A dog ramp was what we needed for our Golden Retriever
to access all areas - here's our review of our purchase
As your dog gets older, will it be the slippery slope,
the old heave-ho or will your pet face the high jump when it comes to
going in the car?
A dog ramp becomes necessary either when the back of a car is
too high for a dog to jump in, or when a dog becomes too elderly
to manage comfortably and is too heavy to lift. In our case,
after years of ascending happily into the back of a Peugeot 406
estate without a dog ramp, our ten-year-old golden retriever was
faced with the challenge of a new car, a Nissan Pathfinder. He
was so willing, poor lamb, and so keen. I sometimes think our
car has captured his loyalty more than we have ourselves. But he
just couldn't make it without a ramp.
Fortunately we had anticipated his difficulty and had already
purchased a ramp from Canine Concepts. It was the strongest we
could find as, at 45kg, our pet is no light-weight. It was made
of heavy-duty plastic, telescoping to roughly half its length,
with a rough-carpeted surface for a sure grip and moulding to
give it a secure connection with the back of the vehicle. Many
dogs might have shied away from such an aid, but ours was almost
too eager.
His main fault was that he would not walk squarely onto the end
of the ramp but entered it at an angle so that one of his hind
legs would be left dangling in mid-air. This was in fact his
downfall. One day he did a belly-flop right onto the joint of
the ramp which I had foolishly opened out to its fullest extent.
There was a crack and a piece of plastic came away. It was still
useable, however, and almost as strong, but I had been finding
it an effort to put in place because it was heavy. The new model
is made of aluminium so presumably that problem has been
overcome.
It was the joint between the two halves of the dog ramp which
was the weakness of the contraption so I decided to try an
experiment. I pulled the two halves apart, and propped just one
half for our dog to use. At first, doing his usual trick of
entering at an angle, he needed a bit of pushing from behind.
But the rough matting afforded him such a good grip that he
learnt to make it on his own even though the slope was a lot
steeper. Now I have only half the weight to take from the back
seat of the car and put in place, and - best of all - we have a
spare if ever something should happen to our dog ramp.
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