Pet Dogs Left In Hot Car Die, Owner Secretly Buried Bodies

A British man was banned by court order from keeping any pets for the rest of his life after his two dogs died due to his negligence.

The Birmingham Magistrates Court heard that Julian Bradbury left his West Highland terriers, Ted and Poppy, inside a hot car for nearly an hour and 20 minutes, on July 11, which caused them to die of hypothermia.

Bradbury took his dogs along with him when he went to pick his son up from school on the day at 3:10 p.m. local time (10:10 a.m. EST). While he returned after 13 minutes and parked his car near his house, he said he simply forgot to let his dogs out of the car. The temperature outside at the time was 26 degree Celsius, which meant that temperature inside the vehicle would have reached almost double of that in the 78 minutes the dogs spent in the car, Mirror Online reported.

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) inspector Herchy Boal said: “These dogs were left in the full view of the sun during the heat wave for one hour and 18 minutes so they must have suffered a long and lingering decline. It was the day when England played Croatia in a World Cup match in the evening and people will I am sure recall it was very hot.”

As to how Bradbury spent the 78 minutes was a point of debate in the court. While the prosecutors argued that he spent it playing with his children in a nearby area, the man’s lawyer, Chris Stewart, said his client’s daughter needed to rush to the toilet after reaching home and that was why letting out the dogs from the car skipped his mind.

"An error of judgment led to the death of what my client tells me were family members. He questions himself every day, asking why did he do it? In his car, both dogs had fallen asleep during the journey and, after arriving home, his daughter needed the toilet urgently. Disciplinary issues were also forthcoming with his son while in the flat,” Stewart said.

According to CCTV footage, Bradbury went back to let his dogs out of his car at 4:42 p.m. local time (11:42 p.m. EST). That was when he discovered that one of them had gone limp while another was gasping for breath. He unsuccessfully tried to revive the dog that had fainted by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He also put them in the bath to cool them down but they did not survive.

Surveillance footage showed Bradbury leaving his home with the bodies of his dogs wrapped in a bundle a few hours later that day. The bodies were found buried in a nearby field when RSPCA officials dug them up, as part of their probe into dog fouling in the area. When he was interrogated about the surveillance footage, Bradbury initially told investigators he was taking the carcasses to his garage.

After the verdict, which also included a fine of 850 pounds ($1,078), presiding Judge Ian Strongman told Bradbury: “It was stupidity rather than deliberate cruelty, which is why the sentence was what it was.”