Can a dog get car sick?

Yes they can, although I’m not really an expert in that field. Wookie isn’t motion sick, she never was. Almost six months ago now (time flies!), we went to pick her up in Ghent, which is about an hour drive away from where we live. She was sitting on my lap, looking outside to other passing cars. At eight weeks she was already intrigued by traffic, putting her front paws against the window of the car to be able to see even better.

Last Sunday we went for a weekend at the Belgian coast. We booked a hotel for one night where we could take her – it’s not easy in Belgium to find hotels where dogs are welcome, no matter how small… Wookie now has a place in the backseat of our car. She weighs about 3,5 kg now (3,3 lbs) and that’s a bit too heavy to keep on your lap for about an hour… At first we feared that she wouldn’t like to move to the backseat, but she likes it there. She now has TWO windows! Haha! But when she’s very tired, she can lie down on a towel we keep in the back.

“I’m waitiiiiing…”

But, as said, we’re lucky to have a dog that’s not impressed by cars or gets car sick when we have to drive somewhere. A lot of dogs (Schipperkes, but also other breeds) tend to get travel sick on car trips. (As did our former dog, a Border Collie, that baptized my new car in the first week… luckily it was in the trunk, but still…) It’s not easy for a dog to keep standing on all four in a moving vehicle. And mostly dogs are quite enthusiastic when they get to join you to go outside, so they’re aroused, but at the same time they might not really like that big, noisy thing that takes them somewhere, they might be afraid of it. And what they see through the window doesn’t always match the movements of the car… They can’t interpret it the way we can.

There are different ways to help prevent motion sickness to some extent.
The younger you get the dog to like a car, the better of course. You can try to calm him down near the car to go play near it, or give the dog food next to the car. If you don’t give it too much to eat, you can go for a quick drive (no more than for example to the end of the street) while you keep playing and talking to it. That way it’ll associate the care with “great fun”, instead of “oh I’m going to get sick again”…
If your dog has a bench it uses as a “safe haven”, you can put that in the car. That way the dog might think of the car as a safe place too.
There are medical ways, you can ask your vet about them. There are pills, just like the ones they have for humans. And there are spays that spread pheromones, which is a certain scent mother-dogs omit in order to calm the pups.
I’ve read somewhere that a little piece of fresh ginger might work too…

No guarantees however, it seems to be that car sickness is different with every dog. While there are dogs that need to look outside all the time, there are dogs that do better lying down. Some need to eat before a car trip, with others you’ll definitely find the food in the car a bit later… You need to observe the dog very well and try to find a solution for yours.

Wookie however couldn’t be bothered with cars. She loves to drive. Whether she’s lying down, standing on her hind legs, or she’s sleeping at my feet on the passenger’s side, she’s always fine. I guess we’re lucky the breeders took them out for short drives when they were very small. All of them together in a laundry basket. Hehehe…

As said, we were going to the seaside. I’ll write about that later on!