Pets across the pond

London

All the scores of weeping American children who move here every year and have to lock up their beloved pets or leave them behind....

All the great and glitzy of America too -- Elizabeth Taylor anchoring a rented yacht in the Thames just for her dogs, David Hockney choosing to paint in California rather than in his homeland because of his dachshunds, a diplomat who had to think hard about accepting the ambassadorship at the Court of St. James’s, all because of this island nation’s stringent, century-old rabies quarantine.

Now all that could be a thing of the past, consigned to the kitty litter bin of history.

The British government, which raised hopes and spirits of peripatetic pet lovers this summer by letting it be known that it might roll back the quarantine requirement for the United States and Canada “subject to satisfactory conclusions” to its research, says it will announce its findings this month. A paws-up ruling on a “pet passport” program could allow U.S. pets into Great Britain without the harrowing six-month “no-walkies” sentence of solitary confinement in small cages. That law has prohibited quarantined pets -- even guide dogs -- from so much as sniffing the soil of Britain and forced owners who want to cuddle to climb into the cages with their critters.

In a nation that loves its pets enough to allow them on public transit, thousands of foreign pets have been sentenced to time in government-approved kennels, and dozens have died there and thereafter -- not from rabies but from ailments, stress and just plain loneliness. (Precise numbers are hard to come by, but in the three decades preceding the lifting of the quarantine for selected European countries, more than 200,000 dogs were caged.) To pet parents among the quarter-million Americans living in the U.K., and to others who’d like to settle here with menage and menagerie, the new program would be not only welcome but a “what took you so long” cause for celebration. Take the word of a former ambassador.

“I talked about it by kidding on the square, kidding by being serious. I would say that I thought [the quarantine] was the biggest obstacle to improving Anglo-American relations,” says Raymond Seitz, appointed by the first President George Bush, and the first career diplomat to hold the ambassadorship in modern times. Seitz loves his dogs, mostly mutts; he devoted a chapter to them in his memoir, “Over Here,” and became a founding member of a British organization, Passport for Pets, that has lobbied to change the quarantine he characterizes -- in language not remotely diplomatic -- to be “ludicrous, awful and dreadful,” serving “no obvious purpose” in an age of vaccines and med-tech.

Seitz’s own three-time shuttle diplomacy to Britain meant giving one dog away to friends -- “that was excruciating” -- and locking down others in “the slammer.” When he was offered the ambassadorship, his wife’s first reaction was: What about the dogs? “I think for her it was a close call as to whether we should come back here and put the animals back in the slammer, one of them for the second time.”

Reasons for policy

For about a century, the quarantine has served as a cordon sanitaire, keeping the nation and its nearly 10 million dogs and cats virtually rabies-free. The quarantine was tightened after World War I, when officers brought back infected dogs they’d befriended on the battlefields of Europe.

“The only defense of this policy is the fact that Britain is an island,” says Seitz, “and this has been a kind of paranoiac consideration of a lot of island countries.” He’s from Hawaii, he says, and understands this. “Once [rabies] is loose in an island country, you don’t get rid of it, it’s there forever. But that argument went away with the [English Channel] tunnel.”

In spite of effective vaccines, the quarantine has carried its own sluggish entropy of resistance. Quarantine kennels lobbied to stay in business, and no bureaucrat or politician wanted to wear the mantle of “the man who let rabies into Britain.” But like other seemingly unassailable British customs, such as “last call” in pubs and no Sunday commerce, the quarantine too began to disappear in an internationalized world. In February 2000, Britain opened the kennel doors for cats and dogs from 22 Western European countries, provided they had the proper paperwork -- “pet passports” proving they had been microchipped, vaccinated and tested for rabies and treated for parasites.

It was a concession to Europeanization; if England wasn’t adopting the euro any time soon, at least it could do this for its Euro-partners. But it was also an acknowledgment that Britain’s own traveling class was no longer confined to diplomats and businessmen. Ordinary Britons were buying holiday homes on the Continent -- and they wanted to take their pets with them. And when Europe opened, could America be far behind?

From Ray Seitz’s old digs in the U.S. Embassy, Joyce B. Rabens, the minister for economic affairs, says diplomatically, “We’re very pleased that DEFRA is giving this a serious look, and we’ve got our fingers crossed.... It would mean a tremendous amount of difference to thousands of families who have had to leave their pets behind.” DEFRA is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and it could use some feel-good PR in the wake of the mad-cow and foot-and-mouth diseases that ravaged British agriculture and its beef industry.

But it is acting with an abundance of caution. The program might not take effect until next year, and arriving pets would still have to meet rigorous standards, including microchipping and rabies certification from U.S. government-approved veterinarians and a flight or ocean crossing aboard an approved carrier. That’s easy-peasy compared to the expensive (about $3,000) half-year quarantine.

Fido’s French vacation

The group that has happily made a nuisance of itself lobbying to end the quarantine was founded by Lady Mary Fretwell, widow of a British ambassador to France, whose basset hound Bertie died in 1987, not long out of quarantine. He’s become the posthumous poster dog for the Passport for Pets cause, to stop what Fretwell calls the “archaic, cruel” practice of quarantine. The smuggling of pets to get around the quarantine, she contends, is a greater rabies risk than replacing the quarantine with a regulated inspection “passport” program. Fretwell’s French connection is Patricia Swinglehurst, who gives Americans the chance to “launder” their pets. For about the same cost as quarantine, Swinglehurst fosters them with British families in France for six months, after which time they qualify for the paperwork requirements to walk into Britain and into their new homes.

Swinglehurst has placed hundreds of American dogs in France, and one of her satisfied clients is Jack Bays, a Danville, Calif., importer-exporter whose wife was offered a great job with Charles Schwab here. “Essentially the dogs had a nice six-month vacation in the south of France,” he says, and the couple took long weekend trips to visit them. Sam and Molly, both Jack Russell terriers, love London’s parks, says Bays -- “all these open spaces where you can walk. The real problem is getting here and, frankly, if you have pets you really care about, it actually becomes a very serious consideration as to whether or not you should take the career move.”

As for Swinglehurst, the prospect of the British government’s lifting the quarantine troubles her not at all. “I should be delighted,” she says, “to be put out of business.”