Buckle up the whole family, including your pets

A 60-pound dog riding unsecured in a vehicle will become a 2,700-pound projectile if a wreck happens at just 35 miles an hour — a bad-news reality for the dog and for the humans in the car.

At least 85 percent 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.

"Some pets will have to be put down at the scene," she says.

She is convinced, because law enforcement people and first responders have convinced her, that many pets who die in or as the result of a vehicle accident 'would have survived with minor injuries if they'd been secured in a safety harness or a crate (tethered so it won't fly around on impact). And she is equally convinced that many of the animals that survive with injuries would have had less serious injuries if they'd been restrained.

And so Selter spends a great deal of time speaking to groups far and wide about the benefits of pet restraints. Her busiest time begins this month, as she flies across the country doing joint press conferences with police and fire chiefs, spreading the word. Last year she hit 20 cities in less than two months; this year she expects it will be 25 cities or more.