A Maple Ridge veterinarian that videotaped himself sitting in a hot car to demonstrate the danger to pets says it only took two minutes for temperatures to reach a dangerous level inside the vehicle.
Adrian Walton planned the 30 minute sit-in as a reaction to seeing people leaving their dogs inside the car when they’re running errands. But he says he had no idea how bad it would get, and how quickly.
Even with the window cracked, the car soon became an oven. Within 10 minutes the temperature inside the car reached 47.2 degrees Celcius: that’s a sweltering 117 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This was fun for about six [minutes], I’m not feeling great right now,” Walton says on the video.
By the end of the experiment the thermometer couldn’t even read the doctor’s thermometer and he made a beeline to a bucket of water to cool himself off.
“I thought ‘it’s going to be 30 minutes, no big deal’ but by the end I was not well,” he says of the experiment.
Vet clinic staff said Walton was slurring his speech and was stuttering when he exited the car after a half hour.
He’s asking pet parents to leave their animals at home whenever possible during the heat wave gripping the South Coast.
Symptoms of heatstroke in pets include exaggerated panting, excessive saliva or drooling and listless behaviour. If you see any of those behaviours it’s important to get them out of the car and into the shade, and put their feet in water to cool them down, Walton says.
