A Markham vet takes the heat to deter people from leaving animals unattended in hot cars

A Markham area vet has locked himself in a parked car for 30 minutes to demonstrate the risk to animals in the summer heat, saying even one animal dying from being locked up in a car is one too many.

The Ontario SPCA says it received close to 1,500 calls in 2017 for animals left unattended in hot vehicles.

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"It happens commonly ... so it needs to be fixed," said Dr. Cliff Redford, pointing to the hundreds of calls the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA) gets every summer about animals stuck in cars.

Redford, a vet for 20 years, is the owner and hospital director at the Wellington Veterinary Hospital in Markham.

It definitely happens ... so it needs to be fixed.- Dr. Cliff Redford

He recently filmed himself sitting in a hot parked car and posted the video on Facebook in a bid to hammer home the message to pet owners.

"It was pretty intense. I sat in there for 30 minutes, had two iPhones set up to record it . . . The iPhones were shutting down due to the heat; we had to keep grabbing frozen towels to wrap them in," Redford said on CBC's Here and Now.

"It got much hotter, much faster than I anticipated, so hopefully the message gets out."

Redford said he wanted to simulate what a dog or a cat would feel, pointing out that they have two problems humans don't — they have a fur coat and they can't sweat.

"They heat up much, much faster than we do. I sat in there for 30 minutes. It often only takes 15 minutes to kill a dog that's been in a car in that sort of weather temperature which was not that extreme," he said.

"The first five to 10 minutes it went from 29 degrees C in the car to low 40s. It was kind of hard to breathe. As I breathed in I could feel my lungs warming up. It was insufferable. It was very difficult."

No hot pets campaign

Natalie Rizzuti, an inspector with the OSPCA said the issue of people leaving their pets in hot parked cars is an ongoing problem and they are still getting lot of calls at this time of the year.

She said the OSPCA's No Hot Pets campaign, now in its sixth year, aims to stamp out the problem once and for all.

It's definitely a dangerous situation for people to leave their animals unattended.- Natalie Rizzuti - OSPCA inspector

"In 2017 our call centre received about 1,400 calls that reported animals left alone in vehicles unattended and that doesn't include the calls that went directly to local police services," Rizzuti told CBC Toronto.

"It's definitely a dangerous situation for people to leave their animals unattended ... We ask that if you don't need to take your animal with you that you leave your dog at home where it's safe."

Rizzuti said the OSPCA has a zero-tolerance policy for these situations and if an animal is seen suffering in the heat in an unattended vehicle, "there will be consequences."

Call police or animal protection agency

If you find an animal locked in a hot car, you should call the police or animal protection agency.

It is unlawful to break someone's car window even to save an animal in distress.

But Redford says most people either don't know about the law or they don't care.

"I myself, if I saw an animal stuck in a car, might wait a minute to see if someone's coming by with a bag of groceries and then I'm going to find something to knock that window in," he said.

"The worst thing that happens is that I got to pay someone a couple hundred bucks to fix their window. Well worth it, in my mind."