun – the back seats were folded down, creating a giant playpen for me and one of our bigger dogs. (Needless to say, we were lucky that the years passed without incident.)
When we adopted Bella in 2002, it didn’t even occur to me to restrain her in the car. We took a few local trips, which went as well as possible considering that she managed to get carsick on all of them. Then, we piled into the car to go visit my parents. That’s when it all went downhill…
We were driving down the interstate in my oh-so-stylish Dodge Neon – a fetching gold color, no less – when the following scene ensued…
Bella decided that she really needed to see what was happening outside. Not only did she need to see it, but she needed to see it from the back window. So, our not-so-graceful pup decided to scale the backseat like a mountain range.
As she scrambled her way up the face of Mount Backseat, the humans in the car began to panic. We were barreling down the highway at sixty-five miles per hour while our new dog decided to perform her own stunts. Surely, this would not end well.
And it didn’t. After grabbing at the edge of the window as if she was Wile E. Coyote hanging on to a cliff, she eventually plummeted towards the back seat. Like so…
By this time, we’d managed to find a place to pull over and assess the damage. Luckily, no Bellas were harmed in the making of this anecdote (although my nerves were).
We purchased a canine seat belt shortly thereafter. (To learn more about securing your dog in the car, click here.)
So, tell me… have your dogs ever pulled any crazy stunts in the car?
We now keep Luna in a booster seat, so she can see out the window without climbing everywhere. Before that she terrified me once by sticking her nose in between the my seat and the driver’s side window and then proceeding to sneeze. Heart attack.
Beagles and Bargains recently posted..What Do Plankton Have to Do With Dogs?
Oh, man – I bet!
Glad that Bella was unharmed! We use a seat belt restraint in our car too. We loved the illustrations by the way!
berniethefrenchie
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Ok, so, first of all: The cartoons are so cute. Even though cute isn’t the point. But they are. 🙂 Second, I have yet to figure out how to restrain all three dogs in the back of my SUV. I’ve searched for tools, tried different clip-on harnesses, and so on, to no avail. I feel guilty, but they’re actually really good. They get in the back and either sit and stare out the window or snooze. But, I do still feel guilty!
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Silas is restrained in a very slap-dash way. He has a Kurgo Zip-line that runs across the back seat, but he’s much better psychologically if he stays up front. So I just clip the tether from the Kurgo (basically a very short leash) to the front passenger seat headrest mounts.
This is only because he is DETERMINED to sit in my lap while I drive, and he does not fit. Or, actually, he fits, but then I can’t see over his enormous ears.
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Terrific point, AJ. And awesome graphics to boot!
My husband, a fire fighter and often called to accident scenes, has educated me a great deal on dog restraint. I don’t imagine you’ll want graphic demonstrations here, but I can tell you a few things that really matter.
– When accidents happen, even at 30 miles per hour, your unrestrained dog(s) become projectiles with the capacity to do unrevivable things to your noggin as they fly by, not to mention their bodies.
– If your unrestrained dogs are ejected from the car, they will suffer horrible injuries and emotional trauma from crashing through the windsheild with a brutal landing.
– Unrestrained dogs also have the capability of running around an accident scene creating chaos in oncoming traffic, sometimes causing secondary accidents.
– In the event of a crash, even due to another car and not your own, unrestrained dogs may also harm your chances of first aid. When scared, hurt, disoriented, and approached by scary strangers in what appears to be faceless firematic gear, your dog(s) may act in ways that you would never expect, protecting you inside your car and preventing those on the scene from quickly approaching to help save your life.
Restraint shouldn’t be based on whether your dogs are well behaved or not. It should be a routine for keeping everybody safe in every scenario.
Amen, Kim! Thanks for this comment – I didn’t delve into all of that here, but it’s such important information for everyone to know. Sometimes I shudder to think how lucky I’ve been that I’ve never been in an accident with any dogs in the car.
I think GoPetFriendly peeps were really the first to educate me. The rest followed just because both people and dog rescue are now part of our daily lives. So, I’m with you. We’ve been very lucky for many years and, like you, never really thought about it for too long a time!
I always shudder when I see dogs loose in a car, it’s just so unsafe!!
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Love the image. LOL. These guys don’t like it, but they are restrained now. It’s better for them, and us.
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It was before my time, but my Kuvasz sister Katie has worn a seat belt pretty much all her life. She was living in Germany at the time and had a convertible VW Beetle. Katie was seat belted in in the back seat as always with her fashionable Doggles on for wind protection. They were driving to her dog friends house out in the country. Well, Katie saw her friend running towards the car and just couldn’t control her excitement and jumped out of the moving car. Luckily…1. Mom was only going about 10mph at the time and 2. Katie had her seat belt on, so she was hanging by the seat belt off the side of the moving car. No one was harmed, not even a scratch on the car, but the hardest part was getting Katie back in the car to get her out of her seat belt. It scared the crap out of Mom!
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How scary! So glad she was okay!
Judgy cloud. Brilliant. 😉
Is this your web comic? It’s very good. You should do more.
Nice PSA, too (lest you think I missed the point). Jon Farleigh would go through the front seats and get between me and the wheel when we first got him. Needless to say, that was a wake-up call. Hello, front seat barrier and back seat harness contraption!
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Nope… just a one-off I whipped up for this post. I may try to start doing some more here though – thank you for the kind words! (The official comic will launch on its own site at some point… I’m working on it. 🙂 )
lol! Judgy cloud – those are the worst!
I’ve read lots on seatbelts not necessarily fully helping when in an accident situation, but there are so many other uses – driver/passenger safety, restraint, etc. that I would still argue any day that they’re better than free-roaming dogs in the car. Especially if the dog has any sort of anxiety or reactivity about the vehicle or travel.
We have an SUV and the dogs have their own caged spot at the back of the car. No seatbelts, so they’re free to sit, reposition, stare out the window or laydown as they wish, but they’re also both seasoned travellers.
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Tynan jumped (or fell- not sure) out of the car window. I was going about 15mph but I still had about seventeen heart attacks in a row and we rushed him to the vet. He was completely unphased and fine. But our next stop was the pet store for a restraint system! This was fourteen years ago so there wasn’t much out there… I wonder if a large drawer would have worked? Speaking of that, my mom put me in one of those new tangled car seats to drive me home from the hospital and all the nurses and a few doctors were laughing at her and critizing her for not wanting to hold her baby to go home. I think about this everytime it takes me fifteen minutes to strap all three of my dogs into the car…
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Oh, how scary that must have been!
That is so funny with your drawings! When I was a kid our seatbelt was my mom’s arm thrown across us when she had to stop. I remember sleeping in the back window of my grandparents car on trips! It really is a miracle that any of us survived those days! Thanks for the smile today!
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One thing I love about our car is that there is no bouncing around or hanging out the window. I also added a few accessories to prevent this, including window guards and a backseat hammock. I’m not finished 🙂
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Wow that must have scared the crap out of you. Glad Bella was unharmed.
Last year on vacation Hubby booked a fishing trip. The day before we did a drive to make sure he would be able to find it. Well we found the lake and he got out to walk over and see where the entrance was and in the meantime the back windows were rolled down. (He rolls them down far too low for my liking.) Delilah (in the back) saw the lake and tried to climb out the window to get to the water! Thankfully her leash was attached and I grabbed it and stopped her. I think my heart also stopped.
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Oh, Delilah… never a dull moment!
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When Elka was a puppy, she rode in my lap. I didn’t know about puppy seatbelts either. I’m glad we both escaped without real incident!
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I was paranoid from the moment I decided to get a dog. Once I fell in love with my chocolate chi and knew he would be mine I immediately scoured the internet for a dog car seat. I had it already installed in my car the day I picked up my little bundle of fur. Only one time did he make me question my choice. He poised himself on the edge of the seat to take advance of the A/C blowing on his furry butt when he slide off the edge and was dangling from his harness. He wasn’t injured, just scared me silly. He still perches on the edge, but now wil one foot always on the inside of the car seat for balance.
Great that you were already on top of this when you first got a dog!
There are so many things I want to say, let me hope I remember them all!
1. You crack me up. Nuff said.
2. Did you draw those pictures? If so, I am very impressed! If not, just take credit for them anyway, because I’m very impressed!
3. When my sister was a baby, she once slept in a drawer hanging halfway out of a dresser during a hurricane. She’s still alive and well today, by some small miracle! I think when I turned 3 or 4, I was done having to use a car seat…now kids have to ride in some kind of car seat or booster seat until practically their 18th birthday (okay, actually, I think it’s their 8th birthday, but close enough).
4. The only real mishap I’ve had in the car with Riley has involved a dog seat belt, actually. I got her one a few years ago and there was definitely a learning curve involved on my end and her end. The first few times she got herself tangled up to the point of yelping/panicking and no return (I’m not entirely sure how she even did that, it was a short strap that went from the harness and buckled into the seat buckle). I had to pull over and untangle her or unstrap her and re-strap her in several times. I gave up on that seat belt after a while, but now I have a barrier (I have a cargo area in the back of my car) and I sometimes will hook her up to one of the d-rings that are in my cargo area (but that’s more so she won’t escape when we get to our destination or so she won’t try to go through the barrier and into the backseat and refuse to get out when we get to the vet’s office. Yep, I’m evil!).
Okay, I think that was everything!
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Aw, thank you! I did draw the pictures. 🙂