Blogathon 27/26: Gear

Like a number of dog-owners, I suspect, there are a number of dog-leads of different design in the house. There is the static, colour-and-pattern-coordinated and slightly too long lead, which perfectly matches the harness (except the underside of the harness is currently mud-coloured and a bit grubby). There’s an extendable lead of (what we’ll call) design A. There’s an extendable lead of (what we’ll call) design B). There’s the short puppy lead which is the perfect length when paired up with the other harness. There’s the waaaay too long static lead. And the normal-length static lead. However, the topic of today’s TED Talk is the general concept of the extendable lead, its major design flaw, and how to fix it.

I’m sure you’ll be familiar with how these devices work. You lock-off the length of your choosing which allows the dog to run on a greater distance than a static lead would permit. The design flaw which obviously comes with the extendable lead is when the dog runs back to its owner. The hapless human is left trying to shorten the lead but either a) releasing the catch therefore allowing the extendable lead to retract or, b) gathering up the extended lead in the other hand until the dog runs away again, at which point the hand-held lead is manually played out. No matter how you look at it, that’s a significant design flaw.

The fix is to have another set of gears built in, which allows the lead to retract back to the point where it was locked off. So it becomes a multi-length retractable lead. This would free the human from ‘managing’ the locked-off lead because it will always retract.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.