Sunday, July 11, 2010

Would you believe...

...that you can buy a $1,500 treadmill for a dog (mind you, I have a very good HUMAN treadmill manufactured by Vision Fitness that only cost me $1,400), but you CAN'T buy the equivalent of a $20 butt pack for a dog?

Nyx and I jog a 2.3-mile route through the neighborhood several times a week (we're working up to longer sessions but it's HOT right now!!).

I want her to carry my house key, ID and cellphone.  If I put a fanny pack on myself, it flops around in an irritating and distracting fashion, plus it throws off my center of gravity (not by much, but at my age and with my bones having been rearranged by childbirth, every bit of stability helps).  With her easy lope and one-year-old legs, she's a better candidate for this task. 

But even with the hundreds of thousands of consumer products out there, including said $1,500 treadmill, there seems to be no product that fills this need.  There are dog backpacks, designed so that they can carry their own food and water on hikes, but those are too big, bulky, hot, and expensive. 

The best I've been able to do so far is to take a generic waist case with a velcro belt strap and attach it to her harness.

She tolerates it without complaint, but it flops to one side or the other and it can't be comfortable. 

Yesterday Lawrence said that he ordered me some type of carry product from a service dog website, so we'll see how that works.

In the mean time, think about it:

Thirty-nine percent of American households own at least one dog (says the Humane Society).

Sixy-four percent of American adults are seriously overweight or obese (says the United States).

Yet are ANY of those 130 million getting off their fat asses and getting out there to jog with their readily-available dogs??   Not really - or else the market would have been stimulated to offer dog jogging products such as I've described above.

And oh - just in case you didn't believe me that someone is marketing a $1,500 doggie treadmill?  It's manufactured by a company called Jog-A-Dog and here's a snippet of it in action:

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