Hi all, My puppy (4 months) seems to get pretty bad motion sickness in the car. She doesn't cry, or scream or anything. Instead she is completely quiet, and generally wont play with a toy or eat a treat when I put her in the car (even before we start it up). She starts to drool after a few minutes, and within about 15-20 throws up. This is a bit of a problem because we have to travel further than that to get to her vet. I have read that its fairly common in puppies due to ear development and it will end up going away. Have any of you had similar experiences with puppy motion sickness? If so, how old were they when they started to get better with car travel?
Poor girl. I don't have any experience with motion sickness but someone will be along to advise you. xx
HI, I also have this problem with our 18week old lab, I would welcome any suggestions as can't go for more than 15minutes in the car without her throwing up.
I've recently had success with our 11 month old boy who's suffered from motion sickness. We changed to putting him into a car harness and opening the window for him, which gives him fresh air and the scent distractions seem to help as well. Just be careful that your pup can't jump out the window or stick his/her head out. He used to be sick every single time, with drooling and generally seeming miserable. He's not had this happen since we started doing this. Good luck!
How have you introduced her to car travel? Does she drool, pant etc before she vomits? Making sure she stays cool andown has fresh air can help
Can she see out? Both my dogs hated car journeys until they were tall enough to see out. I'm sure the motion with no visual context was unpleasant.
I've been slowly making progress with Snuffles and I'll let you know what I've learned. I'm not sure how the car sickness started, it may have been real or fear based, but I think it's stress/fear related now, at least in part. More recently we noticed that she started drooling after we put her in the car, but before we turned it on. When we noticed this we thought it was more of a learned behavior at this point. I started working on desensitizing her to the car after that. I now spend a little bit of time each day in the car doing happy things like feeding her large amounts of cheese. After a bit we would drive a short distance still feeding her cheese and she seemed to do ok. We seemed to make some progress including a 20 minute drive without issue. The cheese seemed to distract her and make her more comfortable. Also having someone sit in the backseat with her seems to help keep her calm too. Be carful if you try this though, try and only do short drives and slowly increase distance. We've had to make some long drives to the vet (1 hour each way) and we seem to start back on square 1 whenever she gets sick. One of these was today and only one of us could go and we couldn't feed her before (spay appointment), so we couldn't distract her and things didn't go well. Going home she was terrified of the car and things weren't great ether. We've tried the windows open, adaptil, crate, etc and haven't had much success. That could just be due to the learned behavior we think is causing the sickness though. We haven't tried a car harness yet so thanks for that idea SilverFalcon we'll try that next. If anyone has any more advice I would love to hear it too, this had made things really difficult.
