Moving to Prague with your Pet

Written by Petr Novotny
for Expats.cz

There are two ways you can ship your animal. First one is to ship your pet as an excess luggage.

The second option is to use the services of the shipping company that takes care of the shipping of the animal for you. The travel route is tracked from origin to destination using airlines computer systems. There are usually few shipping companies specializing on the pet shipping at each major airport. You find their addresses in the local yellow pages, Internet or animal magazines.

Each pet has to have necessary paperwork in order to be able to be shipped. The most important is the health certificate with current rabies vaccination, which needs to be at least 30 days old but not older than 1 year. When shipping your pet from the Czech Republic you also need a veterinary stamp (“kulate razitko” in Czech) certifying that the animal is healthy and comes from an area free of rabies. The stamp has to be maximum 3 days old prior to the flight.

Your pet needs to be shipped in crates that are IATA (http://www.iata.org/) approved for animal transport. The crate has to have certain dimensions based on the animal standing in a natural position.

The following table shows the guide for selecting the correct crate for the animal:

A = length of animal from nose to root of tail.
B = height from ground to elbow joint. A + 1/2 B = length of container.
C = width across musters. C x 2 = width of container.
D = height of container (top flat or arched)/height of animal in standing position.

When you are returning home from the Czech Republic and you are thinking about bringing your pet home you can contact Petr Novotny at 724 240 359 or petr@jinopo.cz for information and advice about shipping your pet home. We are importers of IATA approved crates and we can also help you to ship your animal!