As you know, last week we adopted Ochi from the Town Lake location of Austin Pets Alive. The shelter is almost an hour’s drive from our home and, for the Austin portion of the drive, involves quite a bit of traffic.
If you’ve never adopted from a shelter before, you may not realize that you will probably need to transport your cat in your own carrier (although some shelters will have carriers for loan and others will be able to provide temporary cardboard pet totes).
Even if you don’t plan to vacation and to travel with your cat, you will need a carrier for several reasons:
- to safely transport your cat to the veterinarian. Most vets require cats to be in a carrier as they wait for appointments.
- to provide a safe confinement in the event of an evacuation. No, you may not be in a hurricane zone but you never know when you could need to evacuate your home with your pets due to fire, flood, chemical leaks, etc.
- to provide a safe confinement in the event of home disruptions. Whether you’re talking about trick or treat traffic, home renovations, or holiday visitors, there may come a time when your cat needs (and wants!) a safe place to call home for a few hours, away from the hustle and bustle.
We loaded our soft cat carrier, the Sherpa Original Deluxe Pet Carrier (aff Amazon link) in the car, hoping that it wouldn’t be empty on the ride home!
To secure the carrier in the car, you can run the seatbelt through the handles or use a product like the Sherpa Safety Suite (aff) which secures to the rear seat latch system..then latches to the carrier.
We take our security step one step further with a low-tech solution: we use bread twist ties to secure the zippers so that we don’t have to worry about a restless cat getting a paw–then the rest of their body–between the zippers.
The extra steps help ensure that each and every car ride is a safe one both for us and for our cats!
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