Shipping Animals Overseas - Part 2

Shipping Animals Overseas – Part 2

By Debbie Sehulster – Mindset Wizardry

Moving to Brazil has been an adventure full of unanticipated challenges and learning. As I mentioned in our last blog, we will be posting some of our stories about the extreme changes associated with living in another country.

This is the second part of the story...shipping our cats.

My husband, Roberto previously tried to ship our cats in November, but he had trouble catching them. When he finally did, they clawed him up so badly that he ended up going to the emergency room. There is an art to catching cats and getting them into their carriers. We abandoned the mission and determined that it would be best for me to handle this task instead of him.

A few weeks after transporting our dogs to Brazil, we decided to ship our first two cats. I was expecting this to be a bit easier since cats are much smaller and easier to transport. The dogs had to fly out of Dallas-Fort Worth airport due to the size of the carriers, so I had to drive them there. The cats could fly out of Houston which was more convenient.

I booked vet appointments and the flights and thought that everything would happen as planned, I should have known better. The day before the flight, American Airlines contacted me with a scheduling change due to the temperatures in Dallas. To keep pets safe, they can only fly when the temperatures are within a certain range. It can’t be too hot or too cold. We were asked to send the cats to Dallas a day before their international flight. The airline arranged for them to stay overnight at a cat hotel in Dallas and put them on the flight to Brazil the next evening.

We reached out to our courier in Sao Paulo to help us navigate Brazilian customs and to transport the cats to their flight on the local airline, Gol. The second flight was arranged but we learned while they were on their way to Sao Paulo that Gol wasn’t flying pets on Fridays. Of course, this was the day they would be arriving. We had to figure out what to do. The first idea was to reach out to family and friends to see if any of them could hold on to the cats for the weekend. This didn’t work out, so our courier recommended a cat hotel near the airport. We were able to book them for a long weekend and then transport them to Salvador on Monday.

 Transporting my last cat, JJ, a few weeks later was even crazier. His flight also got changed due to the weather a couple of times and he had to wait in the cat hotel in Dallas until it was safe for him to fly.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, JJ and I were on the same flight. My connecting flight to Dallas was significantly delayed and I barely made the flight. We arrived in Sao Paulo, and I met our friendly courier again to provide him with the paperwork to clear JJ through customs.

Unfortunately, I made an error when completing the paperwork and it delayed his release. This meant that JJ missed his connecting flight to Salvador. Once our courier was able to get him cleared, he had to scramble to find a place for him to stay until we could get him on a flight the next day. There were no openings at local cat hotels, so he took JJ home with him for the night and put him on a plane the next morning.

We were so fortunate that the courier we hired is an honest person and an animal lover. He took excellent care of my cat and successfully got him on the plane. Needless to say, we gave him a FANTASTIC tip.

JJ has been reunited with his brothers and is now back to terrorizing our dogs, his favorite hobby. All our animals seem to be very happy in our new house.

Lessons from this experience – we had to recognize when things were out of our control. It was important for us to be confident that we would find a solution to the challenges we were facing. Although it would be easy to panic, this would not allow us to think clearly, and we wouldn’t be open to new ideas. It was also essential for us to have trust in other people.