For the lady that called in today about her dog not liking the safety harness and chewing through the seat belt, I have a suggestion which I iused that worked for my two dogs. Go to a junk yard and get a “male” safety belt buckle end that inserts into the latch at the seat that matches your car’s safety belt end. Remove any safety belt from your newly acquired belt buckle end. Attach a short leash (shorten to only long enough to let your dog move as far as you want it to be able to move) to the belt end. Insert that into the seat belt buckle at the seat and connect the shortened leash to your dog’s harness (not to a neck collar). This way if if dog chews the leash it will only cost you a few buck and not a few hundred bucks.
Two ways to solve this situation. (1)Put a Dog-Cone on your dog (one of this funnel type devices that keep dogs from licking their wounds - or eating seat belts. (2) Get a 3" piece of PVC the same length of the belt that the dog is chewing and have someone use a table saw to cut a slot lengthwise. So that after the dog is in the car and the seat belt is in place, slide the seat belt through the slot and when the entire PVC covers the belt, rotate the PVC 90 degrees. If you start to notice chew marks - congratulations - you’ve come up with another “dog-bone” idea. Just take the PVC back to where you originally bought it and say - “I need 5 more”…
This is not a solution to the problem of the dog chewing thru the seatbelt again, but a suggestion for the repair of the damaged belt, which was, I think her original question. (i.e., whether or not she could replace the belt herself, or if it should only be done by a shop/the dealer, at what might be considerable expense)
If I understood correctly, her dog had chewed a hole thru the belt, compromising the integrity and safety protection offered by the belt for anyone else in that seat. My suggestion is to overlap the undamaged sections of the belt on either side of the hole, covering the hole (the hole is now in the middle layer of 3 layers of belt) and sew the sides of 3 layers of belt together, reinforcing that section of the original belt, thus avoiding the full, expensive replacement. “Sewing” thru 3 layers of a seatbelt will require more than a standard needle & thread, of course, but could be a do-it-yourself job with a leather repair kit, or maybe better arranged (an appointment at a less busy shop time) with a shoe/leather repair shop - the repair person would of course have to come out to the car to do the job. A small compromise to this repair arrangement will be that the retraction of the belt will stop at the thick section of the belt, but this might be easily “lived with”.
I think the caller should simply use a chain to tie the dog down instead of something that is chewable, like a seatbelt. The cone collar would help too, as would a good measure of simple obedience training.