To dumbasses who insist on driving with their dogs on their laps:

[eyesroll]

(and the one who I saw earlier today driving a giant Escalade)

Please remember that a 15 mph crash may not cause a lot of damage or human injury...but you know where it says in your car you should sit as far away from the airbag as possible, and put your kids in the back seat because an airbag can KILL THEM?

It goes for dogs, too.

Some people are just stupid.

[jobycom]

1. My cat rides on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel, to be safe.

[StopTheMorans]

2. but doesn't it obstruct the view of your tom cruise bobblehead doll?

[jobycom]

4. ROFLMAO!!!

Nothing like a personalized jab to make me feel remembered!!!!

(And yes, yes it does.)

[Midlodemocrat]

6. Mine is in the back, along with my Hawaiian bobble head

and all the Beanie Babies I ever had.

[StopTheMorans]

7. oh look, someone is a mod again.

who invited the narc :eyes:

[Midlodemocrat]

9. Nice. Real Nice.

Smooch.

[StopTheMorans]

16. I try

:*

[Patiod]

12. You are probably kidding, but sadly

my S.O. actually thought this was a good idea one time. And the cat did indeed end up on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel, which put a very strange look on the face of the State Trooper who pulled up next to them a block from our house. Sadly, trooper must have had a call come in, because he didn't stop S.O. and haul him into jail for General Stupidity as he should have.

[jobycom]

33. Half kidding, actually

I had to take my sick cat on a trip with me, and since she was too weak to move around much, I just let her roam the car. So on I-10 west of Houston, at 75 mph, she suddenly leaped onto the dashboard and tried to crawl along the steering column to say hello. Bit nerve-racking, but we survived.

[MsUSA]

15. Speaking of cats in the car,

when I lived in rural Cambridge Wisconsin, and returning home from shopping, I stopped my car and picked up my wandering cat on the road in front of our rented farmhouse. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when the car started moving forward. He just hung from the dashboard by his two front paws and screamed!! Thank gawd the ride to the house was only about a half a block long including the driveway. I've never heard that sound in my life, Wow. I never did that again. :rofl:

[LeftyMom]

3. Not just that

In an accident, an unsecured animal is a potential projectile and could injure or kill a member of your family if they hit them while flying about your vehicle.

Unsecured your animal (who would probably be scared shitless by the accident) even if uninjured could wander off, be hit in traffic or pose a threat to rescue personnel and delay your own medical care.

The safe thing to do is get a cargo barrier anchored to the frame of the vehicle (the pressure mounted ones sold at the pet store are worse than useless) or use a harness or carrier that attatches to the vehicle's seatbelts or tether anchors.

[hfojvt]

18. Good grief Charlie Brown

I think I would be safer finding a rubber room for myself so I won't get hurt doing this :banghead:

That would also keep me from having to goto my crappy job. I was always jealous of the pilot of the A-Team, but I bet real mental hospitals are not that nice, probably do not have broadband internet for their patients.

[ProfessorGAC]

5. Geez. Mine Wears A Seatbelt!

He has a harness that has a loop of seat belt material on the back. The seat belt in the back goes through that loop, and he's belted in. And, he only rides in back. Of course, he's a 100# beast. So, if he was sitting on my lap, i couldn't move.
The Professor

[WeRQ4U]

8. Mine drives.

My small dog rides in my lap sometimes. Glad I made an impression.

[hfojvt]

10. it is my dog that insists on doing that

and I do not generally drive cars with airbags. Since the dog is unbelted in any case, a 15 mph collision seems like the least of my/his worries. Isn't he likely to be safer on my side than in the deadly shotgun position?
Stupid people do not bother me near as much as mean ones and/or members of the safety/worry gestapo.

[eyesroll]

11. Restrain your dog, please.

Put him in a carrier or a harness (depending on his size). As LeftyMom said, an unrestrained animal in the car becomes a projectile which endangers car occupants and others.

Stupid people bother me a hell of a lot more than mean ones and/or members of the safety/worry gestapo, for the simple fact that mean ones don't generally endanger my safety and stupid people do.

And people who use the word "gestapo" bug me most of all, because that's a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of Godwin's Law and we can't have that.

[hfojvt]

14. thank goodness we are not like the fundies

who try to tell everyone else how to live. MYOB is selectively applied, eh? Apparently endagering occupants of my car is a threat to your safety or could be in some worst case scenario, like if a meteor hits or there is a twenty car pile-up.

[eyesroll]

17. Do you keep your kids on your lap while you're on the freeway too?

No. Duh. It's dangerous, never mind against the law.

But I guess the law should butt out and mind its own business.

[hfojvt]

21. Probably my parents did this, back in the day

but not while they were driving. The car seats of the day were not worth a darn for safety anyway.
And yes I do think the law, and especially other drivers, should butt out. My safety and the safety of my children is my concern before it is anyone else's. Clearly there is a line there where negligence crosses into child abuse, but I think this is a long ways away.

Can we apply your logic to everything? Smoking marijuana - it's dangerous and against the law. Smoking cigarettes - it's dangerous, clearly it should be against the law. I see this as the same type of fear mongering, as the war on Tara. We need to surrender our freedom in the name of safety because we are afraid :scared: of accidents. Big brother says "buckle up".

[eyesroll]

23. I think adults have the right to endanger themselves if they want.

They do not have the right to endanger their children. Which is why I agree with car-seat laws, but not with seat belt laws. And if there have been any instances of a child dying because they were properly fastened into a properly installed car seat, when if they'd been bouncing around the car unrestrained they would have been fine, I haven't heard about it.

Children -- and dogs -- can't consent to endanger themselves.

If you think freedom means you have the right to do whatever you please with your kids short of not feeding them or beating them with a tire iron, consequences be damned, then we have a different idea of freedom.

And if we're using "back in the day" as examples...well, back in the day there weren't even seat belts in cars.

[Kellanved]

19. So you are against driving exams as well?

Cell phones, movies, dogs -they're all great, but have no business sharing the attention of someone driving a vehicle on a (public) road. The problem is not just the safety of one car's occupants: it is to all people on the road; it's supposed to be a "I won't endanger you, so don't endanger me" deal.

[hfojvt]

22. so having driven my dogs about 40,000 miles

I am suddenly a huge threat to the public? The danger is negligible, and I am probably less of a danger because I am not exceeding the speed limit (except when the traffic conditions require it), nor using a cell phone, which, unlike my dog on my lap, requires a free hand and my attention.

[Kellanved]

24. well, that's what everyone thinks

Accidents happen, you can be rather certain that most don't happen because people were doing something what they deemed unsafe.
I think it is a safe bet that most accidents happen because someone does something which worked the prior 10,000 times.

[hfojvt]

31. and they are probably right

I do not buy alot of the blame game. People try to blame the accident on cell phone use, when actually there probably were a variety of factors which came together, any one of which, if removed, would have prevented the accident. You cannot say the judgement is bad until you produce some stats. What is the accident/injury rate involved for dog accidents? How safe/unsafe is that compared to other behaviour?

[StopTheMorans]

20. seriously. thank goodness the government doesn't regulate our free

will and make us wear seat belts or force us to educate our children or to provide care for the elderly, then we'd be freepers!

[HEyHEY]

25. Yeah, but when it's MY safety I get worried

[GirlinContempt]

30. gestapo lol

Shit man I didn't know defunct nazi germany was so worried about car safety. Hitler has clearly lost a lot of power if he's sending the goons that escaped Nuremberg to monitor american safety regulations.

In case any are reading this right now:
DUDES you're like 120 fucking years old and you lost. Get over it.

[Initech]

13. Sometimes I have no choice!

My dogs will routinely climb up on my legs while I'm trying to drive them to the vets or getting groomed.

[Ladyhawk]

28. Carriers will keep them out of the way, but as with my parrot you

probably cave in to their desire to see what's going on.

I should keep my parrot in his carrier, but instead he rides on my shoulder most of the time. This probably isn't a wise decision.

[sundog]

26. this is just the type of thread i would expect to see on free republic

and you call yourself a liberal

[ronnykmarshall]

29. I am shocked!

SHOCKED I TELLS YA!!

The things you find out about people you THINK you know.

[Ladyhawk]

27. Do you drive with your parrots on your shoulder?

I confess I do sometimes. :( It's because he likes riding in the car and hates being in the carrier where he can't see what's going on.

[GirlinContempt]

32. Shit, who are you?

Rudolf Diels?