‘Selena y Los Dinos’ Guitarist Chris Pérez Smashes Car Window to Rescue Dog in New PETA Video
For Immediate Release:
September 28, 2021
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Smashing the guitar that he used to play smash hits against a car window, GRAMMY winner and Selena y Los Dinos star Chris Pérez rescues a dog who appears to be in danger of overheating for a new PETA video, reminding people that animals can quickly die of heatstroke inside parked cars on a warm day. With temperatures still high, he urges people not to let their guard down and to continue to leave their animals at home where they’re safe.
“That connection I feel with dogs is something special to me. I consider them as part of the family,” Pérez says in the video. “When I hear about a dog [who] gets left in a car, it’s really upsetting. It’s sad. It happens so fast.”
Every year, dogs suffer and die when their guardians make the mistake of leaving them in a parked car while running an errand. Parked cars are death traps for animals and children: On a 70-degree day, the temperature inside one can soar to 99 degrees in 20 minutes, and on a 90-degree day, the interior temperature can reach as high as 109 degrees in just 10 minutes.
Dogs can die of heatstroke in as little as 15 minutes, and such deaths, Pérez points out, are “easily preventable if you just take the right measures and take [dogs] with you, or you can just leave them at home.” For anyone without a guitar on hand, PETA recommends an emergency window-breaking hammer for intervening in life-or-death situations in which dogs weren’t left at home.
Pérez goes on to ask people to do right by animals in another high-stakes matter: adoption. “When you buy a dog from a breeder or a store, that’s actually a dog in a shelter losing [an] opportunity for life,” he concludes.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
