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Critter Cargo
Houston Airport System
September 8, 2006

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, along with gorillas, ant-eaters, emus, penguins, and snakes, all on planes arriving and departing from George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), each year. IAH is one of the largest and busiest animal transportation hubs in the world.

Lucky, a half-Siamese, half-domestic short hair cat remained calm as his owner, Nandini, signed the final papers and picked up his cage. She’s headed to Dubai for a new job, and she wasn’t sure what it would take to ship her animal buddy from one end of the world to the other.

“The good thing is that I started early, about two months in advance and I’ve been calling Tom ever since and asking him a lot of questions about how to ship animals world-wide, but luckily we were in time so everything has worked out,” she said.

Thomas Schooler is the man who owns and operates Animal Port Houston at Bush Intercontinental Airport. The facility, which is bonded by U.S. Customs and a designated Fish and Wildlife Port, manages animal quarantine, coordinates medical care, feeding, housing and transportation for the animals arriving and departing from IAH.

Work begins before sunrise as specially equipped trucks, and sometimes surgically outfitted workers retrieve thousands of animals from the belly of all types of aircraft.

“In an average year, through the airport here, we would be running, I say, a half million animals a year,” said Schooler, who handles thousands of dogs and cats like Lucky, each month.

His crew also works with a jungle book of exotic creatures including leopards, panthers, elephants and rhinoceros, to name a few. All headed for worldwide destinations, “right now we’re booking animals for Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, for France, Germany, Holland, the Emirates…we’re getting about three to four hundred inquiries a day on shipping animals through here,” he said.

As Tom see’s it, what makes Animal Port Houston and Bush Intercontinental Airport such a desirable and successful destination is partially due to the emphasis on paperwork and documentation.

Lions, and tigers and bears are among the half-a-million critters that pass through Bush Intercontinental Airport each year.

“The primary thing that we’re doing here is making sure that the trip from origin to destination is uneventful, that there are no disruptions, that the paperwork is correct, that the diet is correct, that the animal has as few stresses and strains on them as possible. Bad documentation can cause stress both for the owners and for the receivers, and it can cause stress for the animal at the point of destination because in some cases, animals are returned to the point of origin when their documentation is incorrect,” he noted.

George Bush Intercontinental Airport, annually handles more than 347-thousand metric tons of air cargo, and ranks as the 10th largest international air cargo gateway in the United States. Some cargo is more precious, especially if it’s breathing.

That’s why Nandini didn’t mind driving three hours in the rain from Austin to get Lucky’s paperwork together for their move to Dubai.

“The weather is not too much different from how it is in Austin,” she said, “so it will be fun for him.” Schooler knows she would have taken him personally had it been possible.

“The problem is with the documentation, otherwise you’d probably see people walking with their dogs and cats onto the plane,” he said. “But it doesn’t work that way and with each country there are different regulations. There are different requirements; every country has its very own way of doing business, so we’ve made a specialty out of dealing with those requirements for each country.”

That’s more than seventy five destinations in twenty three countries and counting, at IAH.

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