Doggone Truckers

A common sight in South Lake Tahoe is dogs riding untethered in truck beds.  Too much bother to tie them up or crate them for safety, I guess.  This is against the law, but so are a lot of other life-threatening offenses I see routinely committed by California drivers.  As I was driving down the road toward the intersection at busy Pioneer Trail, I saw an older black lab racing for all he was worth up the steep incline to catch up with one of those giant pickup trucks.  At first I thought he was being dropped, but then I saw another dog in the truck bed and figured that wasn't the case.  The panicked look on the old dog's face is imprinted in my brain as is the worried expression of the golden retriever that was still in the back of the pickup.  Since I assumed this wasn't just the Tahoe way of exercising your dog, I could only assume that the dog had been thrown from the truck bed on the sharp turn exiting from Pioneer Trail onto Golden Bear.  I can't even imagine the injury a dog could sustain from a fall like that.  I laid on my horn repeatedly to alert the driver who was oblivious to his dog's plight.  I watched him slow but only to turn into a side street in our neighborhood.  I don't know if he was ever aware his dog had fallen out of his vehicle, but I'm sure he must have discovered it when he got home and found only one dog in the back of his truck.  Why are people so thoughtless about their pets?  I turned my car around to go check if the dog was safe and uninjured from the fall and to give that brainless idiot a piece of my mind, but I couldn't locate the truck.  Probably just as well since he's no doubt a hunter and would have "stood his ground" and shot me on sight.