By Laura Northrup From Consumerist

Shopping at Costco is pretty great, but that doesn’t mean you should bring your dog along on your shopping trip, then leave it in your vehicle with the temperature outside in the 90s. The same goes for your very young and very old loved ones. Come to think of it, just don’t lock anyone in the car. An elderly woman and a dog are both still alive because authorities intervened and got them both out.

A passing shopper filmed an Animal Services employee breaking the windows of a van in Plano, Texas over the weekend. “I was hot, and I could only imagine what the dog was going through,” the shopper noted. An Animal Services employee said that while they would have preferred not to break into the vehicle, the dog was becoming distressed, panting rapidly. He had been left with a cup of water, and the van’s windows were all closed.

Animal Services now has the dog, because it turns out that he didn’t belong to the owner of the van. The family claimed to have found him as a stray recently, and the city is looking for his owner(s). The dog will go up for adoption if they can’t be found. The people who locked the animal in the van received a citation for animal cruelty, and the city is not responsible for the expense of repairing the broken window.

Meanwhile, police were summoned to a casino in Maryland when someone reported an elderly woman sitting alone inside of a locked truck in the parking garage. It was about eighty degrees inside the closed vehicle, and she had been waiting there for five hours while her son was inside gambling. When police found him, they arrested him for vulnerable adult neglect, as well as an unrelated outstanding warrant.

Sitting in a hot car is a miserable experience even if you’re a young and healthy adult human. Don’t leave vulnerable elders, children, and animals in your vehicle.

IMAGE: (CBS DFW)

For more on this story go to: http://consumerist.com/2014/07/22/authorities-bust-tiny-dog-out-of-hot-van-in-dallas-98-year-old-mom-out-of-hot-car-in-dc/