What CPS Crash Certification Actually Covers

The one thing to take away: a Center for Pet Safety certification is issued for a specific product in a specific size, tested at a specific dog weight. It does not transfer to other sizes of the same product, and it does not transfer to a heavier dog.

A Gunner G1 is certified in Small, Medium and Intermediate. A G1 Large is not certified at all.The Sleepypod Clickit Sport is rated to 90 lb; put a 110 lb dog in it and you are outside the certification. This is not pedantry. In CPS’s own testing, the same harness model passed in one size and catastrophically failed in another.

Who the Center for Pet Safety actually is

CPS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 2011 by Lindsey Wolko, after her own dog was injured by a faulty harness. Two things about it matter:

• It takes no money from the industry it tests. In its own words: “Center for Pet Safety does not accept funding from pet product manufacturers, we are independent of industry and work in the consumer interest.”
• It uses no live animals. Testing uses “specially designed, weighted and instrumented simulants.”

It also does not endorse products — certification is a test result, not a recommendation. And certification is voluntary and manufacturer-submitted, which has an important corollary: a product that is not on the list has not necessarily failed. It may simply never have been submitted. Absence of certification is absence of evidence, not evidence of failure — though for a safety-critical purchase, that distinction is cold comfort.

The test

There is no government standard for dog restraints, so CPS adapted the closest thing that exists. In their words, they used “a test generally referenced by some canine safety harness manufacturers, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 213 for child restraint systems.”

• Speed: a simulated collision at 30 mph
• Lab: MGA Research Corporation, Manassas, Virginia — the same facility that does testing for the US Department of Transportation and NHTSA
• Dummies: instrumented, weighted simulant dogs — 25, 30, 45, 50, 75, 90 and 110 lb across the various tests
• Pass criteria: head excursion within FMVSS 213 limits, structural integrity of hardware and webbing, and full containment of the dog
• Protocols: CPS-001-014.01 for harnesses, CPS-002-016.01 for travel crates

Why size changes everything

The clearest evidence in the whole field comes from CPS’s 2013 harness study, where the results are broken out by size:

• Sleepypod Clickit Utility (the study’s top performer) — “Head Excursion Measurement (FMVSS 213) was within limits for sizes Small and Medium and was exceeded for size Large.”
• RC Pet Canine Friendly — passed Small and Medium; “Failure of size X-large met CPS Catastrophic Failure Definition.”
• Kurgo Tru-Fit — “Head Excursion Measurement (FMVSS 213) was exceeded for medium size. Failure of size small and large met CPS Catastrophic Failure Definition.”

Read that again. The same product, in a different size, catastrophically failed. A bigger dog generates more force; the geometry changes; the load paths change. Size is not a detail, it is the test.

This is why CPS lists the Clickit Sport as per-size weight ratings rather than one number — and why, when it wanted to extend the rating across the Medium, Large and XL, it had to physically inspect them first to confirm they were “constructed of the identical materials, stitching and hardware.” Certification does not spread across a product line by default. It has to be earned, or explicitly extended, size by size.

And when Sleepypod wanted a rating above 90 lb, it could not simply claim one — it had to put a different harness (the Clickit Range) through a new test at 110 lb.