PET CARE Taking your pet on holidays?

Packing your pet has never been easier


Ask the vet
Esther Van Luipen

Good news for the adventurous among us: It has become much easier to bring your pet on holidays. Since January last year, it is not necessary to put your pet in quarantine for six months or to wait six months before you can travel. This means that for those who would rather go to the Costa del Sol than Costa del Bundoran, it has become relatively easy to bring your dog abroad.
So what do you need to do to be able to bring your pet for a holiday? If you are bringing your pet to England, you don’t need a pet passport or vaccinations. If you are travelling to the continent, you need to apply for a pet passport. Yes indeed, your pet can have its very own passport – complete with picture.
In order to get a passport, you need to call into your vet. Your pet needs to be microchipped before the vet can issue a passport. If you want to bring your pet abroad, you don’t necessarily need to do anything else. It is the coming back to Ireland that is the problem.
Ireland is an island, so we don’t have many of the diseases they have on the continent – and we have to make sure that it stays that way. For example, here in Ireland, we don’t have rabies, certain very dangerous tapeworms and certain tick-borne diseases. That’s why, in order to bring your pet back to Ireland it needs to be vaccinated against rabies at least 21 days prior to re-entering the country. Your pet also needs to be wormed with a proper wormer 24 hours before travelling back to Ireland. A treatment against ticks is also recommended.  

Low-risk countries
So what do you need to do? First of all, call into your vet to have your dog microchipped (if you have not done so already) and to get a rabies vaccination. Bear in mind that the vaccination should be done 21 days before you plan on re-entering Ireland. Bring along a nice picture of your pet (4cm by 6 cm) if you want to – this is not obligatory. If you are travelling to a qualifying (low-risk) EU country, which is most of the European countries, you don’t have to do anything else.

High-risk countries
However, if you are travelling to a high-risk country (check on the Department of Agriculture’s website or ask your vet), the process takes longer. You need to go back to your vet 30 days later to have blood taken. This blood will be tested to check that the antibody concentration, or ‘titre’, is high enough – if it is, it means that the vaccination worked and your pet will have enough antibodies against this disease should it get infected. The pet may reenter Ireland only when at least three months has expired since a successful blood test.

Returning home
Before boarding the plane or ferry back to Ireland, you need to go to a vet (five days to 24 hours prior to arrival in Ireland) to have your pet treated for worms (dogs only) and ticks, and to have a health check to make sure that the animal is healthy enough to withstand the journey. You can then head home without any problems with customs.
Safe journey!

For more details, see www.agriculture.gov.ie/pets.