The cosmopolitan pet

A lighter topic for today’s blog entry: luxury international animal transportation.

In 2022, I found myself interacting with a few different (but interrelated) strands of pet cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, I was writing a paper about the Nowzad Dogs evacuation. At the same time, my husband and I were researching ways to move our elderly, high-strung pug mix from Belgium to Finland, while also evaluating if there was any realistic chance of eventually moving him to the US. It was thus that we discovered the large and lively online community devoted to luxury international animal transportation.

The majority of mainstream airlines offer two forms of animal transportation: pets that, with their carrier, weigh 8kg or less and fit under a seat can generally travel in the aircraft cabin so long as they remain in their carrier for the duration of the flight. All other pets must be placed in cargo, though flat-nosed breeds like pugs and French bulldogs are often not allowed to be placed in cargo. The United Kingdom, somewhat exceptionally, does not allow dogs to be flown into the country in aircraft cabins.

Many owners of mid-size and larger pets are not willing to place their animals in cargo, either because of the safety risks involved, because of the physical discomfort involved, or because of the anxiety that pets may feel when separated from their owners in a stressful environment. Many owners of small pets do not want to stress their animals by forcing them to remain confined for the long duration of an international flight. And, of course, owners of flat-nosed breeds have few options for transporting their pets over non-drivable distances at all.

Facebook groups have therefore emerged that are devoted to, variously, (1) sharing information on airline pet policies, including boutique airlines that allow larger pets or that allow owners to buy seats for pets; (2) organizing charter flights in which pet owners pay approximately $5,000-$10,000 each to charter a private jet on which their pets can travel in comfort; (3) discussing all other issues related to travel with pets: pet-friendly hotels, ferries and cruise liners that allow pet travel, and so on.

I described this community as devoted to “luxury international animal transportation,” but I think that many people who have participated in the community would object to the term “luxury.” For some, like my own family, this form of pet transportation may be used only once or twice as part of a large, expensive, and unavoidable international move. And while it’s true that some in the community want options to transport their pets more frequently, for instance if they divide their year between two countries or frequently vacation in a remote area, I suspect that these participants would also argue that transporting their pets is not a “luxury”: it is ethically demanded, owing to the way that they understand their relationship with their pets.

Heidi Nast has provided the most substantial examination of shifts in human-pet relationships in what she characterizes as the “post-industrial” world, and what I would term “elite countries”. Nast sees a particular genre of pet love, one that positions pets as “highly commodified and valued objects of affection and love” (“Loving…Whatever”), emerging in the 1980s and 1990s and intensifying into the twenty-first century. Nast is particularly interested in reading pet love as a response to post-industrial conditions: specifically, the hyper-mobility, hyper-individualism, precarity, and social isolation that emerge under these conditions. Pets provide a form of love object that is functionally ideal for people who lead unstable, fragmented, highly mobile, consumption-oriented lives that make traditional attachments to neighborhood and family (and particularly to children) impractical. In this sense, pet love actually serves an important purpose for post-industrial capitalism, “smoothing” the experience of participation and, as Nast writes, “helping to sustain an increasingly inequitable global economy” (“Critical Pet Studies?”).

The rise of luxury international animal transportation fits very well into Nast’s schema, because it draws together consumption, affect, and mobility. The need for such a service arises in an increasingly mobile elite world in which global travel functions as a sign of both professional and personal success, but in which the intensification of border imperialism also means that this mobility is also often accompanied by separation from loved ones, transience, and challenges related to child-rearing. The amenability of pets to border regimes— they may require health certificates and medical documentation, but are not (unlike human family members) scrutinized for entry on the basis of their national origin, poverty, religion, or employment record— renders them ideal companions for globally mobile humans. Luxury international animal transportation both legitimizes that companionship through consumption and is a necessary consequence of it: if your relationship with your pet is one of the closest and most important in your life, then of course it is of paramount importance that your pet be safe and comfortable.

We also begin to see echoes here of the way that animals, as in Israeli case studies, function as a site of moral simplicity and purity. Spending $5000-10000 on a luxury plane flight would normally raise many uncomfortable political and environmental questions: couldn’t that money be better spent elsewhere? Ought chartering private jets, even in groups, be allowed in a rapidly warming world? Yet because this expense is necessary for the comfort of an animal, it is removed from the sphere of politics and becomes morally requisite. I speak with some degree of experience here: while my husband and I opted to use a small airline for our relocation, and therefore spent less than twice what it would have cost us for a normal set of airline tickets, it is very possible that we would have bought a seat on a charter flight if that had been the only option. For us, the idea of any discomfort or stress for our dog is unbearable, and the need to ensure his comfort and happiness overrides all other considerations.

I say this: and yet the “other considerations” at play in my own life provide a stark illustration of the tensions that the “moralization” of this animal affection creates. As I write, I am trying to find financial assistance for several Afghan friends, among them a family with two young daughters who are hoping to buy their way out of Kabul in a few months. $10,000, for them, is the price of an entirely new future. Similarly, I have several former students from whom $10,000 is the difference between being able to obtain a U.S. student visa and not, in a world where such a visa is not only the path to the elite education for which they’ve worked and sacrificed all their lives, but also their chance to support their families in Afghanistan.

It is not the choice to spend money on pets that I find problematic— how can I, when I experience the same devotion? Rather, it is the sense that is highlighted in the Israeli articles I have previously discussed: that animal welfare has become decoupled from human welfare, and that this has happened in a way that renders animal welfare a moral absolute in a way that human welfare is not. It seems to me that this decoupling and this “moralization” are intensifying as dehumanization becomes a more common and more visible part of our world, perhaps as a form of deflection and perhaps a survival strategy: if we did not displace our emotional reaction onto animals, then we simply could not tolerate the brutality of the world that we live in.