How Fast Does a House Get Dangerous for a Pet Without Power? What Is Published, and What Is Not

No veterinary body, federal agency or extension service listed under Sources publishes an hour at which a house without power becomes dangerous for a given animal. So you cannot look the number up. You can measure how fast your own house is changing, act early on that rate, watch your animal, and follow your veterinarian’s advice for that animal. If heat or cold turns extreme, people and animals leave.

Act Now If You See This

• Signs that need an emergency veterinarian. AVMA says to seek emergency veterinary care for anxiousness, excessive panting, restlessness, excessive drooling, unsteadiness, abnormal gum and tongue color, or collapse.
• Extreme heat or cold in a house with no power. Ready.gov says to go to a community location with power. Whether a warming or cooling center admits animals is decided locally, so find out before the day you need it (see rung three below).
• Never a generator indoors, never a gas stove or oven as a heater. Both risk carbon monoxide poisoning, which harms people before animals. Details are near the end of this page.

Seasonal outdoor safety, walk length, frostbite checks and ice melt live on our winter storm and extreme cold pet safety guide. This page is about the inside of the building, on a clock.

Why the Number Does Not Exist

An indoor temperature curve after a power failure belongs to one building. It depends on the envelope, insulation, air leakage, glazing, thermal mass, orientation, how many people are inside, the weather outside that window that day, and what you have already done to the doors. That is our reasoning, not a sourced finding: the only way to predict one building’s curve would be to model that building against that day’s weather.

Two things follow, and both are our reasoning, not a sourced finding. A lookup table by construction type would not capture one building, and no source listed here publishes a degrees-per-hour figure for a 1970s frame house in a cold snap. And none of the sources listed here connects a building’s temperature curve to a particular animal’s tolerance, such as a chinchilla’s. The species thresholds below come from veterinary and USDA sources instead.

Half the calculation, how fast your house changes, is knowable but building-specific. The other half, the temperature at which this animal is in trouble and how long it can sit there, is mostly unpublished. Multiplying the two produces a confident-looking hour with nothing under it, and a number like that gets used to justify waiting.

For reptiles and amphibians, the professional body’s answer is a veterinarian, not a care sheet. As of September 29, 2026, the Association of Reptile and Amphibian Veterinarians’ Care Guides page read “Coming Soon”, and its owner page sends readers to a Find A Vet directory and says it cannot give medical advice by phone or e-mail.

Measure Your House Instead

Put a thermometer in the room the animal actually occupies, not the hallway. Read it and write down the time. Read it again an hour later. The difference is your building’s rate right now, in degrees per hour, under today’s outdoor temperature and with whatever you have already closed or covered. It accounts for your insulation without your knowing anything about your insulation.

That number supports three decisions:

• Whether you are drifting slowly enough to spend an hour preparing, or fast enough that preparation is already late.
• Whether something you just did (closing off rooms, hanging blankets, moving the animal to an interior room) changed the rate. Measure again and compare.
• Which direction the emergency runs. For a chinchilla, VCA’s warnings are on the heat side and it publishes no cold-side danger point, so a summer outage is the direction its source speaks to. That does not mean a cold house is safe for them. Nobody published that either.

What the number cannot do is finish the arithmetic. To turn degrees per hour into hours remaining you need a temperature to divide toward, and for most species below no source publishes one. Our aquarium and reptile power outage guide works the same two-reading method for tanks and terrariums, where there is at least one published line for tropical freshwater fish. For the room itself, use the rate as a trigger to act early, never as permission to wait until a computed hour arrives.

Do not project a straight line far into the future. The rate can change as the indoor and outdoor temperatures converge and as sun hits the house, so re-measure rather than extrapolate.

What Each Species’ Own Source Publishes

The table lists what a named source published for animals that live inside a house. Where a source publishes nothing, the cell says so; an empty cell is the finding, and this page does not fill it with a figure from a related species. Horses, livestock and outdoor flocks are a different problem, covered on our horse and livestock evacuation basics page.

Animal	Published range	Published danger point	Published time to harm indoors	Source
Dog	No household ambient range published. AVMA’s rule is “If it’s hot outside for you, it’s even hotter for your pet”	No household figure. AVMA publishes signs to act on, not a temperature	Not published	AVMA, Warm Weather Pet Safety; Merck Veterinary Manual, 05/28/25
Cat	No household ambient range published	No household figure	Not published	AVMA, Warm Weather Pet Safety; EPA, Protect Your Pets From Wildfire Smoke
Rabbit	Optimal 15–25°C, optimal humidity 55%–60%	Heat stress can occur above 30°C. Above 35°C rabbits cannot regulate their body temperature and can develop heatstroke	Not published	RSPCA Australia Knowledgebase, last updated March 1, 2023
Guinea pig	Comfortable only in a narrow range, 18°C to 23°C	Hyperthermia can occur as low as 24°C, most commonly above 28°C. If the animal cannot bring its temperature down, heat stress can progress to heat exhaustion, heat stroke and death	Not published	RSPCA Australia Knowledgebase, last updated December 10, 2024
Hamster	Steady 18-21°C, away from draughts and direct sunlight	No numeric danger point. PDSA says a too-hot cage can cause heatstroke and a too-cold one a dangerous torpor. For a suspected torpor, it says to check whether the room has fallen below 20°C and, if so, to increase the temperature gradually	Not published	PDSA, The ideal home for your hamster
Gerbil	Merck says gerbils adapt to a wide range of ambient temperatures and gives no numeric range in that passage	None in that passage	Not published	Merck Veterinary Manual, Gerbils
Chinchilla	Optimal environmental temperature below 80 °F, humidity below 40%–50%	VCA says chinchillas are very susceptible to heat stroke and should be housed in rooms that will not get above their recommended comfort zones	Not published	VCA Animal Hospitals, Chinchillas Housing
Ferret	VCA calls it critical to keep the environment at or below 80 °F and well ventilated	Same passage: ferrets are very sensitive to heatstroke	Not published	VCA Animal Hospitals, Ferrets Housing
Hedgehog	Seem to thrive between 70 and 85 °F	Heatstroke is possible above 85 °F	Cold side only, and it is the length of the chill, not a temperature: a chilled hedgehog, “if the low temperature lasts for several hours, may become critically ill”	VCA Animal Hospitals, Hedgehogs Housing
Pet bird or parrot	No numeric range. AAV says a healthy bird can tolerate temperatures comfortable to its owner	No numeric figure. AAV adds that rapid or frequent temperature changes can be stressful	Not published	Association of Avian Veterinarians, Basic Care for Companion Birds
Backyard poultry	For most poultry the zone is 60 to 75 °F, where heat production is lowest	Toward 85 °F birds adjust behavior and reduce feed intake and production. Toward 100 °F, core body temperatures rise to lethal levels unless relief is provided	Not published. For the cold side, see our backyard poultry in a power outage guide	University of Minnesota Extension, reviewed 2026, written for commercial barn production (see note below the table)
Bearded dragon	Cool end roughly 75 to 80 °F, warm end 90 to 100 °F, cool end 65 to 80 °F at night	None published. VCA says body systems slow in cooler temperatures and a too-cold animal may become immunosuppressed and predisposed to infection	Not published	VCA Animal Hospitals, Bearded Dragons Housing
Reptiles, general	Merck’s housing table gives tropical species 80°F to 100°F and temperate species 68°F to 95°F	Body temperature, not room temperature: the closer it is to freezing (32 °F), the more of a medical emergency it is. PetMD adds that “Reptile bodies can freeze completely, leading to death”	Not published	Merck Veterinary Manual housing table; PetMD, Sean Perry DVM, October 19, 2023
Amphibians	Most do well at 60–70°F (16–21°C). Tropical species may need 75–80°F (24–27°C)	Outside the preferred range, they may become immunosuppressed and develop secondary infections	Not published	Merck Veterinary Manual, Housing for Amphibians
Tropical freshwater fish	Warm side: tropical and temperate fish tolerate the high 80s or low 90s °F for a day or more, but prolonged exposure reduces dissolved oxygen, which can be raised by stirring water with a whisk	Cold side: “Most tropical fish can tolerate temperatures even in the low 60s or even high 50s for several hours”, with the mid-50s named as the point to raise the temperature	One of only two durations in this table: several hours on the cold side, a day or more on the warm side (the warm-side figure assumes someone is present to stir the water)	NC State College of Veterinary Medicine, quoting Gregory Lewbart, October 12, 2016

Reading the table

Thirteen of the fifteen rows have no published time to harm. Do not fill one by analogy, from a similar species, a body mass, a coat length or by splitting the difference between neighbors. The result would read exactly like the sourced numbers and would not be one.

A comfort range is not a survival limit. VCA’s hedgehog figure describes where hedgehogs “seem to thrive.” Merck’s amphibian figure describes where they “do well.” RSPCA Australia calls its rabbit figure “optimal.” None says the animal is harmed one degree outside the band, and none says it is fine one degree inside it. They are husbandry targets, the right thing for a care organization to publish and the wrong thing to read as a cliff edge.

Humidity travels with temperature. RSPCA Australia pairs its rabbit range with 55%–60% humidity, and VCA pairs its chinchilla ceiling with humidity below 40%–50%. University of Minnesota Extension says that for older turkeys, 85 °F with humidity above 50 percent puts them in the danger zone, and 90 °F with 50 percent humidity raises the risk to extreme. A temperature read without its humidity clause is a partial reading, and in a sealed-up house during a summer outage the humidity is the half that climbs quietly.

The poultry row borrows from commercial production. University of Minnesota Extension’s heat-stress guidance is written for barn-housed production flocks. The thermoneutral-zone figure is bird physiology and transfers reasonably to a backyard flock, but the source’s own caveat should travel with it: “These temperatures can shift depending on humidity, care and building conditions.”

Two printed unit errors. Merck’s reptile housing table prints the same Celsius values for its tropical and temperate rows, so the conversions cannot be right for both; use the Fahrenheit figures and confirm with your veterinarian. VCA’s chinchilla page also carries a unit slip in its range, so only the ceiling below 80 °F is used here. Our chinchilla emergency kit guide covers the wider disagreement between chinchilla sources.

The Federal Numbers, and What Travels With Them

Search this subject for ten minutes and you will meet 45, 50 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, usually with no explanation of where they come from. They come from the Animal Welfare Act standards in 9 CFR Part 3. Section 3.2, “Indoor housing facilities”, sits in Subpart A, the standards for dogs and cats. As of the eCFR text current on September 25, 2026, paragraph (a) says:

• Indoor housing for dogs and cats must be heated and cooled when necessary to protect them from temperature or humidity extremes.
• The ambient temperature must not fall below 50 °F (10 °C) for dogs and cats not acclimated to lower temperatures, for breeds that cannot tolerate lower temperatures without stress or discomfort (such as short-haired breeds), and for sick, aged, young or infirm dogs and cats, “except as approved by the attending veterinarian”.
• Dry bedding, solid resting boards or other methods of conserving body heat must be provided when temperatures are below 50 °F.
• The temperature must not fall below 45 °F (7.2 °C) for more than 4 consecutive hours, and must not rise above 85 °F (29.5 °C) for more than 4 consecutive hours, when dogs or cats are present.
• These requirements are “in addition to, not in place of” all other requirements pertaining to climatic conditions in parts 2 and 3.

Two clauses get dropped every time this is quoted. The 50 degree floor ends with the exception for the attending veterinarian, which is the regulation handing the number to a named veterinarian for the animals in front of them. And the paragraph says the temperatures are in addition to everything else, which makes them a floor for a licensee, not a complete description of adequate care.

The 85 degree number also appears in paragraph (b), on ventilation: auxiliary ventilation such as fans, blowers or air conditioning must be provided when the ambient temperature is 85 °F (29.5 °C) or higher. That is a trigger for a licensee to switch something on. It is not a statement that a dog is in danger at that temperature.

The scope is narrower than most people assume. These standards bind entities the USDA licenses and registers under the Animal Welfare Act: dealers, exhibitors, transporters and research facilities. They do not describe a private living room. And section 3.2 covers dogs and cats only, because Part 3 is organized into subparts by species.

What the rest of Part 3 says

Reading across the subparts shows regulators choosing different numbers for different animals.

• Guinea pigs and hamsters (Subpart B). Section 3.26(a) says indoor facilities must be sufficiently heated when necessary and that the ambient temperature shall not fall below 60 °F nor exceed 85 °F. That is a warmer floor than the dog and cat sections carry.
• Rabbits (Subpart C). Section 3.51(a) says indoor housing for rabbits need not be heated. Section 3.51(b) requires auxiliary ventilation when the ambient temperature is 85 °F or higher. The outdoor section, 3.52, requires artificial cooling when the atmospheric temperature exceeds 90 °F and shelter when it falls below 40 °F. Alongside RSPCA Australia’s heat figures, the outage that should worry you most for a rabbit is the summer one. Our rabbit and small pet emergency prep guide carries the rest of that species’ kit.
• Birds (Subpart G). The bird standards are a recent addition, with the subpart’s source note reading 88 FR 10714, Feb. 21, 2023. Section 3.151(a) requires indoor temperature and humidity to be regulated and appropriate to bird species “in accordance with current professionally accepted standards”. The bird standard names no number and points to professional practice, which is another reason not to read a cross-species number table as a rule for a bird.

USDA APHIS’s Pets on Planes guidance adds one more example of where the decision goes. It describes a health and acclimation certificate that should specify the temperature range within which the dog or cat may travel, signed by a licensed veterinarian. Even the federal air-transport regime asks a veterinarian to write the range for the individual animal.

Borrowed Standards May Not Transfer

Most “safe indoor temperature” figures online started as guidance written for people. That is not automatically wrong, but the transfer has to be labeled.

Dogs. A thermostat reading that keeps you comfortable is not evidence about your dog. AVMA publishes behaviors to act on (the emergency signs listed above) rather than a thermostat reading. Merck’s hot-summer-months article, writing about a pet locked in a parked car, says the interior temperatures involved are potentially fatal for any pet, but that young, elderly and overweight animals are particularly at risk, and that dogs with short muzzles that do not breathe well in the heat, and those with thick or dark coats that trap warm air, are also at increased risk. That names risk groups for a hot car, not a household room, though the same physiology applies indoors. Flat-faced breeds sit further from the human case again, which our brachycephalic dog cooling gear guide covers.

Birds. The Association of Avian Veterinarians is direct about the limits of borrowing. Its brochure says:

“A healthy bird can tolerate temperatures that are comfortable to its owner.”

Note both qualifiers. The sentence is about a healthy bird, and what it warns about is rapid or frequent temperature change, which is exactly what an outage produces. The same brochure says healthy birds can tolerate drafts and that fresh air and good ventilation are important to their health, and that birds have much more sensitive respiratory systems than humans. Our reasoning, not AAV’s: that is a reason to be cautious about sealing a bird into a wrapped, unventilated cage to hold heat. Our bird and parrot emergency preparedness guide covers birds in more depth.

Facility standards. The 9 CFR figures were written for a licensed premises with staff, records and an attending veterinarian on call. They are not a description of when an individual animal in a private home is suffering. Ready.gov’s power outage guidance is written for people, and this page follows it on leaving because human life outranks animal welfare wherever the two conflict.

The Two Places Anyone Published a Duration

Two sources in the species table attach a period of time to an animal’s own temperature tolerance. Two other durations on this page belong elsewhere. 9 CFR 3.2(a) attaches 4 consecutive hours to 45 °F and 85 °F as a compliance limit for a licensed facility, not as a statement about when a dog or cat is harmed. And Merck’s hot-summer-months article, dated 05/28/25, says that on an 85-degree day the temperature inside a parked car can reach more than 100 degrees in 10 minutes and over 120 degrees in 35 minutes. That is a parked car, not a house without power, and neither figure belongs in a power-outage estimate for a room.

VCA, on hedgehogs, cold side. VCA says a chilled hedgehog becomes less active and, if the low temperature lasts for several hours, may become critically ill. That attaches “several hours” to the duration of the chill, not to a specific room temperature, and the outcome is a veterinary emergency, not discomfort. VCA also suggests considering a safe supplemental heat source under one end of the cage if the ambient house temperature is too low, which leaves the animal somewhere to move. On the other side, the same page says heatstroke is possible above 85 °F, so a hedgehog owner adding heat during a winter outage has a ceiling to watch as well as a floor. Our hedgehog emergency preparedness kit covers that two-sided problem.

NC State, on tropical fish, both sides. The guidance from Gregory Lewbart says most tropical fish can tolerate the low 60s or high 50s for several hours, and that tropical and temperate fish usually tolerate the high 80s or low 90s for a day or more. The cold clock is much shorter than the warm one. But the warm-side figure depends on oxygen: prolonged exposure reduces dissolved oxygen, which can be raised by stirring with a whisk, and in a power outage the pump and airstone are off for the whole “day or more.” The article puts the mid-50s as the point at which the advice switches from watching to raising the temperature. It says a 10 percent water temperature change every hour or two should not endanger fish, and suggests insulating an aquarium with a blanket, sleeping bag or newspapers in winter. Tank oxygen, which becomes the real clock in a longer outage, is covered on our aquarium and reptile power outage page.

Everything else in the table is a range with no clock. Two duration statements across fifteen animals is the published record.

About Cats Hiding It

A widely repeated claim says cats conceal heat distress longer than dogs do. None of the sources on this page compares the two, so this page does not assert it.

What is published is narrower. VCA’s page on recognizing signs of illness in cats says “cats have evolved to hide signs of illness and pain” and that in the early stages, often the only thing an owner may notice is that the cat has become quiet and withdrawn. That page is about illness in general; it does not mention heat. The heat-specific list comes from EPA’s factsheet Protect Your Pets From Wildfire Smoke (EPA-452/F-26-007): cats may exhibit restless behavior, search for a cool spot, pant, drool and have sweaty paws. Panting in a cat at rest is a reason to call a veterinarian, not a data point to watch for another hour.

A quiet, withdrawn cat during an outage is not necessarily a calm cat, so your check has to be looking at the animal rather than waiting for it to complain. Our guide to evacuating multiple cats covers the containment half of the problem, and litter box options while sheltering in place covers the part of a long outage nobody plans for.

The Ladder: Passive First, Then Powered, Then Leave

The ladder is ordered by cost and risk, and it is subordinate to one rule: human life outranks animal welfare wherever the two conflict. Nothing here asks you to stay in a house that has become unsafe for you to keep an animal in it.

Rung one: passive steps

Passive steps cost nothing, cannot poison anyone, and change the rate you measured. Shrink the space you are trying to hold. Close doors to rooms nobody is in, and pick an interior room with the fewest exterior walls and windows. Keep the animal and yourself in the same small space rather than trying to hold a whole house.

To cool, EPA’s pet factsheet gives a sequence for when smoke and heat are both present, so this borrow needs a label. If you have no air conditioning, close blinds and shades before it gets hot. At night when it is cooler, open the windows and use fans to exhaust hot air or draw in cooler air. Then close the windows and use a portable air cleaner to remove smoke. The word doing the work in the first step is before: blinds closed at noon are late. Our reading: close the windows again once the indoor air is cool, whether or not smoke is part of your situation, because with the power out no air cleaner is running.

To keep warm, keep the animal off cold floors and give it something to conserve its own heat in. The regulation is worth borrowing as an idea, not a number: 9 CFR 3.2(a) requires dry bedding, solid resting boards or other methods of conserving body heat when temperatures are below its 50 °F floor.

Then measure again. If the rate has not changed, you have not done anything, and it is far better to learn that in the second hour than in the eighth.

Rung two: powered steps, sized by the device

If you own a battery power station or a purpose-built heat source, this is where it comes in. No page can tell you whether your battery is enough, because runtime is a function of the device’s actual draw and the battery’s usable capacity, and both belong to the manufacturers. Our portable power stations for pet loads guide and the enclosure guidance on the aquarium and reptile outage page cover the equipment side.

If any human in the household depends on a powered medical device, that device is not in a queue with an aquarium heater. Settle that plan with the device manufacturer, the equipment supplier and the prescribing clinician before an outage, and let it set the rest of the household’s decisions.

Anything refrigerated has its own clock and its own page. Our refrigerated pet medication in an outage guide covers why that question goes to the pharmacy and the manufacturer rather than to a thermometer in the fridge.

Rung three: leave, and solve it early

Ready.gov’s power outage page says:

“Go to a community location with power if heat or cold is extreme”

and its preparation list says to check with local officials about heating and cooling locations open near you. Whether a warming center, cooling center, public shelter, church, school or fire station will admit your animal is decided locally, and no page can promise it will. EPA’s factsheet tells owners to know where pets will be allowed to go in an evacuation, and states that “not all emergency shelters accept pets.” Solve that during a quiet week: call your county or parish emergency management office and ask, for each facility they would open, whether animals are admitted, which species, and what paperwork the door wants. Write the answers down next to the phone numbers.

If the answer where you live is no, that is not a reason to stay in a dangerous building with the animal. It is a reason to build a private destination list now: a relative outside the outage footprint, a boarding facility, a pet-friendly hotel booking. Our page on when your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds that ladder, do pet-friendly disaster shelters exist explains how the co-located model works where it exists, and shelter in place or evacuate works through the decision itself.

Improvisations that kill the household

The cold house is what produces these decisions at hour twelve, so they are named here.

Ready.gov says:

“Do not use a gas stove or oven to heat your home. It increases your risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

It adds that using an oven or stovetop can also increase the risk of fires and burns and could damage the appliance. So this is not only an air-quality question.

On generators, CPSC publication CPSC468 is unambiguous. The prohibition, in the document’s own capitals:

“NEVER use inside a home or garage, EVEN IF doors and windows are open”

And the placement instruction:

“DO operate portable generators outside only, at least 20 feet away from the house, and direct the generator’s exhaust away from the home and other buildings.”

Two features of that instruction get lost in retelling. The distance is measured from the house, and the exhaust-direction clause arrives inside the same instruction, not as a separate suggestion. No enclosure, canopy, open garage door, large room, short run or fan makes indoor operation acceptable. Our generators and carbon monoxide with pets in the house page carries the rest.

Anything that would connect a generator to your house wiring is not an outage improvisation. A transfer switch or interlock device is installed by a qualified electrician, and your local authority having jurisdiction governs it. This page stops there deliberately.

Whatever you run, the alarm rule is the same. CPSC468 says to install battery-operated CO alarms, or CO alarms with battery backup, outside sleeping areas and on each floor of your home, and to test alarms monthly. Ready.gov says to install carbon monoxide detectors with battery backup in central locations on every level. Follow your alarm manufacturer’s instructions for where to mount them.

In a pet household, an alarm sounding two floors above a closed laundry room does nothing for the cat shut inside it. Coverage on every level matters when part of the household cannot open a door.

Who to Ask for What

• The hour at which your animal is at risk. Not published for any species in the table. Ask your veterinarian, before an outage, for the range and warning signs that fit your animal’s age, condition and species. That is the same move the federal regulation makes with “except as approved by the attending veterinarian”.
• A threshold for a species not in the table. For reptiles and amphibians, a species-experienced veterinarian and your animal’s own care documentation.
• Runtime for any device. The manufacturer of the device and of the battery.
• Anything touching house wiring. A licensed electrician and your local authority having jurisdiction.
• Whether a shelter, warming center or cooling center near you takes animals. Your county or parish emergency management office, asked in advance, facility by facility, with the answer written down.

The Outage Thermal Checklist

• Put a thermometer in the animal’s room and take a second reading an hour later. Write both down with the times. The difference is your building’s rate.
• Look up what your animal’s own source publishes for its species. If the cell in the table is empty, take that question to your veterinarian.
• Ask your veterinarian, in advance, for the temperature range and warning signs specific to your animal, including its age and any condition it has.
• Decide which single interior room you would consolidate into, in heat and in cold, and confirm the animal can be safely contained there.
• Do the passive steps before you need them: blinds closed before the heat arrives, doors closed to unused rooms, bedding that lets the animal conserve its own heat.
• Re-measure after every change. If the rate did not move, the step did not work.
• Confirm your CO alarms are battery-operated or battery-backed, on each floor and outside sleeping areas, and test them monthly, whether or not you own a generator.
• Never run a generator inside a home or garage, even with doors and windows open, and never heat the house with a gas stove or oven.
• Call your county or parish emergency management office and ask, for each facility they open in extreme heat or cold, whether animals are admitted, which species, and what paperwork is required.
• Build the private destination list anyway: a relative outside the footprint, a boarding facility, a pet-friendly booking, arranged before a season rather than during an outage.
• If any human in the household depends on a powered medical device, settle that plan with the device manufacturer, the supplier and the prescribing clinician first.
• Agree in advance what would make you leave, and go when it happens.

Where to Go Next

This page is the thermal explainer under our pets and power outages hub.

• Seasonal and outdoor. The winter storm and extreme cold pet safety guide covers the outdoor cold problem, heat and hot cars covers the fastest thermal environment a pet ever sits in, and pet heatstroke emergency response is the page to have read first if a dog is already in trouble. For dogs that work or live outdoors in deep cold, see outdoor working dogs in extreme cold.
• Equipment. Dog cooling gear in a power outage, the aquarium and reptile power outage guide and refrigerated pet medication in an outage.
• Species. The rabbit and small pet guide, guinea pig evacuation kit, hamster and gerbil evacuation kit, chinchilla emergency kit, ferret emergency kit, hedgehog emergency preparedness kit, bird and parrot preparedness guide and backyard chicken evacuation guide.

Then do the one thing only you can do. Take two thermometer readings an hour apart on an ordinary day, in the room your animal actually lives in, with the heating or cooling switched off. You will learn more about your own house in that hour than any published table can tell you, and you will have learned it on a day when nothing was riding on it.