Belt Your Dog

seems that Santa Fe, New Mexico is considering passing an ordinance to ensure that your dog is safe when you take it for a ride...the ordinance would require any dog riding in the bed of a truck to be in a crate or container, and dogs riding in the passenger compartment to wear a seat belt...it's things like this that remind me that Santa Fe truly competes with California for pointless legislation to protect what doesn't need protection...while i'm sure that there are some accidents where the dog died because it was not belted in, or had jumped out of the truck, i can't believe that there are very many...i'm also pretty certain that the well meaning idiots who wrote this pointless law have no real proof that it will in fact prevent dog deaths...while having your dog in a crate would prevent it from jumping out of a moving truck, i'm pretty certain that it won't make a lot of difference in an accident...even if the crate is properly tied down to prevent it from flying around in the bed, the dog would still be violently thrown to the front of the crate, resulting in serious injury, if not death...for the seatbelt idea, it took a lot of crash testing to actually design seat belts, and/or child seats that didn't cause as much harm as they prevented...somehow i doubt that anyone has been crash testing vehicles with dog crash test dummies to see what actually happens...not that i am suggesting they spend tons of money doing so...i'm suggesting that the people who came up with this stupid idea drop it, and perhaps find something more constructive to do with the vast amounts of free time they obviously have.