i am a huge proponent of the dog harness, especially because both of our dogs are able to slip their heads out of normal collars. also, when your dog walks frequently on a leash (as ours do), normal collars can pull against and even collapse the dog’s trachea. no, thank you. harnesses are much more gentle on your dog and more effective. the pressure is distributed along the chest and shoulders instead of the windpipe. last winter before the harness revelation had dawned on me, lady and i had a scary incident. she was wearing a normal collar and we were out for a walk. we ran into another man out walking with his two dogs, and the dogs were immediately aggressive towards lades, barking, lunging, and snarling at her. lady panicked and literally backed out of her collar and into the very busy street behind her. luckily (after i nearly panicked myself) i was able to coax lady out of the street and back onto the sidewalk and into her collar. after that scary incident, i went straight to petsmart and bought her a harness. she has never gotten out of it, and i honestly think it’s more comfortable for her than the collar was.
we had another scary incident recently, which led to getting lady another new harness. the girls were rough housing, and sinka somehow got her jaw caught in lady’s harness. it was terrifying. the strap wrapped around her jaw, and the harder she tried to pull herself out of it, the tighter it got around her. she started yelping loudly, and osman (saving the day as always with his skills and wit) grabbed a pair of scissors and cut sinka out of it. lady was unbelievable calm and patient during the entire incident (which in reality only lasted about thirty seconds), sitting perfectly still while sinka was literally attached to her, yelping and writhing, and while osman cut off her harness. the whole thing scared me so badly i instantly burst into tears, but calmed down once we checked thoroughly and made sure that sinka was not hurt at all. she just got trapped and panicked. since then we have made sure that the girls leave each other’s harnesses alone when they’re playing. also, the new harness we bought lady is a different style, one with less straps. after finally finding what we were looking for on this site: www.puplife.com , i decided that sinka needed one of these, too.
check out lady’s harness and sinka’s harness. so cute!
i would definitely recommend the site we ordered these from. neither petco nor petsmart had what we needed in the store or online, but puplife did. they also shipped incredibly fast (four hours after i placed my order, to be exact), and since every strap is adjustable, they fit both lady and sinka perfectly. look how cute they are:
^going out to pee!
^lades, looking like she knows what’s up.
^sinka’s patented roll/writhe.
whoa that would be a scary incident. maybe you guys should get harnesses to use for when they go on walks, but just have regular collars on all the time so they don’t get harness caught while playing?
we walk marls on a harness too, it works so much better for her and us. no idea why i had not discovered the harness with my prev dogs.
wow i wish you were bringing these 2 crazy kiddos! next time, maybe.