A Mississippi police dog has died after it was left in a patrol vehicle and the engine quit on a hot day.
The Vicksburg Post reports the 8-year-old German shepherd named Thor was in the vehicle outside the Vicksburg Police Department on Tuesday afternoon.
Police Chief Milton Moore says it’s normal procedure for a K-9 officer to be kept in a vehicle with the engine and air conditioning running for hours. Moore says he does not know why the vehicle quit while Thor was inside it. Tuesday’s high temperature was 95 degrees.
Thor had lived with Officer Donnie Heggins’ family. After Heggins found him in distress, Thor was rushed to a veterinarian but died there.
Moore says Thor “might have been an animal, but he was an officer.”
A man in New Mexico managed to save a dog trapped in a car.
New Mexico Man Breaks Window to Save Dog
In related news, a man in New Mexico broke the window of a hot car to save a dog trapped inside on Sunday, Aug. 4, according to multiple reports.
Gerasimos Klonis and his girlfriend were having lunch in Albuquerque at the Little Anitas restaurant. They noticed a dog trapped in the car parked next to theirs, according to KRQE News 13. Klonis said that he saw the dog was in distress in the heated car but wasn’t able to open the door to let the animal out.
“There was a vehicle parked right next to me, and what got my attention was I heard a dog crying,” Klonis told the news outlet.
Klonis told KOB4 that the dog was attempting to get air by sticking its snout through the crack in the partly lowered window. “It was obviously struggling to breathe,” he said.
The couple waited a few minutes, in case the owner returned to his vehicle. When there was no sign of the owner, Klonis’s girlfriend called the police, CBS 17 reported.
Klonis told the news outlet that ten minutes after calling the police, no one had shown up yet, and the dog was still clearly suffering. “We didn’t feel comfortable waiting too long cause every minute counts and that dog was not happy,” he told the news outlet.
“The longer I waited, the more I was thinking about this moral dilemma to myself the more the answer became obvious to me because the dog was in clear distress,” Klonis said, according to KOB4.
Ten minutes later, authorities still hadn’t shown up, so Klonis decided that he couldn’t wait anymore because the dog was suffering in the hot car. He smashed the car window and removed the animal from the vehicle. Klonis said he didn’t want to break the owner’s car, but felt he had no choice but to smash it, saying he did not want to see the dog die because of his inaction.
“It was pawing at the window, it was trying to dig its way out of the car,” Klonis told KRQE News 13.
Epoch Times reporter Paula Liu and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
