And please don't ever leave them in a hot car. 2-3 minutes is all it takes for the temperature to rise to an unsafe heat level.
http://www.app.com/article/20100804/LIFE05/100804052/Road-safety-Buckle-up-the-whole-family-including-your-petsA 60-pound dog riding unsecured in a vehicle will become a 2,700-pound projectile if a wreck happens at just 35 miles per hour — a bad-news reality for the dog and for the humans in the car.
At least 85% of people don't use safety restraints or crates for their pets when they've got them in the car.
These are the kinds of stats that Christina Selter has made it her business to uncover and share. A near-crash while driving in her car with her dog a few years back prompted her to wonder about worst-case scenarios and to begin information-collecting. And that spawned a one-woman mission — eventually named Bark Buckle UP — to promote in-car restraint of pets to prevent injuries to them and to humans.
"We need people to
buckle up the whole family, including the pets," she says.
For the fact is, she has heard from way too many first responders about an unhappy cascade of horrors that often occurs when an unsecured pet riding in a vehicle is involved in a crash. Not only can there be significant injuries to the animal and the people in the car, there's frequently a second wave of awfulness. Maybe the dog escapes through a broken window and dashes into traffic, causing more accidents and very often getting killed. Or maybe the dog, hurt and scared, gets protective of its human and won't permit the first responders into the vehicle to assist, sometimes going so far as biting. Sometimes dogs that probably could have survived their injuries move about so much inside the wreck, agitated, fearful of what all the strangers on scene are preparing to do, that blood loss speeds up to the point they don't make it.
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