One day I was out for a country drive in my 1989 Mustang and my lovely little 60-pound cattle dog was driving alongside me in the passenger seat. I trained him to stay there – so he was actually a really great dog to drive with. Until I took a drive on a warm sunny.

I had the windows open and all of a sudden, a yellow jacket flew into the car and stung Desmo. Desmo was so upset he jumped into my lap and as he did, his body hit my steering wheel. This caused my car to veer across two yellow lines into oncoming traffic. All in a matter of about 5 seconds or less. I had no time to react and all I knew was that I was head-on in oncoming traffic. Luckily for both of us, there were no cars in the oncoming lane.

Whew! It was a “near miss” situation that I never wanted to be in again. After telling my husband this story, and my frustration with pet barriers that just didn’t work in 2-door cars like my Mustang, we went on a mission to develop a pet barrier that would work in any type of car – 2-door, 4-door, minivan, SUV, trucks, etc. It’s because of Desmo, The ZooKeeper was born.

The ZooKeeper was invented and engineered in the USA. I wish that The ZooKeeper could be manufactured here too. The problem is that its cost alone to the manufacturer here was quoted at costs between $110 to $130 for each unit. That would put the retail price at anywhere from $440-$500 for each one. The consumers in the USA just wouldn’t pay that price. Bummer we couldn’t make manufacturing work here…but we did what we could to try.

Along our journey, we’ve met a lot of really great people. We also met two really bad people who turned out to be very dishonest thieves. If you ever see a similar-looking product – but named differently, you know it is not The ZooKeeper and is in no way affiliated with what we do. I wish these “not smart, unoriginal, not creative” thieves would never come into our lives. These people are so dishonest they have stolen our product design, stolen our images, stolen our written words and more. Do not buy knock-offs of our original and great product. There is a reason knockoffs cost less money: they are cheap ripoffs and of poor quality.