The Pet Carrier That Nearly Ruined Christmas!

   Since the moment we brought Cassie home I tried to acclamate her to simply lying in the back seat of the car while I'm driving.  Well, that was fine when she was ten pounds and I could still drive with one hand and hold her at bay in the passenger seat with the other.  However, now that she is 50 lbs and very excited about car rides leaving her loose in the car is just not an option.
    We've tried seat belt harnesses, dividers and putting her in both the front and the back seats.  Finally on one 5 mile drive home from training when I had pulled over for the 3rd time to get her back in her seat belt (she really is a houdini dog) I decided that it was time to buy a crate.  Well, maybe Christmas time wasn't the best time to try it out, but I am a glutton for punishment.  So one day on the spur of the moment I picked up a collapsible dog crate from Target and brought it home to try it out...what a mistake:

The Boots & Barkley Large Pop Open Dog Kennel:

    I start in my defense:  At this point I still wasn't sold on the idea of carrying a dog kennel around in the back of my car, so the facts that it is 1) cheap ($25) and 2) collapsible had the impulse shopper in me interested.  In addition, I was increasingly desperate for an end to my daily stops along the side of the interstate to re-fit a seat-belt harness.  I brought the Pop Open Kennel home on a whim and carefully read the brief instructions (that were also unclear).   From the beginning, I was never able to get the thing back into the tight circle it came in (even though that was meant to be a selling feature).  It wasn't frightening to Cassie, but I did do some work with getting her used to being inside the kennel when it was zipped up. She seemed fine.
   On Christmas morning my husband sat in the passenger seat straddling a bucket of brining cornish game hens while holding Lilly, who was instantly asleep in his lap and Cassie jumped right into the Pop Up Kennel that my husband had meticulously fitted into the backseat.   To say she didn't like it was an understatement.   We made it to the end of our neighborhood before trouble started with scratching and clawing at the filmsy material of the kennel walls.  The next problem came a quarter mile down the road, when Cassie somehow tipped the kennel towards the footwell, which resulted in her becoming trapped within the collapsed sides of the kennel in the footwell screaming frantically for help.   It was a terrible start to Christmas morning!  I pulled over, extracted my dog from the kennel and ripped it out of the car, folded it as much as possible and threw it in the trunk...My husband spent the rest of the ride to my parents' house in the backseat with Cassie, while Lilly slept by herself in the front seat.  When we finally pulled into my parents' driveway, I had to wait with Cassie until my father could bring Tobey's old Crate up from the basement so we could enjoy opening presents without chew marks!

  Moral of the story folks: If your dog won't sit still in the car and can get out of seatbelts like mine can, just buckle down and buy the biggest hard-sided crate that will fit in your car.  I did (The Petmate Kennel) and I've not seen the shoulder of the interstate since.