Downtown Dog Dangers: Elevator Leash Hanging – Don’t Let This Happen to Your Pooch

Downtown Los Angeles has plenty of dangers for people and pets, and some of them are less obvious, but more deadly than others.

Preventing Downtown disasters - Elevator dog leash safety
Preventing Downtown disasters – Elevator dog leash safety

Pet-friendly tall loft buildings and high-rise towers with views are awesome places to live, but they have their hidden dangers. Residences have had fingers broken by elevators doors, and worse. Dogs have no way to understand the inherent dangers of elevators, so they need extra protection around elevator doors in the form of extra caution, especially when they have a leash around their neck.  #petfriendly #dtla #lofts

Zzyzx the wuppy enjoys a rawhide after surviving another harrowing ordeal
Zzyzx the wuppy enjoys a rawhide after surviving another harrowing ordeal

Zzyzx the wuppy has nine lives, but not all dogs are so lucky.  The intelligent, human-like little pup has survived being abandoned on the street, nearly starved to death, high drops onto his face, being slammed in heavy closing doors, agonizing back problems, near misses by speeding cars, even a mauling by a pit bull.  The aggressive, expressive chihuahua mix makes it abundantly clear that he hates to be left at home alone, so he is sometimes brought with along to showings of lofts in Downtown Los Angeles.

SB Grand Building
SB Grand Building

Just a couple weeks ago, Zzyzx was walked into an elevator at the SB Grand amid a dumb mistake by his master trying to carry a ladder onto the elevator at the same time.  This led to a disastrous distraction as it caused Zzyzx to walk out of the elevator just as the door was closing.  The door could have closed on him, hurting his thin, fragile bones. But, the instant that I saw the door closing onto the leash as I was in the elevator holding the other end of the leash, I could tell that my loving puppy’s life was in serious danger, and I would give my right arm to save him.  I jumped toward the elevator buttons, thinking about how the elevator will go up and pull my little lap dog with thousands of pounds of force, and possibly a truly horrible outcome. I also knew that finding the right button that would successfully open the door would only be hit and miss proposition, as I use elevators in 75 different Downtown buildings daily, and often fail to press the right button at the right time only to have the elevator take off to an unknown floor to pick up a passenger.  Extremely scared, I looked for a stop button. There was none.  In a flash, I pressed the emergency call button and poked what was hopefully the door open button.  I did not expect it to work.  I feared for the worse as a vision of my puppy-baby’s mangled body flashed in my mind.  Anything could happen. Luck has is that the door opened because nobody had called the elevator.  Zzyzx was safe.

After that scary event, I took to Youtube when I got home to find that my fears were unfortunately correct.  While most dogs that get their leash trapped by an elevator door survive after the leash is snapped by the forceful elevator car pulling on the snagged leash, some dogs are hanged to death when the elevator car pulls the dog up to the top of the doorway and the dog sometimes gets stuck there to strangle.  If the door had not opened for me and Zzyzx, he would have been pulled up 7 feet into the air, then dropped onto concrete when the leash snapped, injuring him, or worse.  Thank God he survived yet another harrowing ordeal. It is hoped that this tale helps to prevent harm to anyone’s loving pet.

The L.A. Loft Blog recently helped prevent financial disasters by putting a local fraudster behind bars after some powerful blog posts, and hopefully, this article will help prevent a hairy pal from getting hanged.

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Extra care is required for leashed dogs in elevators
Extra caution is required for leashed dogs in elevators

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