Watch This Veterinarian Sit In A Parked Car With Cracked Windows For 30 Minutes

I used to work at a veterinarian’s office, and every single summer, people would bring dogs in that were sick and despondent. At first, the owners would usually say nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but when pushed for more details, the larger story would often involve leaving the animals in a parked car on a summer day for an extended period of time. Well, as much as dogs love riding in cars, they hate being stuck in one on a hot day.

Dr. Ernie Ward has spent his career as a veterinarian telling his clients never to leave their pets in a parked vehicle during the summer, but last year, he decided to give himself a new perspective on the issue by actually sitting in a parked car for thirty minutes. Spoiler alert: the time spent wound up being excruciating and horrendous in pretty much every way imaginable.

As you can see in the above video, the temperature outside the car was 95 degrees when the clock started, which is pretty typical for the middle of the day in Southern portions of the country, and by the time the thirty minute clock stopped, it was an unbearable 117 degrees inside the car. And that’s with all four of the windows cracked. There are some people out there who don’t even afford their animals that much courtesy.

There are people in the United States who are fanatical about animal rights, whether it be through a strict vegetarian diet or through pushing their belief system. There are others who do horrying things to their pets. An overwhelming majority of us, however, reside somewhere in the middle. We’re not exactly crusaders, but we want to make wise decisions that benefit our pets. Not leaving them in the car during hot days is a perfect example of one of those little decisions.

Dr. Ward loaded this video onto YouTube over a year ago, but it took the general public a really long time to catch on. Luckily, they finally did, and the footage has been dashing around the Internet pretty quickly over the past few days. It’s now rapidly approaching two hundred thousand views, and given how well it illustrates something we’ve all heard before, its success isn’t terribly surprising.

No doubt this summer will be filled with plenty of anxious owners running their pets to the vet after leaving them inside their vehicles, but if that number can be reduced by even a small percentage, quite a few dogs will be saved a lot of sickness and anguish over the next few months.

Mack Rawden
Editor In Chief

Mack Rawden is the Editor-In-Chief of CinemaBlend. He first started working at the publication as a writer back in 2007 and has held various jobs at the site in the time since including Managing Editor, Pop Culture Editor and Staff Writer. He now splits his time between working on CinemaBlend’s user experience, helping to plan the site’s editorial direction and writing passionate articles about niche entertainment topics he’s into. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in English (go Hoosiers!) and has been interviewed and quoted in a variety of publications including Digiday. Enthusiastic about Clue, case-of-the-week mysteries, a great wrestling promo and cookies at Disney World. Less enthusiastic about the pricing structure of cable, loud noises and Tuesdays.