Getting hot under the collar

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/07/2011 (5480 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She said she wanted to tell her side of the story, and I guess she thought I’d be sympathetic, given all the players.

Patricia Layne is a senior who lives in New Bothwell, Man., a town famous for its award-winning cheese, not its hot dogs. That was before Layne decided to go public about what happened to her and her pooch, Buster.

The way she tells it, she was arrested, handcuffed and issued three summonses last month by police after someone reported her for leaving Buster in her vehicle while she shopped on a hot evening in late spring.

The Free Press briefly mentioned her being tagged by police without naming her. And police also alluded to it when they had a rash of complaints that prompted a public advisory about being careful not to leave pets in parked vehicles for any period of time without proper ventilation or access to water.

“If you observe an animal in a parked vehicle this summer,” the advisory said, “and are concerned for its well-being, notify management of the business closest to the vehicle in attempt to locate the owner as soon as possible. If required, contact police.”

And apparently that’s exactly how this incident started. The temperature was 26 C on the early evening of Saturday, June 18 and Layne was out looking for a coal-oil lamp.

Her “guard dog” — as she refers to the seven-month-old malamute-golden lab cross — was riding in the back of her Cadillac. Layne had already searched a couple of other stores when she pulled into the Canadian Tire parking lot on Regent Avenue. That’s where she left Buster in the car.

I hasten to say that I — like many of you — have briefly left my dog in a shopping mall lot but not on a really hot day. If it’s warm, I always roll the windows halfway down to catch the breeze. But that’s not how Layne described what she did that evening.

“I had three windows, three inches open,” she said.

She would have left the fourth open a crack but it doesn’t go down. As if that would have made a difference.

The Animal Protection Institute in the U.S. did a study that measured the temperature inside a car in the shade with four windows down a crack. What they found was when it was 28.8 C outside, it was 36.6 C inside. And 45 minutes later, when the temperature reached 31.1 C outside, the study found it was 39.4 C inside. Dead-dog territory.

“I wasn’t going to be in the store more than 15 or 20 minutes,” Layne said.

She recalled being in the store about 10 minutes when she heard her licence plate over the public address system and a voice summoning the owner of that car to the service desk.

Layne would be summoned twice in quick succession that night. Both times she said she went out to find Buster sleeping, even though, after she said she fed and watered him the first time, someone reported Buster was “going nuts.”

People “should mind their own business,” Layne told me.

Ultimately, Layne decided to take Buster inside with her. She was barely back in the store when a police officer appeared — three of them, apparently — and asked her to accompany him outside where she was told she was abusing her dog, and she shouldn’t have him in a car when it’s so hot. Then, according to Layne, police told her they were going to take the dog to the pound.

It didn’t come to that. Layne took off with Buster.

She said it was because a crowd had gathered and she wanted a more private place to talk to police.

“I said, ‘You can follow me.’ “

Which police did. By the time she reached a nearby Costco parking lot, she said three police cars had boxed her in. Layne described being pulled from the car, placed on the ground and cuffed.

“They treated me like a common criminal,” Layne complained.

Eventually, they let her and Buster go, but not before Layne said they gave the summonses, which she plans to fight. All of this, Layne said, “because of a lousy dog.”

I’m sure she didn’t mean that.

I’m sure she loves Buster.

So Friday, when we spoke, I advised Layne that the weekend was forecast to be extremely hot, and I wondered if she was concerned about leaving Buster outside or taking him with her in the Caddy.

“No,” she said, “I’m not concerned about that.”

So much for her side of the story.

I’m more interested in the dog’s.

Unfortunately, the only ones who seem to be speaking for Buster are the person who reported him being in danger, the employee at the service desk at Canadian Tire and the police who intervened. If the cops got a little hot under the collar after she took off, I don’t blame them. Patricia Layne still doesn’t seem to get it.

“Lousy dog,” she called Buster in a moment of anger.

I would beg to differ.

Lovely dog. Lousy owner.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca