Keeping Pets Cool in Current Heat Wave

It is summer, but temperatures have been a little hotter than normal for the Pacific Northwest.  Cathy Campitelli of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service offers this advice:

"If you feel like it's muggy and hot, your dog or cat, or other pets feel it too, even more so."

So keeping pets at an indoor setting, a cooler area with air conditioning, or a fan, is needed to keep pets from experiencing heat stress.  Even outdoor pets with heat tolerance, "they need to be able to access shade outside of their normal shelter.  When the sun is beating down and baking those shelters, the temperature inside those can get very hot, very quickly."

She noted having a kiddie pool filled with water outside allows pet's an opportunity to keep cool.

"Because they regulated temperature through evaporative, or conductive cooling, they need to have some air movement.  That's why its very dangerous to leave a pet in a car."
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