Anti-animal cruelty CEO's dog dies in hot car

Source: USA TODAY

Anti-animal cruelty CEO's dog dies in hot car

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) — An executive for an anti-animal cruelty group says her 16-year-old blind and deaf dog died after she accidentally left him in her hot car for four hours.

Robin Starr, the CEO of the Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, says she didn't realize "Louie" was in the car until noon. Starr's husband, Ed, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch he put the dog in her car as she got ready for work Aug. 19. She often took the dog to work with her.

Robin Starr took the dog to two clinics, but he died of kidney failure.




Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-08-26-anti-animal-cruelty-ceo-dog_N.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno

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Doesn't seem like it's her fault.

Not just because hers because she holds that position.

you would think she would be held to a higher standard since this is exactly the kind of thing she would crucify someone else over, its a sad thing that happened be she of all people should know better.

who have been cooked alive in hot cars, it has to be just about the very worst suffering death possible. Please remind your friends. One can not be absent minded when it comes to pets, kids or others dependent on your good judgement in the heat.

I cry for this poor old dog, who died not understanding why he had been so abandoned to suffer.

I couldn't agree more. As one who rescues old animals, I am so very sorry to hear this.

me is limited. I treasure her, worry about her (throughout the day) and have managed to avoid going out of town, even for business this last year. I can not, for the life of me, understand how older pets who have been such an integral part of our lives, could be so casually dismissed in their last months or years. It is heart breaking, knowing how deeply felt are the emotions that these animals possess.

Can't think of anything worse than fighting your whole life for animals only to have something like this happen to your own. Very, very sad.

allow an infant to die that way.

I don't believe that statement at all. "Criminal negligence"...

A North Texas man is behind bars on South Padre Island after being arrested for his dog’s heat-related death at a popular water park.

South Padre Island police arrested Ambrosius Susilo Bekti under an animal cruelty charge on Thursday afternoon.

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=340147

Most states have animal cruelty laws (even Tejas) which can be used to prosecute should they elect to prosecute.

but what states will *not* prosecute an infant human death caused by leaving a baby in a hot car?

Re-read the post I was addressing:

"No Elephants Wed Aug-26-09 03:03 PM
Response to Original message

5. In some states, you can prosecuted if you allow an animal to die that way, but not if you

allow an infant to die that way."

He exposed his dog to temperatures in excess of 100 degrees by leaving his dog in his car. The 120 degree in the shade heat of Tent City must have fried everyones brain. Because no one is using that to establish their detention in Tent City as cruel and inhumane punishment. If Sheriff Joe locked up a dog in Tent City he would be breaking the law and would be the next inmate at Tent City. So the cruelty to humans aspect should be a no brainer. We're raising holy hell over the federal government exposing terrorists to extreme temperatures. Mean while Sheriff Joe's is doing this to people over unpaid parking tickets and child support and other minor crimes. :wow:

Both the Maricopa County board of Supervisors and the Phoenix City Council could give a damn about those people, also the majority of the voters of Maricopa County.

Let's face facts he keeps doing the same thing every year and the "good people" of Maricopa County keep re-electing that piece of human garbage. So, it's not only Arpaio, put the blame on the voters of Maricopa County as well, they are as inhumane as the Sheriff that the majority seem to idolize.

I lived in Arizona for 8 years, luckily it was down in Pima County, where Sheriff Dupnik isn't a camera hog like Arpaio is. Not saying Dupnik is without his faults, but before I left the Pima County Sheriff's Department, they were constructing an extension to the jail and it didn't include a tent city.

So, which is worse, the one who treats people inhumanly or the enablers that allow it to happen, I say both are equally guilty.

Or are you a liar?

i think it's safe to say she didn't intend to hurt the animal.

it looks like a heart-wrenchingly tragic mistake.

That poor dog. :cry:

Todd in Cheesecurdistan

Horrible.

My heart goes out to them.

The Times had an article some months ago about people who had accidentally left their children in cars and the children had died. It's easy to think you would never do this, and in this case it sounds like miscommunication between her husband and herself as opposed to forgetting, but there's a lot of there but for the grace of God go I in the world.

She was taking her two toddlers and grocery bags out of her car. Thought the dog had jumped out as usual, and shut the doors.

It was a devastating discovery when she found her dog.

who it is impossible to ignore. He only stays in the car when I go in to pay for coffee at the gas station for a minute. Otherwise he is into the front seat and trying to get over me as soon as I stop the car. Forgetting an old pet or an infant would be heartbreaking.

Child or animal. The guilt these people live with afterwards. I am SO thankful I couldn't accidently leave mine in the car if I wanted to.

Corki thinks I need help driving. Took me a while to convince her the BEST place to help me drive from is the passenger seat. And, even then I wind up with a dog breathing in my ear if I do something she doesn't like.

Melia...Well, she is a slobberhonous. Being in a car with her is like being in a spastic rainstorm. You KNOW big drops are going to come at you every so often, you just don't know which direction they'll be coming from or how much force will be behind them.

Cody. He's like something from a psycho thriller. He sits on the back seat right between the driver and passenger seat, and every time I look in the rear view mirror, there are his eyes - staring back at me. It can be rather disconcerting at times.

And, knowing they are in the car, I also have approximately five minutes between leaving the car and re-entering before they start 'entertaining' themselves. Which in this case, means tearing the car apart. They are gracious enough to give me five minutes because that is how long it should take me to get into the convenience store and back out with their ice cream sandwich. Yes, I am unashamed to admit that I bribe them to not damage my car.

As I said, I feel so bad for this lady and her pup.

only time in the car is a trip to the vet.

The headline is designed to imply that her job should have something to do with the story. It may have, if she had deliberately left her dog in the car while she went shopping for 4 hours. "She of all people should have no better" would have been appropriate in that case.

In this case, she had no clue the dog was there so her job has nothing to do with the story.

and I don't know why this hasn't been worked out by now --

these deaths go back quite some number of years!!!

One of the saddest I heard recently was a woman who took the baby -- HIGHLY
UNUSUAL for her to do so -- because her husband had a doctor's appointment.
It was the first day of school, she was a teacher -- rushed and with her
mind on too many other things, just went right on her way to the school rather
than dropping the baby off.

This could never have happened with my kids -- first, because we didn't have
car seats where they were strapped into the back -- and secondly because my
kids screamed constantly and played trapeeze/acrobatics in the car as I drove!!
THANK HEAVENS!!!!!

Where is the warning system to help these poor people??????????

Unbelievable.

At least that is the conclusion of someone who researched this tragic phenomenon..

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/03/09/fatal_distraction/

Some parents actually drive all the way to the daycare center with their dead children in the back seat before realizing what has happened.

In every instance he covers, the parents responsible were dealing with unusual interruptions in their morning routine, got distracted and believed they'd already dropped their children off at daycare or with the baby sitter -- when in reality, they'd skipped that step and left the children in their parked cars as they went to work. Says Diamond, "The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it's supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries ... it can entirely disappear." Weingarten makes it chillingly clear how the lack of that "reboot" can lead to parents sincerely believing their kids are safe in their daily routines while they're actually dying. "Several people ... have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they'd thought they'd dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat. Then there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn't see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work."

Just when I thought the guilt couldn't possibly be worse from accidentally leaving your child in the car... that last story has shredded my heart into a million pieces.

The mind is not a perfect device, we all make errors and every now and then they turn out to be horrendous ones.

We all like to think that we couldn't do such a thing but no one is perfect.

Read the article I linked to, I found it very disquieting.

It's basically saying that if you can forget anything at all then, given the right circumstances, you can forget your child.

Parents have driven to the day care to pick up their child with the child dead in the back seat, in such a case it is obvious they thought they dropped the child off.

Like airliner crashes, it's very seldom just one thing that causes it, it's usually some "perfect storm" sequence of events that brings such a tragedy.

You clearly don't want to even imagine that you could do such a thing.

Don't assume somebody is going to automatically take responsibility for "dropped calls"

A really sad and unfortunate event.

I'm sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have done the same thing without having a tragedy occur.

I spent most of the summer watching my grandkids and they have a pool, I damn near got whiplash jerking my head back and forth to try and keep an eye on all of them at the same time. Between the grandkids and their cousins there were as many as seven kids sometimes, I was constantly aware of the danger, made me nervous as hell.

At least if it was done accidentally.

We all make mistakes. Usually we luck out and there are not bad consequences. But the action is the same either way.

When my youngest was an infant, my husband and I went to a parent teacher conference at the high school for one of our older kids. Usually one of our teenagers would watch the baby at home, but this time we brought him with us. He fell asleep on the way and we both forgot he was in the car. It was winter - dark out - and we went in the school and were gone for an hour or more. Neither of us had remembered he was in the car the whole time we were gone.

When we got back to the car, we saw our precious boy, still sound asleep, and we were absolutely horrified that we could have done something so careless and with such potentially deadly consequences. That happened 20 years ago and I still shudder with guilt when I think of it.

All those people in this thread did the same thing, either with their dog or their child. They forgot or miscommunicated. Only they weren't lucky. The paid the ultimate price.

We should have mercy on them rather than self-righteously condemn them. The pain and guilt must be searing, and far worse than any criminal prosecution could be.

It's worth the extra effort.

In 1976, when I was 3 months old, Mom forgot me in the car. Unusually for me, I'd fallen asleep in my car seat (I was a back-seat baby, before that was common, because car seats weren't as common then. My mother was a single parent, the back seat had more room for diaper bags and the mobile changing table -- the other seat) and Mom was in the midst of her 3rd year of business school. I'd apparently been fussy all night (even then, I was an insomniac) so she was more sleep deprived than normal and forgot to drop me off at my grandmother's house before she went to class. No cell phones then, so my grandmother had a tense several hours when Mom didn't show.

I was lucky. It was a rainy, cool April. Apparently, I slept through it... and the fire department's arrival to get me out because Mom locked not just me, but her keys, too, in the car.

She was certain I was going to get taken into foster care for that. I wasn't.

My mother was an incredibly attentive parent -- still is -- and conscientious to a fault. If it could happen to her, it can happen to *anyone*. To this day, in a parking lot, my mother checks the back seat of every car she passes and circles her own before she leaves it -- and she hasn't had a baby in her care since 1985. She knows, more than anyone, that memory is fallible, and anyone who says they would never do that is whistling in the dark.

Big difference.

You know, sometimes a situation can't be reduced to good guys and bad guys. Sometimes things happen that are just tragic for all involved. Grow up.

And perhaps she can find compassion for those dog abusers she must have condemned and hated, as she is now one of worst of them.
How can you drive to work and not know there is a dog in the car? Why did her husband not tell her? When you're that out of control, this was just an accident waiting to happen.

or, yes, a baby in your car? They breath, they sleep, they moan, they yawn. How big a car do you have to have not to notice a warm body in the back seat?

No excuses, really. She should step down from her "office."

not be noticed.

End of story.

and I wish I could.

I have my sister's older dog in my car 3-4x per week and I have yet to have left her in the car, anywhere, at any time. To think that her blind and deaf baby was left to suffer this way leaves me just sick and if she took the dog with her frequently, it was definitely incumbent upon her to ensure that if Louie was in the car, she got him out. In her position she should certainly know better.

I feel so sorry for how this poor doggie must have suffered and felt abandoned.

unless you're in it and the vehicle's running, don't ever leave a dog alone in a closed car.

Being the CEO of an organization you think she would have known better or


didn't really give a shit about taking care of the beast any longer.

the *husband* put the dog in the car. She didn't *realize* the dog was in the car.

These are Dick & Jane sentences, not really that difficult to comprehend.

I almost lost my beloved cat not knowing it had jumped in my car when I had walked away and the car front door was opened. It's a long story, and I'm not about to blow my anonimity describing the actual events, since I doubt anything like this could have happened to many, if anybody. If you want to hear a good story with a happy ending, PM me.

sometimes I think they're in the backseat when they're not.

Sad.

and the children later died. Modern life is just too overwhelming for many people and their brains just short circuit. I'm sure that she'll be beating herself up for years over this. :-(

She didn't realize the dog was in the car (husband put him in)...

The poor innocent creature (blind and deaf!) must have suffered horribly not knowing why he was abandoned to the suffocating heat.

The owners must be beyond grief stricken over this...