Secure your pet – but don’t take safety for granted

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“The safety of children travelling in vehicles is very important to Transport Canada,” according to the Transport Canada website. So important, your kid will be bundled up or tied down according to strict government regulations, from birth until he or she is delivered into a regular seatbelt. And that is as it should be. But what about your pets?

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If you’ve ever pulled up to a stoplight and had Buddy in the next lane glance over smiling with Snuffybits his Butterdoodle – or whatever it’s called –  sitting on his lap, you know there are no regulations regarding how to travel with your pets. And Buddy is endangering the life of Snuffybits as surely as if he were to throw her out into a live lane of traffic. Ever seen an airbag go off, Buddy? Thinking your Minipoo is safe inside your handbag is equally dangerous.

While pet owners may or may not care about transporting their fur babies, The Center for Pet Safety in Washington, D.C. cares very much. In fact, it’s a non-profit research and advocacy group that takes zero money from the pet product industry; instead, it rigorously tests the claims of all those cute tethers, harnesses and carriers that promise to protect your pets in your car. Its crash test videos should scare the hell out of you if you own a dog or cat; you can see its test results at www.centerforpetsafety.org.

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Another company that cares is Subaru. While car manufacturers are rightfully held to stringent safety standards for every single part of the cars they make to protect human occupants, dogs are cats are on their own. But Subaru has partnered with The Center to find recommended solutions for their customers (with its findings also found on The Center’s website), and it was good enough to supply me with a recommended harness and kennel for testing in a new Forester; your own vehicle should have similar anchor spots, but check first.

When it comes to any vehicle, Dr. Tara Sermer, a veterinarian and owner of Green Lane Animal Hospital in Thornhill, Ontario, acknowledges pets are a hugely overlooked safety issue for both the animals themselves and the car’s occupants. “Dogs are a major distraction,” she says. “They can easily become frightened or unhappy, and a loose dog inside a car is just dangerous.” Forget worrying about a crash for a moment; Dr. Sermer sees far too many eye injuries from dogs hanging out open windows. “Foreign bodies causing injuries, dried out eyes, corneal ulcers – all of these things are common and preventable.”

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If your vehicle is going 100 km/h and comes to a sudden stop – a crash – everything inside your vehicle that is not secured will continue to travel at 100 km/h. Your cellphone, that Kleenex box, your dog. An unsecured dog can severely injure the occupants of that car; an unsecured, terrified dog can bolt across lanes of traffic; an unsecured dog could threaten first responders who are obligated to tend to the hurt humans first, and if Animal Control has to be called, your frightened dog will be subdued any way it takes to get you the help you need.

Dr. Sermer tells of a collision on a major highway involving a client and his Labrador. With the driver injured, the dog took off and was missing for 24 hours. When it was finally found, it had a severely fractured front leg. She had another client who had to have the dashboard of their car removed to get out a frightened cat. Uncontained cats will usually race right for the pedals and lodge themselves there. As kids, my sister and I let our family cat out of his cage on the way to the cottage “just for a minute” and he did just that; I can still hear my father hollering as he fought the car to the side of Highway 400 in crazy vacation traffic.

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Lindsey Wolko is the founder of The Center for Pet Safety in Washington, D.C. “Pets are as big a distraction as cellphones,” she tells me. Dogs under seven kilograms should be in a carrier; dogs over that weight should be in a safety harness. And there is only one company that makes harnesses that are recommended by The Center after its extensive crash testing: Sleepypod makes both the Clickit Utility and Clickit Sport. Forget the aisle full of tethers with claims they will keep your dog safe. There is no standard, no legal requirements to back up their claims, and testing proves many of the products will not only do little to protect your dog, they will actually cause worse injuries in some circumstances.

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You can get kennels of all sizes, and the Gunner Kennel we tested that was big enough for our 20 kilogram dog took up all of the cargo hold of the Subaru Forester we were using. The Gunner supplies superior safety, but obviously would be an option restricted by space and lifestyle; examine all the recommendations.

The Clickit harness I tested for this piece was the Utility, with two tether straps that attached into the child seat anchor points. The company, Sleepypod, now has a newer version to market that is easier to use and has passed The Center’s stringent crash test standards. Sleepypod remains the only company that voluntarily complies with The Center’s standards to attain certification. The biggest problem with many of the mainstream harnesses available to consumers, according to The Center, is the use of an extension mechanism.

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“The Center for Pet Safety has scientifically proven that extension tethers and zipline-style products increase the risk of injury to not only the pet, but also the people in the vehicle if a crash occurs,” says Wolko. “Long extension tethers negate the crashworthiness of a harness and should be considered a design flaw.” Extension tethers and ziplines are any devices that allow the animal to “travel” distances beyond a safe zone, and then snap back while tied to a single point.

The Center continually updates its best practices for testing consumer products, and it even has a former IIHS bioengineer with years of passenger safety expertise on board to help replicate dog dummies for most effective results. Wolko begins to tell me with a shudder that decades ago, someone used real dogs in similar tests. She doesn’t finish the sentence.

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According to Wolko, American statistics indicate 60 per cent of dog owners travelled with their dog in the car at least once per month in the past year. I will venture that Canadian numbers will no doubt be somewhere in this neighbourhood.

Animals who have never been secured will take some training. Wolko suggests short trips – just a few minutes – initially to get them acclimated, and like children, the younger you start them the easier it will be. The harness we used seemed comfortable for Shelby, our dog model; after a bit of testing with the straps, it didn’t take long for Shelby to relax while wearing it.

And after hearing about the injured Lab missing for a day, Shelby no longer has a vote in whether she gets bolted in. We love her too much not to. And, Alfie, the little yapper in the video, is getting a new crate. We love him, too.