HEEYOO Extra Wide Folding Dog Car Stairs
No more jumping. Not once.
For most of his life, Sawyer, our 95-pound English cream golden, loaded himself into the car. Front paws on the bumper, a boost from me, and on good days he simply launched himself in. Getting out was even easier... he just jumped. He did it that way from about six months old until he was six, when our vet noticed the start of some back trouble and asked us to cut down on the jumping. The first thing on that list was the leap from the hatch onto a driveway or a trailhead parking lot, twice a day, every day.
We had no idea what to buy. We started with a folding plastic ramp, and it was a miss. It was bulky and awkward to set up, and Sawyer never trusted the surface. He went up a few times, but every trip was a negotiation.
These stairs ended the negotiation, and four years later they’re still part of every outing. They’re light enough that I can open the hatch, grab them by one handle and swing them out in a single motion while holding a leash in the other hand. Kelly handles them just as easily on her own when I’m traveling for work, which mattered more to us than any spec on the box.
Now it’s the routine every single day. An ordinary outing goes like this: up the stairs at home, down at the trailhead, back up after the walk, down again at a restaurant with a dog-friendly patio, up after dinner, and down one last time in the driveway. That’s six trips on a normal day, and Theo and Beau have it down cold. They sit and wait while the stairs go down, leashes go on, and they come down one at a time. They’re perfectly capable of jumping, but we don’t let them. We did this with Sawyer to protect his back, and we do it now so Theo and Beau never need protecting. The stairs ride along on every long-weekend trip from home in Maryland too: Harpers Ferry, Cape Charles, Savannah, Charleston, Beaufort, Edisto Island and Watercolor.
There’s a bonus we didn’t expect. Because the stairs always come first, the dogs have learned that an open hatch doesn’t mean go. It means wait. At a busy rest stop or a gas station, that matters. Nobody bolts out into a parking lot full of moving cars, because in their world, getting out doesn’t happen until the stairs are down and we say so.
Every dog we’ve had was a little suspicious at first. What fixed it was watching another dog do it. Beau learned as a small puppy by following his big brother, all 90 pounds of him. Theo trots up, turns around at the top and looks down at him, and Beau decided right there that wherever Theo goes, he goes too.
Fair warning: these stairs draw a crowd. Wherever we park, at trailheads, gas stations and rest stops, someone usually stops to watch. Most people have never seen stairs made for dogs, let alone two goldens walking up and down them like it’s nothing. We get questions, we get smiles, and more than once we’ve heard “I didn’t even know they made these.”
We almost always load through the back hatch, but the stairs work at a side door too. Rest the handles on the edge of the back seat and it’s the same routine.
The handles wear out. The metal frame under the foam grips eventually cuts through the foam, and once it does, it can scratch the plastic trim on the car. After years of near-daily use that’s exactly what happened to our first set, so we replaced it. A wrap of duct tape around the handles slows it down a lot. We liked them enough to buy the same stairs again, and then a third set for Kelly’s car, so she’s never stuck without them when mine are out of town with me.
Use the safety strap. The stairs come with a strap and clip that hooks to the hatch latch, so they can’t slide off the bumper. We’ll admit we usually skip it and hold the top of the stairs against the cargo floor with one hand instead. Once in a while, when things are moving fast, they slip. No one has been hurt and the dogs don’t even flinch, but if you’re working one-handed, clip the strap.
