Most of you know that I have a 9-month-old chocolate lab puppy named Simon. He is, of course, the cutest, best behaved, and most fantastic dog ever to emerge from my bioengineering experiments. The prehensile tail that he uses to climb walls is still a work-in-progress, but overall I am very pleased with the developments, and rest assured that my Evil Army of the Night will be prepared when the revolution comes.
Anyhow, he is a chewer. Not incessantly, and in a very limited fashion. In particular, he loves chewing on stuffed things. Not so much chewing, as destuffing. In as rapid, gratuitous, and stuffing-flying-across-the-room fashion as possible. Which is fine; I alternate between buying him nice, $10 stuffed animals which last a few weeks, and cheap, $3 ones that last a few minutes before being sacrificed to whatever gods he worships. I only can hope that there's no version of Cain and Abel in his dog-culture, wherein Abel sacrifices real animals and Cain sacrifices stuffed ones, and dog-god only likes the real ones. If so, he's fucked.
The only problem is that he loves unstuffing his dog beds. And, while I have come to grips with leaving him in the crate during the day, and he doesn't particularly seem to mind it either (especially if he has a stuffed zebra to disembowel), I do feel guilty if I can't give him a little padding. Fortunately, in our 'if you can spend money on your pet for it, we can sell it to you!' culture we live in, there are many choices of chew-proof dog beds available. I went with the Dura-Crate, which is like a normal dog bed only it's a bit thinner, and the cover is made of cordura nylon, the same stuff they make parachutes out of. Also, it is zip-tied to the crate, so they can't pull it up and get teeth around it so easily.
So far, so good; three days, and not a sign of stuffing so far. It's quite a bit louder than the usual bed, which has fleecey something on top (the texture is more like a hightech motorcycling jacket than a fabric you would wear for comfort), but if that's the worst complaint, it's not so bad. Besides, I really like the idea that if my house were to suddenly be launched a mile into the air (spontaneous eruption?), my dog could craft a parachute out of his dog bed and land safely.
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Dave's normally excellent research is a bit lacking. Cordura nylon is way way too thick and heavy to build parachutes out of -- sport canopies are built out of what we call rip-stop nylon. It's much thinner and does (shockingly enough) stop rips that may form in it... however, it's very "puncturable" in the sewing-needle-or-doggie-claw-and-tooth dimension, which means I'm not letting cute little Simon anywhere near my rig.
Having said all that, we DO use cordura for all kinds of things like jumpsuit knees and other gear where durability is important and we can afford the weight/volume price. ;)
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