Airline Safety Checklist for Pet Owners
Always check with your airline for a list of its specific requirements, regulations, restrictions, rules, and/or policies for traveling pets.
Imagine your pet, injured, bleeding, with hypothermia, soaked in urine and vomit with missing teeth or swollen gums or even worse — killed.
This is a harsh reality of travel on airlines for many pet owners. The first leading cause of injury, loss or death is faulty carriers. The second leading cause of injury or death has been extreme heat or cold.
Lisa Kelly, pet travel specialist and speaker, owner of Kitty Condos and inventor/developer of Dryfur Pet products, both under the umbrella of KC Pet Products, LLC., is highly dissatisfied that many airlines simply accept any standard small animal carrier, regardless of faulty mechanics or even missing hardware that easily harms and kills countless animals each year.
An active member of the International Pet Animal Transportation Association and an animal advocate, Kelly, being a successful entrepreneur and inventor, has developed a free, downloadable Safety Checklist specific to airline travel.
A simple search on airline reports will bring a shocking reality to the surface as the horrid tales unfold of injured, missing or killed animals that occurs while traveling.
Kelly, who is entrusted to take care of pets, almost a hundred a day, for owners, has a deep passion for helping pet owners provide safety for their pets.
“Let me state that it is not the airline’s responsibility that the animals are in proper carriers; it is the owners — however has not been a viable education by airlines for the owners to stop a lot of this senseless harm and demise to the unprotected, innocent animals,” said Kelly. “I knew what I was seeing every time I picked up a pet from the Airline Cargo Office. It wasn’t positive at all,” she added.
“Only since 2005 have the laws required airlines to report all pet incidents to an appropriate government agency, so the numbers are new. We have no way of knowing how many pets have been injured or killed even in the past decade or five years,” said Kelly. Pet owners can, however, access the new compiled listings by researching the Department of Transportation, in which all airlines must report the incidents. Kelly stated that perhaps this will help pet owners make more informed pet travel choices, though it is their responsibility to understand the reality of how their pets will travel.
