For starters – kudos to the BC SPCA and the dedicated people who work for it. Like emergency responders, police and any number of other public servants, they get important work done in the most trying circumstances imaginable.
Speaking of trying circumstances for an average dog, how about a mid-afternoon, mid-July sidewalk in Rossland?
We’ve been sweltering through a record setting heatwave in Southern B.C. for a couple of weeks and still, people are walking their dogs like they always do.
Here’s a sincere request, one the SPCA would most likely support: please stop it. Leave your dog at home where they know how to stay cool. Even if it’s an expensive, rare breed that you love to show off… why not leave home without him or her if you’re headed into the heat?
Going somewhere in the car or truck? These kind of warnings go double. It’s shocking that such extreme animal cruelty can arise out of ignorance.
Of course (most) people don’t intend to torture their pets, but that’s exactly what all-too-often happens to a dog or cat in a parked vehicle in the sunlight.
Even in the wake of the highly publicized deaths of six dogs in a lower mainland truck some weeks back, SPCA’s are responding to high number of animal rescues from parked vehicles.
Is this a message you’re tired of hearing, because you hear it every summer? Of course it is!
But as long these public acts of neglect and, yes, cruelty continue, so will the pleading that they stop.
