Arranging International Pet Travel

A huge consideration for us in the immigration process was preparing for our fur children to be relocated, in fact it was the most emotionally draining and worrying part of the entire experience.  I absolutely love animals even dare I say it spiders, although whilst I might not feel the compulsion to burn the house down if I see one lurking around indoors, I do prefer it if they respect personal boundaries and do not try and cuddle up to me … even I have limits!

In my personal experience animals are far more caring, loyal, loving and accepting than a lot of humans I have met, I feel a real kinship with them. My inability to watch a wildlife program just in case an animal dies is a long running family joke, I mean I can’t even watch Disney movies like Finding Nemo without becoming a blubbering ball of snot and being a huge source of embarrassment to my 8- and 10-year-old nieces!

Leaving Lola, Bob, Bear and Ray behind was never going to be an option for us, we wanted the reassurance of an end-to-end service and to know that people who care would be there to ensure the comfort of our fluff balls and get them to their destination happy, healthy, and with the minimum of stress.

Again, relocating pets internationally can be expensive depending on where you are going, how many pets you have and which operator you are using, we found the initial rates reasonable although at that point no one could anticipate how much Covid would affect the price and availability of flights, but even as the price kept creeping up this was not something we were prepared to compromise or scrimp on.

Relocating our pets was a topic that we found most people had an opinion on and in the main we had a great deal of support but there were murmurings from some about-homing …. nope …. never going to happen and one person who mentioned euthanasia, this person is now dead to me. At the end of the day it was our choice to relocate so we owed it to our little fluffenpuffs to do the right thing by them.

Life is a journey best travelled with pets

Knowing that we had to be ready for when the border restrictions eased, we decided to get the pets travel organised while we had the time, and paid for it while we were still working and able to save. International pet relocation was the one area that we didn’t leave it to the four winds to decide, we did our research and finally settled on Jetpets domestic and overseas travel services to take care of our four little fluffkins. Domestic & Overseas Pet Travel Services – Jetpets NZ

Getting the ball rolling was so simple and after we completed an online form and submitted our pets’ measurements and weights Jetpets would take care of the rest, they would instruct us through every form and every part of the process. Finally, this was going to be straight forward, we did not expect any issues, I mean that is why you engage a pet relocation specialist, to take all the stress and worry out of the process right? Wrong! Like with all things in this journey we hit hurdles on the way, hurdle number one was whether any of the airlines would even fly Lola?

Apparently, Boxer dogs fall within the Brachycephalic (literally means short headed) or snub-nosed breeds, dogs that fall within snub nosed breeds have been known to suffer respiratory issues when travelling and on rare occasions have even died and the ensuing litigation caused airlines to place heavy restrictions on these breeds if not outright ban them, many airlines operating out of Auckland Airport chose to ban them.

This was not good! Whilst Lola has never been a heavy breather or particularly snuffly or sniffly (unless she is trying to wake me up in the morning by stuffing her snout in my eyes, which involves meditation level inhalation/exhalation and copious amounts of slobber and spray) there was no magic pill to make her shnoot grow or contraption to stretch it so that she could get on a plane!

We were considering chartering a private yacht to get her to Canada at this point, the price would have been about the same.

However we need not have worried about it because Jetpets were able to look into and resolve this problem and luckily for us there were 2 airlines operating out of New Zealand who would fly Lola long haul and that was Air Canada and Qantas neither of which were flying from Auckland until the Covid restrictions began to ease, we had to keep our fingers crossed that when we were finally permitted to travel that those airlines would be back to flying out of New Zealand.

The good thing about organising the pet relocation in plenty of time is that we were able to arrange to pick up the pet travel crates from Jetpets and leave them around the house so that the fluff heads could get used to seeing them, climbing on them, and sleeping in them. One of the stipulations for transporting a snub-nosed dog is that they must travel in a crate one size bigger so Lola’s crate when we picked it up was big enough to house a Shetland Pony.

Whilst all our fluff nuggets got used to seeing the crates in the nearly two years they were deposited around the house Lola and Bob were the only two to get in them (although interestingly enough we discovered that Lola’s crate is big enough for two humans and a dog to fit in … yes, we tried it … many times!), Bear slept on top of one of the crates at one point but for Ray going anywhere near the orange box of impending doom was a hard pass.

One of the negatives brought about by delays caused by Covid was also one of the biggest positives and that was time, time to develop relationships with people like Vicki Gray the Corporate Sales Consultant from Jetpets and the Jetpets wider team. All in all, we spent almost two years working with Jetpets and Vicki especially to get our pets to Canada, we trusted Jetpets implicitly with something very precious to us and they did not let us down once.

When I look into the eyes of an animal, I do not see an animal, I see a living being, I see a friend and I feel a soul.

The Jetpets team literally took care of everything, pre-flight vet checks, ensuring our pets had comfort breaks in the transit lounges, walks, cuddles and treats, their care at the boarding facilities, all their flights (and there were lots of those) and all the information required by Canadian Customs as well as getting them cleared at the ports of entry. Naturally we were always going to worry about how our fluffies were going to adapt to the travel and disruption but knowing that trained staff were there looking out for their welfare and taking care of them during what must have been a very scary and confusing process allowed us to sleep at night.

As time went on and more hurdles cropped up Jetpets took it all in their stride, they told us that these things happen, that our pets would get to Canada, and we did not need to worry about it. They were professional and reliable to a fault and gave us the confidence that our fluff puffs were in the right hands and that reassurance was worth its weight in gold.

To those of you who are following this blog (All three of you, you know who you are so give yourselves a high five! Go team!), we are at the half way mark of the of the pre getting into Canada part of our Canadian immigration journey, medals will be awarded at the finishing line for the die hard readers! Stay tuned next week.