I purchased this pack in the now discontinued Aurora teal. Gorgeous vibrant color, and I hope ruffwear will add some more cool-tone bright colored gear to their lineup to accentuate their more typical red/mauve/sage green/other somewhat generic earthtone offerings.
The pack is structured over one of the best harness systems I’ve ever come across. A 6-point contact design ensures the pack doesn’t shift around when being worn. Unlike most dog packs, ruffwear’s designs work with dog anatomy to ensure optimally safe placement and distribution of loaded pack weight. Too often dog packs put the bags along the center of their backs- this is a terrible idea that is inviting injury. Ruffwear, however, designs packs to keep their weight over the sturdiest part of the dog.
Further, dog packs are notoriously hard to balance. And if you’re like me and using the pack nearly daily, an unbalanced pack can set a dog up for long term issues from unbalanced muscle conditioning.
Ruffwear’s packs intuitively distribute the weight within each side. Meaning they so long as you get the “left side vs right side” weight distribution correct, the pack will help ensure that load is in an optimally efficient position. Clever!
I have found that all of ruffwear’s packs run a a smidge on the large side. My current dog is 50lbs and has measurements definitively in their size medium suggested pack size. While it does fit my dog just fine, I had to cinch down every strap on the medium pack to its…