Friday Fallout: Animals Can Get Killed In A Drunk Driving Crash Too

Innocent people die from drunk driving every single day, but the fallout from drunk driving can extend beyond people. Sometimes animals are killed in drunk driving crashes too.

Take a recent drunk driving crash in Arvin, California. It was around 6:00 am on a Sunday morning when a man in a GMC truck drove through a stop sign and crashed straight into a Dodge truck with a cattle trailer attached. The impact of the crash caused the drunk driver’s GMC truck to roll over several times, as did the cattle trailer.

The end result of this drunk driving crash was one person in the drunk driver’s vehicle died, several people were injured, and five animals were dead, all because someone decided to drive drunk.

California law enforcement probably don’t see this type of drunk driving crash very often, but while it’s not common, it’s happened in different spots around the country. A  drunk driving crash in Alaska earlier this year resulted in a sled dog being killed by a drunk driver on a snowmobile. The driver in this case was so drunk he didn’t even realize he was the cause of the crash until he looked at the damage to his snowmobile the next morning and turned himself in.

It would be very difficult to place value on the life of an animal. When it comes to livestock like the cows killed in the California, that person has probably invested thousands of dollars into the feeding and care of those animals. Sled dogs are a means of transport for people who live in rural areas, so in either scenario the loss would be deeply felt.  

These crashes are great examples of the wide-reaching fallout from a drunk driving. Thankfully for the man who lost his livestock in California, the state has recently passed an ignition interlock law designed to prevent these exact situations from occurring. When it’s in place in 2017 you’ll be seeing fewer drunk driving crashes like this in California.

The Friday Fallout: Every Friday Guardian Interlock will bring you a unique drunk driving case that demonstrates the impact, or fallout, of drunk driving.