Lou and Serge’s Excellent Adventure

Lou and Serge are our four year old miniature doxies and they are coming with us to South Africa. Oh boy! Lou Reed is a wire-haired dachshund and Serge Gainsbourg is a red long-haired teckel.

So first stop, look up the procedures for pet immigration on the South African Consulate website.  I started reading through the volumes of instructions and if possible, it seemed even more complicated than getting our human visas to emigrate. Timing seemed to be very important. This test must be done no more than … but no less than… Vaccinations had to be completed a month before travel. Final vet examinations must be done no more than a week prior to travel.  I started getting bleary-eyed with confusion reading about how to set up an agent to receive them, bank accounts and wire transfers, certifications, etc.

So I did what I do best and I threw some money at it, a lot of money actually. I decided to seek out a Pet Relocation Service. After some interviews and estimates I settled on Sally at Airborne Animals in nearby Blairstown, NJ. The first thing Sally told me to do is to find out if my vet was USDA-accredited. If not, I would have to change vets since the South African government will not accept pets unless they have been certified by the USDA and the USDA only worked with accredited vets. Sadly, Dr. Schaeffer at Scotch Plains Animal Hospital was not. He had been our vet for 4 years with Lou and Serge and had been our vet for 13 years with our first pair of family dogs, Boris, an English Springer Spaniel and Natasha, a Brittany, now both deceased. 

We had to say woof woof and goodbye to Dr. Schaeffer and move on to Dr. Perez with the Plainfield Animal Hospital.  Not only was Plainfield Animal Hospital accredited, they had Laurie their pet relocation specialist. Laurie, meet Sally. Sally, meet Laurie. Darlene, stand back and let the pros take over.

Microchips, Vaccinations, Blood tests, Heartworm tests, Parasite tests, … Dr. Perez oversaw and certified the results. Sally told me when to go to the vet, she made the plane reservations, filled out most of the paperwork with Laurie who filled out the rest.  All I had to do was take the paperwork to the USDA Veterinary Department in Trenton and have the application certified and we were ready!

Sally came in her van to collect the dogs for their flight out of Newark to Jo’burg. I started drinking. The dogs had to fly in cargo in crates with only a mat to sleep on, in our case their doxie sleeves, and water. No balls, no toys, no sedative. I did get them some natural anxiety tablets. Not sure if they helped but they couldn’t hurt. Besides I was the one who really needed a sedative!  I put some food in a Ziploc bag which Sally taped to their individual crates for breakfast the next morning. They could not share a crate unfortunately on Lufthansa, but I was assured that they would be right next to each other since they were on the same manifest. They could not take a direct flight (16+ is too many hours to be confined in a crate in cargo) so their flight had to be broken up into two 8 hour segments. In between they would be the guest of the Lufthansa Animal Lounge in Frankfurt. A world class animal lounge, it had seen the likes of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers and exotic circus and zoo animals. I guess it would be good enough for Lou and Serge.

It was a very nerve-racking couple of days but it would have been worse had I not received status texts from Sally throughout. She texted me when the dogs were checked in at Lufthansa. (PS being German dogs and extremely cute, Lou and Serge became the beaus of the ball at the Lufthansa Cargo. If you have a poodle my advice to you is to fly it Air France!) 

Sally texted me when Lou and Serge were received in Frankfurt, when they were received for their Jo’burg flight in Frankfurt, when they were received and their paperwork was certified by the South African Department of Animal Immigration in Jo’burg and when Vince had been contacted on the ground. All I could do myself was follow the Lufthansa website’s flight status monitor which only gave me info about the flights themselves, take-off and landing, but that was it.

Finally Vince called me to tell me he was on his way to pick them up at Tambo airport and the first pictures of Lou and Serge came across my blackberry. Lou looked a little shell-shocked but Serge was active and alert. Regardless, they were very happy to see Vince!!! And Vince was very happy to see them! And I was very happy to see them reunited!

We have since taken to referring to Lou by his new African name, Zulu. Red-haired Serge should definitely be renamed Maasai because he is so slim and beautiful but so far has not responded when called. We will work on it!