Woman faces charges after dog dies in overheated car in southeast Calgary

Posted On: July 12, 2024

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A Calgary woman has been charged after a dog died in a hot car on Canada Day, police said.

Police said they received reports of a dog in distress in a vehicle in the 0 to 100 block of Mount Copper Green Southeast around 5 p.m. on July 1. Officers said they found a dog lying lifeless in the car.

According to a press release issued Thursday, witnesses told officers that the dog was panting so hard that the car was shaking and after a while it stopped responding to knocks on the window.

Police said the vehicle’s windows were closed and the doors locked, and officers had to break the window to try to rescue the dog.

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The dog was a four-year-old Alaskan Malamute/German Shepherd mix named Lucky. Police said Lucky was left in the car for more than two hours when the outside temperature was about 20°C.

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Police said Lucky’s owner, Kaitlyn Rose Folkins, 30, faces charges of animal injury under the Criminal Code and Alberta’s Animal Welfare Act.

Folkins is scheduled to appear in court on Friday, August 2.

Calgary police said people should immediately call 911 if they see an animal alone in a vehicle on a hot or very hot day.

Brad Nichols, director of law enforcement and deputy executive director of the Calgary Humane Society, told Global News that at the beginning of the year, the organization tries to release as much information as possible about vehicle temperatures to prevent pet deaths.

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“It was a long time. It was a conscious and reckless decision to leave the animal in the vehicle. The dog itself was a cross between a Malamute and a German Shepherd… It’s just the perfect storm of what can happen in hot weather,” he said.

Nichols said police receive hundreds of calls each year about animals locked in hot cars.

“It takes a few minutes to start to suffer. It can be misleading to compare the heat from outside to the heat from inside a vehicle, because they turn into ovens, right? And when the animals are left in these vehicles, unfortunately they cook from the inside out,” he said.

“It is a terrible death and it could have been avoided.”

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