Being able to travel with your pet can be a lot of fun and often a lot less stressful for your pet than being left home. Many of our clients like to travel with their pets and our veterinarians turn out hundreds of pet health certificates for dogs and cats every year.

For a complete list of travel requirements by country for pets, you can visit the USDA website and choose the country you plan on traveling to. If you don’t have an updated health and travel certificate and plan to travel abroad with your pet in the near future, please call our hospital as soon as possible so we can get your pet properly examined and put together all of the necessary documents you’ll need to pass inspection.

Health and Travel Certificates For Pets

Our health certificate and travel examination services for dogs and cats include the following:

• Health Certificates and Travel Examinations and Documents – International and/or Domestic
• Microchip Implantation and Registration
• Rabies Vaccination and Booster Immunization
• Rabies Titer Testing

Travel Tips For Your Pet

Most pet owners that have already traveled abroad with their dog or cat have probably found the experience can be rather stressful at times. Whether you are traveling by plane or by vehicle, we hope these pet travel tips will help you and your canine or feline friend have a safe and enjoyable journey together.

CAR AND MOTION SICKNESS

Motion sickness in dogs and cats is actually much more common than you might expect when pets travel long distances in a vehicle for the first time. If you believe your pet is experiencing any symptoms of car sickness, Dramamine is a safe, over-the-counter medication that can be given to dogs and cats.

Sometimes, a dog or cat’s motion sickness can be more severe and a prescription strength motion sickness medication may be needed. The Animal Clinic of Billings offers Cerenia, which is an antiemetic medication that targets the central nervous system to alleviate the symptoms of motion sickness without actually causing any sedation for the animal.

If your pet pet has a tendency to become anxious or uneasy during travel, there are several veterinarian-approved natural remedies available, such as supplements that contain derivatives of casein which is a naturally-occurring protein found in a mother’s milk in dogs and cats as well as L-tryptophan.

All-natural calming substances can also be found in Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Calm varieties of dog and cat food. Starting a few weeks before travel, this food can be fed to your pet to help reduce the level of anxiety they’re experiencing.

Feliway for cats and Adaptil for dogs can also effectively treat animal anxieties. These are synthetic pheromones that mimic your dog or cat’s own natural pheromones, and inturn, creates a calming and soothing effect on the animal.

Pet Identification

It’s always important to ensure your pet is current on their identification tags and microchip before traveling with them. Our veterinarians strongly recommend updating both your pet’s collar ID tags as well as their microchip.

Microchipping is safe, easy, inexpensive, and practically painless for the animal. The microchip itself is roughly the size of a rice grain and is embedded underneath your dog or cat’s skin near their back, and will stay there for life.

Identification microchips are encoded with your pet’s vital information. The microchip contains a very small metallic “bar code” within it that’s surrounded by an inert membrane to ensure it remains non-reactive when placed under the skin.

Once the microchip is in place, we register your contact information with the bar code number of the chip.

Then, if your pet should ever becomes lost, all animal care facilities including shelters, veterinary hospitals and pounds will scan the animal using a microchip reader over the skin and be able to quickly and easily find all of your contact information.

Additionally, microchips are internationally recognized, which should provide you with the added peace of mind knowing that you can travel anywhere in the world and know that your pet’s chip can be read by a universal scanner.

So if your pet happens to get lost within the United States or abroad, you can help get reunited by microchipping them.

The Animal Clinic of Billings offers microchipping for your pet dog or cat, which our veterinarians routinely provide to our canine and feline patients during examination visits at our clinic.

Pet Carrier Selection

Always choose a pet carrier or travel crate that is comfortable and spacious enough for your dog or cat, regardless of which method or distance you travel together.

Most airlines pet policies will require your carry-on pet carrier is large enough for the animal to stand up and easily turn around in, yet small enough to be able to fit under your seat without hurting or squashing your pet as well. Make sure the pet carrier you choose provides sufficient ventilation as well.

Flying with a Pet

Before planning on traveling with your pet by plane, please check the airline’s pet policy to make sure that you meet the travel requirements. If your airline or destination requires a health certificate for your pet, the veterinarians at the Animal Clinic of Billings are accredited to issue

both international and domestic health certificates to dogs and cats.

Be sure to inquire about potential health risks your pet could be exposed to when traveling to another country or state. Certain vaccines or anti-parasitics like flea and tick, or worm preventions may be necessary and even required by law when traveling to at-risk areas or areas with different preventive protocols than your own.