If you own a dog (or any type of fury animal), you’ll know how much of a pain it can be to take them out for a ride to the dog park or when you go on errands without making a huge mess of dog hair and saliva.
Granted, if you have a small dog, you won’t have as big of a problem. But when you own medium to mid-sized dogs, the mess can really become a problem in a matter of hours. For instance, I own a boxer and he drools EVERYWHERE. Not only that, but he also his hair is super short, so it literally gets everywhere while we drive.
If you’re in the same boat and want to figure out ways to minimize the amount of mess you’ll have to clean up, this will be the right article for you to read.
Note, I’m going to teach you from my own personal experience. These won’t completely eliminate the mess, but it will highly reduce it. As you implement these tactics, you’ll soon come up with your own tactics to minimizing the amount of mess.
Use A Blanket
If possible, have your dog sit on one seat. Regardless of the seat your dog sits in, put a blanket under him so you can catch most of the dog hair and drool. If you keep your dog in the back seats and it’s a 3-row seat, then it’s probably best to use a blanket large enough to cover the entire seats as your dog will be moving back and forth.
The trick with using a blanket is once you’re back home and you’re done riding with your pet, make sure you pull out the blanket as a whole without dropping the hairs.
So that way you can shake it off outside, somewhere not around your car so the hairs don’t fly back in there.
But this can be a very effective method. Use a blanket to capture most of the hair and drool, pull out the blanket entirely without letting all the hair fall onto your car, then shake it off somewhere not close to your car so all the hair doesn’t go back in there
Brush Your Dogs Hair
This tactics falls inline with the above. You can still use the blanket combined, but before you bring your dog into the car, make sure you brush his/her hair so all the loose ones can fall off.
This is going to dramatically help control the hair that falls off because now, you’ve removed the hairs that will fall off from the air while you’re driving.
If you do that and combine it with the blanket, you’ll have MUCH less work to clean up when it’s all done. Yes, it will take a few more minutes to do it, but it will be time well spent as you’ll save that time later when you’re not cleaning up a whole mess 🙂
Vacuum And Wipe Down As Soon As You Can
Amongst all, even if you brush your dogs hair and use a blanket to capture most of the hair, you’re still going to end up having to clean up a bit of mess that was leftover. At this point, you should simply not procrastinate to clean the mess.
The sooner you can vacuum it and wipe it down with microfiber towel, the easier it will be as nothing has had time to sit in the sun or heat and dry. Not that you can’t remove anything once it’s dry, but it just makes life so much easier when you clean it up ASAP.