The first few times you lift him it feels like nothing. Then it is every trip, and you start planning your day around whether you can face it.
There are four ways people solve this. They are not equal.
Lifting him yourself
It works until it does not. The problem is not only your back: it is that a dog being lifted has nothing to brace against, so he stiffens, and a stiff dog is harder to hold and more likely to twist on the way down.
If you are going to lift, get your arms under his chest and hindquarters at the same time and keep him level. Never lift under the front legs alone.
A step or a box
Cheap, and it helps a small dog. For a large one it usually makes things worse: it turns one jump into two, and the second one starts from an unstable surface.
A support harness
This is the middle answer. Handles across the back, like our full body support harness, let you take his weight while he does the work with his own legs, which is completely different from carrying him. He stays upright, he keeps his footing, and your back stays out of it.
It is also the only one of the four that keeps working away from the car: stairs, a slippery hallway, the last block of a walk that went longer than planned.
A ramp
The one that removes the problem instead of managing it. He walks up on his own, which matters more than it sounds, because a dog that walks in himself does not learn to dread the car.
Two things decide whether a ramp works. Length, because a short ramp on a high trunk is a climb and he will refuse it, and surface, because a smooth ramp is worse than no ramp on the way down.
Measure floor to trunk lip before you buy our 63 inch folding ramp. That number is the whole decision.
What most people end up with
The ramp for the car, and the harness for everything else. They solve different halves of the same problem and neither replaces the other.
AlongPaws makes four things for the moments that get harder. See what we make, or reply to any email with his measurements and we will tell you which size.
