WASHINGTON — Action News Jax visited the center where numerous family pet safety items stopped working crash tests. The Center for Pet Safety (CPS) evaluated harnesses, providers, and cages to see if they keep dogs safe throughout an auto accident.
It’s an animal owner’s problem; your dog leaps out a car window onto the roadway. Lindsey Wolko is the creator of the Center for Pet Safety simply outdoors Washington D.C. She’s seen numerous videos of dogs unintentionally falling onto the roadway after hanging out of the car window.
Unfortunately, a problem circumstance, occurred to Wolko while her dog, Maggie, was riding with her in the car. Wolko had actually come by a regional huge box family pet retail outlet and purchased a harness for Maggie.
“It said it would protect her and me if we were in a crash,” she explained.
Wolko needed to knock on the brakes to prevent a crash while her dog Maggie remained in the car.
“All I heard was screaming,” Wolko said. “The only thing that kept her from breaking her neck was she got tangled in the extension component of the harness. But otherwise, she would have gone headfirst into the back of the front seat of vehicle.” Despite significant injuries, Maggie endured.
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LABORATORY SCREENING
It was Wolko’s personal experience on the roadway that led her to start screening family pet safety items and produce CPS.
“The industry is so highly unregulated,” Wolko said. “It literally is the wild, wild west.”
She said lethal mishaps in the car with your animals are extremely avoidable. Wolko has the crash test information to back it up. Action News Jax took a trip to Washington D.C. to go inside the screening center to discover how the family pet safety crash tests are done. Since 2011, CPS has actually evaluated near 400 car restraint items for animals consisting of harnesses, travel providers, and cages.
CPS has several crash test “dog dummies” that are properly weighted for various sizes of dogs. They have a fur outside and facial functions, like the outside of a packed animal.
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Wolko said that’s the point: “We want people to look at the stuffed animals when they watch the crash test footage and visualize their pet.”
It gets your attention. The concept is the exact same. Just as you would put a human crash dummy through a car test, you pack up the crash “dog dummy” and put it through its own tests utilizing the family pet safety item. Most of the items stopped working, and some entirely broke down.
Action News Jax got in touch with the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Not one company manages family pet safety travel items.
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DOG PARK
Pet owners we talked with in Jacksonville had no concept a few of these items might be unsafe.
“I never think that she’s going to jump out of the window like that,” Jacksonville dog owner Julieann Rowen said. “That scares me to death.”
Many family pet owners informed us they check out evaluations and took a look at item rankings, however they don’t in fact search for a dog safety label.
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Wolko said family pet owners frequently purchase into the marketing of an item that doesn’t have screening to support the business’s claims.
Wolko said numerous dog owners feel their dog belongs of their family, however Wolko said, “They [our pets] are no different in the eyes of the law, or the eyes of the federal government as a piece of luggage. That’s a challenge for us.”
“What we’re testing, this can actually happen to you,” Wolko said. “It’s horrifying when you see those things. … We tell pet owners if it is not on our list, do not buy the product.”
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TESTS OUTCOMES
So which items passed? The Center for Pet Safety has actually offered its seal of approval to 16 items considering that 2011.
Thirteen are presently on the marketplace. CPS evaluates the items routinely to ensure that modifications to an item still has the exact same structural stability.
You can see how each of these items did on the CPS website.
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The following items have actually been Independently Crash Test Certified by Center for Pet Safety:
Listed Alphabetically by Brand Name
Safety Harnesses:
Pet Travel Carriers:
Travel Crates:
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