Would Australia really kill my pet if I get something wrong? | Jessica Mudditt | Opinion

Would Australia really kill my pet if I get something wrong? | Jessica Mudditt | Opinion

I was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of my cat’s quarantine cell in Singapore when I looked up and saw an enormous, snow-coloured cat in an orange sweater being cradled by a woman under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. She was whispering sweet nothings in its ear and was slowly pacing the length of the corridor, as I imagined one might do to get a baby back to sleep.

It was a tight corridor with a dozen enclosures on either side, each with ventilated steel doors and a lock. A chorus of plaintive meows drowned out the whirring of fans overhead. When the woman spotted me on the floor she started telling me that “Charlie” was used to quarantine, as he’d had to keep pace with her daughter’s high-flying corporate career. Charlie didn’t look particularly settled. He looked cross.

Suddenly a quarantine officer strode in through the double doors, scarcely able to conceal his agitation. He said his boss had caught her taking the cat outside its demarcated area on CCTV and that it now faced the prospect of having to do extra time. The breach of rules had exposed Charlie to the potential risk of catching a bug from a sneezing cat, and if that happened he’d be placed in the windowless room with a metal plate on the door that ominously read CAT ISOLATION.

As someone who has been through the bewildering, costly, and sometimes terrifying process of bringing a pet to Australia, I’ve always been staggered by the brazen attempt by Johnny Depp and Amber Heard to smuggle in Pistol and Boo. If Depp really did so knowingly as recent accusations suggest, it was terribly poor judgement and a total pirate move. 

Barnaby Joyce’s threat to kill the dogs in 2015 if they didn’t “bugger off back to the United States” wasn’t a hollow one. Read any of the online forums devoted to bringing pets here and you’ll inevitably read an anxious expat asking, “Would Australia really kill my pet if I get something wrong?”

While I haven’t heard of an actual case of a pet being euthanised, pet owners attempting to export their furry friends are haunted by the warning on Australia’s department of agriculture website, which states that 

if an animal arrives in Australia and it does not meet all of the conditions of the accompanying import permit, then it may be returned to the country of export or euthanised at the importer’s expense.

Other countries that are rabies-free, such as the UK, Singapore and Japan (but not the United States â€" it still has rabies) have statements to this effect and it’s the owner’s responsibility to comply with the rules, which are highly complex. In countries with a lax attitude to rabies (a disease which kills 60,000 people a year), the requirements are often opaque and therefore just as scary. Even though we hired a pet relocation company to get our cat Butters to Australia, we still ended up with a well-thumbed stack of papers that my husband and I jokingly referred to as her “spy dossier”.

One way to guard against a fatal mistake is to start the process early. The idea of just rocking up is laughable â€" you have to work your way through the department’s 12 step guide. If like me, you were living in a country such as Myanmar which has a high prevalence of rabies, the lead time is at least six months and it requires a 30-day stay in quarantine in an intermediary country such as Singapore, plus a week in a boarding facility and then another 10 days in Australian quarantine. Pets from all countries need to spend 10 days in Australia’s quarantine facilities and unlike Singapore, no visits are allowed.

Bringing a pet to Australia doesn’t come cheap. It set us back a whopping $7,000 (though that’s chump change for Depp). Admittedly my decision to chaperone Butters to Singapore cost us extra, as did using a pet relocation company, but enlisting professional services is highly advisable because it really is so complicated.

Throughout the sad period that Butters was absent from our lives, well-meaning friends would annoy me by asking whether she’d remember us after nearly two months apart. Cats have excellent long-term memories and recent studies have proven just how much they love their owners. I just hope she’s been able to conveniently forget the bad bits we had to put her through for us to be together.

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