September
Hurricane season, month four: the go-bag check.
September is the peak of the Gulf hurricane season. A ten-minute check of the dog's go-bag, records and crate plan, done now, saves a bad night later.
Hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, and September is its busiest month on the Texas coast. Most families packed a bag in June and have not opened it since. This is the month to open it.
The ten-minute check
- Food: a week's worth, sealed, with the measuring cup
- Water and a collapsible bowl
- Medications and a copy of the vaccination records, in a zip bag
- A leash, a slip lead as backup, and a collar with a legible tag
- The crate, and proof the dog will settle in it on command
- A recent photo of the dog on your phone and one printed
The crate is the plan
An evacuation with a dog is a crate-trained dog riding in a car for six hours and then sleeping in a strange room, possibly a shelter that only takes crated animals. A dog that treats the crate as its bed handles that. A dog that screams in a crate turns a hard day into a dangerous one. If your dog is the second kind, crate calm is a two-week project and this is the month to start it.
Ready Harris and the National Weather Service in League City publish the official guidance; our hurricane page walks through the dog-specific version, including where to go and what a shelter will ask for.
Where the dog goes if you leave
Answer this in September, not with a storm two days out. Family inland is the easiest answer if they will take a crated dog. Pet-friendly hotels along I-45 and I-10 fill in the first hours of an evacuation order, so the list of three is made now. Public shelters in Harris County took pets after Harvey under rules that generally require a crate, records and a leash, and those rules are the reason the go-bag has records in it. Ready Harris publishes the current shelter guidance each season; read it once now so nothing about it is a surprise.
Decide who carries the dog if the family splits between two cars, and put the go-bag in that car for the whole month. A dog that rides in the same crate it sleeps in, with its own bed, arrives somewhere strange already halfway settled.
A rehearsal takes an hour
Pack the car as if you were leaving, drive the dog forty minutes, stop somewhere new and run ten minutes of place and a bathroom break, then drive home. You learn whether the crate fits, whether the dog settles, whether the water bowl spills and whether the leash is where you thought. The dogs in the training home do a version of this every week as a field trip, which is why our graduates travel well; a single rehearsal in September gives your dog the same advantage.
If the crate is the problem, crate calm is the fix, and it takes about two weeks of short daily sessions. The crate training guide walks through it, and it is worth doing before the next named storm rather than after.
Best Dog University Team
Board and train trainers in Cypress, Houston. 16+ years, 900+ dogs. About our team
