Animal cruelty is a crime

Published 12:00 am Monday, August 14, 2006

To the Editor:

This afternoon (Sunday), as I was leaving WalMart at 2 o’clock, I heard the frantic yelping of a dog in distress inside a hot car.

There, in the second handicapped space, in a Jeep Cherokee was a precious black puppy!

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The windows were cracked, but how many times do we have to be told that that does almost no good on a really hot day?

The temperature inside was surely well over 100 degrees. That is animal cruelty.

The first thing I did was call 911. I explained the situation to the dispatcher and was told that someone would be sent to check on it. I then waited 15 minutes.

When nothing had happened, I went to the “security” guy and interrupted his chat with his pal.

He allowed as how he would go inside and have the owner paged.

After asking that they be paged, but not actually seeing the owner, he returned to his truck.

The owner finally ambled out and slowly unlocked the vehicle but didn’t seem very concerned.

He assured me that he would “never do that again,” but I wasn’t very convinced.

When I left, it had been 25 minutes since my 911 call and nobody had shown up to check on the situation.

How quick would

the response have been if I had reported a child in that vehicle?

It takes just as much stupidity to do that to an innocent, trusting pet. The owner would be much more likely to “never do that again” if a policeman had been waiting for him in the parking lot. Animal cruelty is a crime.

Jane Shelton Dale

Camden