It's a Doggone Shame!

IT'S A DOGGONE SHAME!

They're dropped, crushed, lost and rerouted.

By Laura Italiano - New York Post - 3/21/99

In the very worst cases, they freeze to death on icy tarmacs, or overheat and suffocate in stifling cargo holds.

They're dogs and cats. Thousands of them are killed, injured or lost annually after their owners entrust airlines to carry and deliver them safely.

Heat alone - typically from the cargo holds of planes delayed on hot tarmacs- kills or "severely" injures more than 500 animals a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which keeps only a partial accounting.

For the pet, these holds turn the skies into a hell.

A November study by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in San Francisco found that animal crates are almost always shipped along with routine baggage in cargo holds with no air- conditioning or air circulation.

Temperatures routinely exceed 115 degrees.

"These are animals that are struggling to breathe, their hearts are racing, and they're in a panic, suffering extreme stress and anxiety," said Dr. Lila Miller, a veterinary adviser for the New York-based ASPCA.

Their paws are often bloodied, and their teeth chipped and broken, in their frantic attempts to break out of their shipping crates to escape the infernal heat.

"That's torture," police-dog trainer Mike Cain told the Charlotte Observer last year after his five Belgian Malinois arrived dead from heat stroke and suffocation in Atlanta on a Delta Airlines flight from the Netherlands.

More common - and virtually unpoliced and uncounted - are the dogs and cats, whose shipping crates are dropped, crushed, sent to the wrong location, or damaged enough to allow the animals to escape.

There's the Staffordshire terrier from Boise, Idaho, whose crate was dropped and smashed from a height of four feet last year by a Delta baggage handler as his owner watched in horror.

The Air Transport Association boasts of the industry's "excellent record" shipping pets, and says less than 1 percent of the 500,000 pets that fly each year experience health problems.

"We carry hundreds of pets throughout our system each day, normally with complete satisfaction to their owners," said a spokeswoman for Delta, an airline that turned up again and again as this story was researched.

*The USDA has only 70 inspectors to police nearly 11,000 sites - not only airports, but puppy mills, zoos, circuses and research labs.

*Airlines are not required to report pet mishaps. No one knows how many of the nearly 170,000 passenger baggage complaints logged each month by the U.S. Department of Transportation involve pet cargo.

*An airline's civil liability is limited by federal tariff law to only $2,000 per piece of luggage - and a pet in a crate is legally luggage.

Unless a pet is small enough to qualify as carry-on luggage, "You can be99 percent certain you are putting your pet in a cargo hold that is not ventilated and has no temperature control," said Nancy Blaney, the ASPCA's national lobbyist, who is currently fighting for a bill that would address all of these problems.

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