Why doesnt someone design swimming pools with a little ramp, so small animals don’t drown anymore and swimming pool owners don’t have to remove sad little bloated critter corpses from the water anymore?
Amazon sells pet ramps, like this one, http://www.thepamperedpetmart.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?page=TPPM/PROD/SKR4
But any little ramp would do, even a stick of wood.
When I was little, we had, not a pool but a dug in sitting pit. After a vacation I found a starved dead hedgehog in there, because even those 15 inch wooden sides had been to high for him to get out. It was the saddest thing ever.
this is a cute little video of someone rescuing a hedgehog from their pool. Hedgehog Rescue - seen through Google Glass - YouTube . But why the fuck are ramps not a standard thing so animals don’t have to be rescued in the first place?
Kids would try to use them, slip, and faceplant on the concrete.
Not if they were small loose floating ramps.
could be as simple as this: a sturdy sand bag attached to a strip of stiff gauze, like the material used for fly windows.http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://i.ytimg.com/vi/daMjqc8OdJQ/maxresdefault.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DdaMjqc8OdJQ&h=720&w=1280&tbnid=_gnE-kQnL_VQIM:&docid=oEJFabzCK8pzIM&hl=nl&ei=zf3iVYmrCej-ywOfuJf4DQ&tbm=isch&client=safari&ved=0CG4QMyhHMEdqFQoTCMnFzunt0McCFWj_cgodH9wF3w
Having lived in an HOA with a pool for about 15 years now, I can absolutely confirm this would be the case.
As it is, over the years we have had numerous shit-nanigans go on at the HOA pool that I’ve witnessed. Including but not limited to:
Teenage boys backing up about 15 to the outer wall of the building which houses the maintenance room and bathrooms so they can launch themselves over the heads of girls sunning themselves on the “apron” of the pool. *
Children attempting to stand on the small diameter metal pole which spouts water in the ‘baby pool’. **
People of various ages dragging the large metal lounge chairs into the pool so they can stand/jump up and down on them, thus causing damage to the surface of the pool.
People attempting to climb over the fence (which has spiked pickets).
People dragging in bbq grills and nearly starting fires because they improperly dispose of their ashes.
The removal of a chair similar to this one because parents were letting their kids jump and down on it like a trampoline.
Wobbly handrails because parents don’t seem to care if their kids use them like gymnastics bars or not.
*Our pool has a good sized half-circle shaped apron thing on one side…not really sure why it’s there.
**The pole which spouts water in the baby pool USED to have a sort of cap welded on so you couldn’t stick your fingers in, etc but it got broken off and never replaced.
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
That’s a very nice handbasket.
I suspect that to keep the ramp from being too steep it would take up too much space and extend too far out into a small or medium sized pool.
A large ramp, probably. But it can be as easy as letting a five-inch length of knotted nylon cord dangle from the pool’s side. How common are such measures among pool owners in the U.S.? How common is it to find drowned critters in a pool?
We had a pool for ten years before we moved. One rabbit, retrieved from the pump, assumed it was chased in by our cat.
Zero depth entry pools exist. Why isn’t it standard? Probably a mix of demand and cost.
There was a public one where I used to live that at the end of the season for one day they would open it up to dogs so they could run in and out of it. It was great.
Just a really large floating cylinder with a rough-ish surface that affords the critter purchase, moored to the side of the pool. Like a super-fat pool-noodle that allows the critter to climb out while not also presenting a significant hazard to pool users.
As a lifeguard we’d open the pool in the morning and do a sweep for animals. I found many shrews, voles and mice in the filters or by the steps, some still alive, a few dead. We’d just scoop them out and dump them over the fence. We’d find an animal every other week or so, it wasn’t really a major problem. We never found anything larger in the pool, I assume any critters larger than mice/voles/shrews made it out by themselves.
Why are there not arthropod ladders in every stainless sink and porcelain tub?
This Critter Skimmer allows frogs to hop out of the skimmer. Might work for mice and moles too.
Definitely not for dogs and kids.
Because ramps for cows simply take up too much space.
Gosh, I miss Scylla.
Disclaimer:
[SPOILER]I realize Scylla’s story involved a pool cover and the cow probably would never have wound up in the pool if it hadn’t been there, but sentimentality got the better of me in the above post. Heck, it’s a good thread to go back to every once in a while, anyway, so I’m not entirely repentant.
So there![/SPOILER]
You presuppose that a panicky animal drowning in a large swimming pool will recognize a ramp at some distance and swim over to it.
That’s not going to happen very often. Far more often the animal will swim to the nearest side, then try in vain to climb out. It may end up working its way along the edge a few feet. But not much more than that. It’ll mostly be doing a Brownian random walk left & right within a couple feet of wherever it first intersects the pool side.
I have a pool which I don’t use.
A. Water level varies
B. The walls need to be swept - I don’t want an obstacle I have to remove to clean the thing.
C. As LSLGuy said, the critter will not search the perimeter. I had to fish out a fledgling dove - it fell in the deep end and could not have made it to the steps or any other part of the shallow end.
I found one dead dove in the attached spa - which is not visible unless you are within 8’ or so of it.
D. The neighbors have fruit trees and leave the dropped fruit to rot. I found one of the resulting rats in the spa where I had mosquito fish - it had jumped onto the step on which the fish congregated and couldn’t climb the 10" to the rim. I preferred the rat dead - I was certainly not inclined to install an exit for it.
I have been here 6 years and the two birds and 1 rat have been the entire take. There is now a floating cover strong enough to support a bird but not much more. I kinda like it - any mammal stupid enough to jump into the pool (water level quite low- drought) is one I will probably perfer dead anyway.