Dark walks: why drivers do not see your dog

Dark walks: why drivers do not see your dog

From October to March, in most of Canada and the northern United States, the evening walk happens in the dark. The dog is the same dog. The drivers are not: they are tired, their eyes have adjusted to their own headlights, and a dark shape at the kerb is exactly the thing they are worst at seeing.

What drivers can actually see

The clearest research on this is about people, not dogs, and it is worth knowing anyway. On a closed test circuit at night, drivers were asked to say when they could recognise a pedestrian ahead. In black clothing, older drivers on low beams often did not see the pedestrian at all before reaching them. With reflective strips placed on the moving joints, knees, elbows, ankles, drivers recognised the person from over 200 metres. Strips on the joints worked about three times better than a reflective vest, because movement is what the eye picks up.

Nobody has run that test with dogs, and we will not pretend the numbers transfer exactly. But the principle does: reflective material on the parts that move, low down where headlights fall, is what gets a dog noticed.

When it happens

A Spanish study of animal-vehicle collisions found that dogs were the species most often involved, that collisions peaked at dawn and dusk, and that they rose in autumn and winter, when the evening rush hour overlaps with darkness. That is the commuter walk. It is the one to think about.

Reflective versus lit

Reflective material only works when a light hits it, which is fine for a car with headlights and useless for a cyclist on an unlit path, or for you trying to find the dog at the far end of a park. A light on the dog works everywhere but needs charging and can be missed against a background of street lights. Most people who walk in the dark a lot end up with both: reflective harness and lead for the road, a small light for the park. We will be honest that no study has tested either on dogs.

A note on lead length

In the dark, a dog three metres ahead on a long lead is in the road before you have noticed the car. A short lead, or a long lead held short at crossings, is the cheapest safety gear there is.

What we stock for this

References

  1. Wood JM, Tyrrell RA, Carberry TP (2005). Limitations in drivers' ability to recognize pedestrians at night. Human Factors 47(3):644–653. journals.sagepub.com
  2. Canal D et al. (2018). Dogs are the main species involved in animal-vehicle collisions in southern Spain: daily, seasonal and spatial analyses of collisions. PLOS ONE 13(9):e0203693. journals.plos.org
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