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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: December 2006

Safe Air Travel for Animals Act questioned

 

Boston--Eighteen months after the Safe Air Travel for Animals Act took effect, five years after becoming federal law, observers are beginning to ask whether it serves any useful purpose.

The law requires airlines to report losses or deaths of pet animals in transit, previously reported voluntarily.

"Since June 2005," wrote Boston Globe reporter Peter J. Howe on November 3, 2006, "airlines have reported on 74 pet incidents, involving roughly just 0.01 percent of all animals carried in cargo holds during that period, a review of reports filed at the U.S. Transportation Department found."

Prior to the passage of the Safe Air Travel for Animals Act, airlines reported from 25 to 75 animal incidents per year, with only 116 incidents in the four years before Senator Frank Lautendberg (D-New Jersey) introduced the prototype of the Act in 1992.

"When activists were pushing for the disclosure rules in the 1990s," Howe recalled, "they widely claimed that U.S. airlines lost or killed up to 5,000 pets a year." The explanation? Animal rights groups had extrapoloated the 5,000 figure from industry claims that 99% or more of the estimated 500,000 animals who ride in airplane cargo holds each year reach their destination safely.

"Of the 74 reported pet incidents reviewed by the Globe," Howe noted, "almost all involved defective kennels that allowed animals to escape, often to be run over by tarmac baggage trains, or animals who were old or sick and died in flight or soon after."

The federal legislation was the result of more than 40 years of regulatory effort initiated by Fay Brisk of the Animal Welfare Institute, beginning just as jet travel began to take animals unprecedentedly high and far, in unheated and unmonitored cargo space. Over time, Brisk and many others who took up the cause greatly improved airline animal handling. The 2005 law helps to reinforce the high standards that had already been achieved, for pets at least, though mass deaths in transit involving poultry and small laboratory animals still come to light.