Check out this treacly, sentimentalized report from one of the local Play-Nooz stations: A woman crashes her car. One of the two dogs she’s carting around is killed. She and a second dog — a puppy — fly through the windshield. The woman is crippled — still in a wheelchair to this day — and the terrified, presumably injured pup runs off into the desert.
Miraculously, heart-warmingly, and swathed in goopy emotion, the dog is found — trapped, actually — after two months of wandering around in 110- to 115-degree heat.
Isn’t that sweet?
Hm.
The driver goes through the windshield: no seatbelt. The dog goes through the windshield: not crated. The other dog is killed…not crated?
All very touching, but WTF? If the driver had been driving safely — wearing her seatbelt and seeing to it that the animals were secured safely inside the vehicle — she likely would not be in a wheelchair. The puppy would not have been thrown out into the desert to survive on its own. And the other dog probably would still be alive.
Sorry to throw iced acid on another sugary Hallmark Moment, but from the curmudgeon’s point of view, this is not an uplifting story. It’s a tale of raw stupidity.
Just sayin’…
I’m guilty of driving my dogs around uncrated, too, though I’m at least bright enough to figure out how to use the seatbelt on myself. After reading between the lines here, you can be sure I’m getting a car crate for the Queen of the Universe. Today.
Some pet crates are pretty pricey — like all pet-related gear, much exploitation of people’s sentimentality goes on. However, at Amazon prices are as low as $22. Since some crates can be pretty flimsy, I personally would pick one from Target (also flimsy, in my experience) or a pet store, where I can actually see and handle the things. But it’s useful to check Amazon for the consumer reviews — especially for reports like these, which show one brand of portable kennel falling apart repeatedly. Paying a little more to secure the animal, considering how much you’ve already spent on the beast(!!), is worth the extra security.
Soon as the stores open this morning, it’s off to the nearest Petsmart for me and the hound.
How about you? Do you keep your pets safe in the car, as well as yourself?
After having a dog jump or fall out a car window – while wearing a doggie seat belt, mind you – I now keep a crate set up in the back seat. And while the back of a hatchback or similar car might seem like the ideal place, in a rear-end crash it wouldn’t be. So if my next car is a hatchback, the crate will still be in the back seat. And yes, I wear my own seatbelt.
Yow! Anna the GerShep was able to weasel out of a doggie belt, unless it was cinched down so tight she couldn’t move. Not ideal.
Agreed about the back of a long vehicle. I intend to wedge the new crate on the floor between the back seat and the front passenger’s seat, as tight as I can get it. It still could slide from side to side but is less likely to go airborne and sail into the driver’s area or through the windshield.
I thought it was against the law in AZ not to have them restrained? That was the reason my sister have for her puppy’s seat belt. As for kitty pop, no seat belt, but he rides in a crate, which is preferably in the passenger’s lap.
Don’t know about animals. Probably not, though: people drive around with dogs in the back of pickups all the time.
It’s against the law not to have children restrained, however.
I’ve never thought to put my 50-lb dog in a crate while in the car. I’m not sure how well that would work out, frankly, since wrestling a properly-sized crate in and out of the car would be tough for me; I’m not even sure that a crate to fit her would fit in my backseat or hatch area.
My dog is trained to stay in the back seat and lay down. Sometimes she gets nervous and sits up, but she is not allowed to get in the front of the car and she abides by that rule. She hasn’t been in a crate in so many years that I’m not sure how she’d react to being placed in one. She is a very anxious dog and I can imagine that being confined may provoke a response in her that would be unwelcome, to say the least.
We only take short drives on city streets to the vet or the dog walker for boarding. At the way traffic typically moves, there’s no way either of us is flying out of the car unless some fictitious monkeys grab us and do so. 😉 I wear a seat belt at all times, though.
Drive carefully and slowly.
The G-forces involved in even a minor collision at relatively low speeds could surprise you. In a rear-end or head-on collision, the dog’s body will become a projectile that will be hurled into the front seats or, as in the case of this lady’s dog, right through the windshield.
Actually, what will happen in the case of a collision in which your car is moving forward and strikes something is that the animal’s body (like everything else that’s unsecured in the car) will continue to move forward at the speed the vehicle was moving before it came to an abrupt stop. Thus you could have a 50-pound dog hitting you at 30, 40, or 50 mph (typical surface street speeds around here); or, if you’re on a freeway, presumably at 60 or 70 mph. At 30 mph, the dog would strike you (or the dashboard, or the windshield, or someone in the passenger seat) with an impact force of 1505 pounds. That’s OVER 3/4 OF A TON.
Here’s a calculator that will let you figure the scenarios based on the passenger’s or object’s weight and the vehicle’s speed: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/carcr2.html
Do you really want to be hit by 3/4 of a ton while you’re tooling to the vet’s office? Consider getting a seat-belt harness for the pooch — you just get Pup into the harness and then snap the seatbelt through it. Better the dog should be antsy and unhappy than dead. Or that you should be dead.
That’s a nifty little calculator! So, a 50 lb dog would strike my seat with the the force of .036 tons if I had to stop within 2 feet while going 15 MPH. The top speed I ever get to on city streets is 30 MPH (that’s the speed limit, actually, and it is starting to be enforced with cameras so I’m quite firm on that number). I guess I’ll have to buy a doggie seat belt.
Astonishing, isn’t it? When you look at it in those terms, it doesn’t even seem possible. Yet I think we’ve all had small stuff like pens and sunglasses go flying across the car when we had to jam on the brakes…so it’s reasonable to expect that an object (read “dawg”) that weighs a lot more than that would pack quite a punch.
I have carriers for my cats and the carriers always get used in the car. The only exception I made on this was when I took my cat in to be put down. No way I was putting her through that, plus I wanted every moment with her I could knowing it was the end. But, given why I was taking her, there was no chance of her escaping.