How to Take Your Dog Guide to Hawaii 101

Yes, I’m planning on taking Prada to Hawaii with me this summer for our family vacation. We’ve never been before, but family vacations are regular occurrences for my family, so at first I thought this wouldn’t be much of a problem. You call ahead to warn the hotel out of courtesy. Technically we don’t have to, but if it’s just a ten minute phone call that might prevent a hassle later, why not? Tends to improve the service for us, makes us more comfortable, which is good business for them, so why not? We like to leave an extra cleaning tip, too, to make up for the layer of Prada that inevitably ends up on the carpet. Prada’s a good traveler. Car rides, planes, trains, she’s fine. We travel enough that I figured Hawaii wouldn’t be an issue. What’s the difference between travelling to Hawaii and travelling to say, California or Central Oregon, or Alabama? Well…Hawaii’s never had rabies or a bunch of the other typical pet diseases on the islands before. And they’d like to keep it that way. They can’t ban service animals from coming over, and it would be a huge mess if they tried to ban pets from coming, so instead the Hawaii Department of Agriculture put together a list of health certifications and procedures you have to go through. If you’re moving there permanently with a pet you have to go through quarantine, and if you miss one of the items on the health checklist, you get quarantined. For bringing a service animal they want proof of service training, proof of vaccinations, blood tests to check for certain antibody levels, and a health certificate within 2 weeks of travelling there. I’m not going to list all the requirements here because they change, and they tend to be a bit confusing in print. I would also recommend you not use their Dept. of Agriculture’s website for the list of requirements because it’s a bit of a mess to figure out which regulations apply to which category of animals. Instead, when you go in for your pet’s physical at the vet (one is required a certain period before travelling to Hawaii, and another one at the 2 week point) have the veterinarian call the Dept. of Agriculture and get the list and forms directly from them. The vet is the best person to make the call because he/she will understand all the vaccination lingo they use and can get all your records and forms set up. For service animals, you’ll want to get the original vaccination records from your training school with original signatures and the like all the way back to puppy vaccinations. It’s good to have copies of those, anyway.
Prada and I went to the vet today for our first physical before Hawaii, and the blood test for rabies antibodies. A friend recommended a vet in Huntsville her family’s been working with for about 20 years and who has demonstrated exceptional dedication and care for their pets, and she told me he sees other service animals in the area, including law enforcement animals so I felt comfortable going to him. In Oregon, we know a vet tech quite well, and go to her practice for our visits there, so now I’m set up with a vet for each state I live in. Prada is still quite the pathetic patient. Dogs have no concept of health care, or that a little bit of pain now means health later on, and there’s no way to explain that to her so the needle poking her for drawing blood is pain for no reason and she is quite miserable with this. She also has flat veins, which makes it harder to get at the blood.
Hawaii Dept. of Agriculture requires a veterinarian’s verification that the dog has been microchipped. This is something that TSE did for us, so our vet just had to use his little scanner to verify that it was in there. Something for people with very recent microchips to be aware of, though, is that the older scanners that some vets have don’t recognize the new chips’ frequencies so they may not register. Before you assume that the chip’s not in there because the scanner can’t find it, first find out how old the scanner is compared to your microchip, then call Home Again to find out if the two should be on recognizable frequencies or not. That was the case with Prada. The vet had an older microchip scanner but Prada was just chipped in June so the scanner wasn’t calibrated for the new frequency. Was a bit of a puzzler until we called Home Again and they explained it to us.
Overall Prada was very good in the office. Crawled under a bench in the waiting room and just stayed put the entire time we waited, mostly ignoring the other dogs in the waiting room. She was quite a chicken, all shivery and ornery in the office. I usually just take the harness off when we go on back ‘cause I don’t need her to guide me (we’re just sitting still back there) and the vet’s gotta work on her anyway. She tried to get in my lap quite frequently to avoid the microchip scanner, stethoscope, and needle. Apparently shepherds are notoriously cowardly in the vet’s office, though.