Although summer is coming to a close, we’ve still got some hot days ahead of us.
There are a lot of safety concerns that appear when the thermometer rises. You have to make sure that you stay hydrated, and that you don’t stay out in the sun too long. But it’s not only about keeping yourself safe, it’s about keeping your pets safe.
The summer heat can be very dangerous to our pets.
When taking dogs on walks, you want to make sure that you don’t make them burn their feet on sizzling asphalt. You definitely don’t want to leave cats or dogs outside for too long while the hot sun beats down, and you want to make sure that they have plenty of fresh water to drink.
One of the main things to remember, though, is to never ever leave your dog in the car on a hot day.
Even if it doesn’t feel that hot to you outside, the inside of the car heats up much quicker and more drastically than many people realize. Even on a perfect 70-degree day, the inside of a car can reach 113 degrees after an hour in the sun. Now imagine what it’s like when it’s an 80 or 90-degree day.
The car basically becomes an oven.
One New Mexico policeman, officer Vincent Kreischer, discovered a dog locked in Shelly Nichols’ parked car while surveying a parking lot on one of those 90-degree days. He waited for the owner to return so that he could write her a ticket for misdemeanor animal abuse.
However, when she did return to her vehicle, she didn’t seem to take the policeman very seriously.
When Officer Kreischer says “Ma’am, you have to understand the law,” she snickers as she responds with “I understand,” as if the whole thing is a big joke.
The inside of her truck had reached 114 degrees in the ten minutes.
She doesn’t seem to understand that if she had stayed inside of the store for much longer, her dog could have died from the heat. Even if she’d had the window cracked, there’s no way it would have been cool enough to keep a living creature locked up.
When Nichols kept trying to justify her actions, officer Kreischer suggested that she sit in the hot car with the doors closed and the windows up while he wrote the ticket. Since it was fine for the dog, why shouldn’t it be fine for her?
Afterward, Nichols filed a complaint, claiming that the officer had been abusive. However, officer Kreischer’s lapel camera was recording the whole thing. The footage clearly shows that there was no abuse and that no one was forced to do anything.
The officer merely suggested she do the same thing to herself that she did to her poor dog after she’d become irritable and uncooperative with him. It’s no surprise that she refused to comply with the officer’s “order,” because she knew deep down that what she had done was wrong, and that she didn’t want to sit in the blisteringly hot vehicle for even just a minute or two.
In the end, the dog was alright and the woman received a ticket for her actions.
You can see the interaction in the video below. Do you think that the police officer was in the right?
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