Police dog left in car dies

was the headline on Saturday in the Palm Beach Post. According to the Associated Press, authorities in a town in Florida reported a police dog was left in a hot car and died. The 8-year old Labrador mix, trained to detect narcotics was left in the car for about 2 hours. His handler found him dead. A police spokesman said that usually an alarm is triggered when the temps in a police car get too high, but this time it wasn’t working. The handler’s name has not been released since he is an undercover narcotics officer.
I only caught it by accident: The news almost would have gotten lost wouldn’t it have been to it’s oversized headline, which was not in proportion to it’s very short 5 sentence article. But after reading, a couple things came to my mind: For the ones of you who don’t live in Florida during the summer, typically it gets pretty hot here around noon and outside temperatures of 90+ degrees are the norm. This calls for inside temperatures in a vehicle of at least 100+ degrees. So, one leaves his dog in the car and waits for some fancy alarm to go off to tell him it’s too hot for the animal? Give me a break. This is almost as good a story as the one of the woman the other day, also happening in Florida. She fried her own kid in the car while being pampered in a beauty salon. Her excuse was, she didn’t know that (her own) child was in her car.
To me the stories are the same: Their outcome was death. Because the humans who were entrusted with the life of a helpless kid and a helpless dog (I almost said animals, but that would have been an insult to the animals) have no respect for anything but themselves. I do at this place not want to discuss the woman’s story. I am interested what you have to say about the dog. Was that a lesser crime because the victim was an animal? And just think: If you or me would have killed our dogs this way, I am positive we’d be in trouble. I understand, accidents happen. But one hardly can call this an accident. Careless neglect may be a better description.