The Jumping Down Problem

Your dog is not built to jump down

Dogs evolved to travel across flat ground not to launch off elevated surfaces onto hard footing.

 What's new isn't the jumping. It's how often. For most of the sixty thousand years dogs have lived with us, they slept outside. No bed to leap off every morning, no sofa every evening, no truck to drop out of on every errand.

Now it's several times a day, every day, for years.

When a dog jumps down, the forelimbs absorb nearly all of the landing force. The shoulder, elbow, carpus and spine take that impact, then take it again tomorrow.

No single landing does the damage.

The accumulation does.

What that looks like in my exam room: chronic shoulder and elbow pain, disc disease, spinal injury, and cruciate ligament rupture. And once a dog has been injured, the odds of a second injury climb steeply.

This is the most preventable problem I see.

Here’s how to solve the jumping down problem.

What you're looking for is a surface your dog can walk down, one foot at a time, without bracing. Front to back matters more than height, each step should be about twice as long as it is tall.

 A solid wide set lets your dog place each foot and share the load.

Lift the dog who can be lifted.

A word about ramps. I don't recommend them. To reach a truck bed or the back of an SUV at a grade a dog can manage, a ramp would have to be impractically long — and almost none are. What you get instead is a steep, often slippery incline that asks the forelimbs to brake the whole way down or pull with the frontend to go up.

Your dog will make it look easy right up until the day it isn't.

For the Car/Truck

❤️My Favorite Steps

These are heavy but super well built- Pet Loader

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Twiststep - Mounts to your hitch receiver and swivels under the bumper, so there's nothinfg to lift in and out of the .vehicle

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Collapsible Box