Feral Cat and Farm Dog Move to Argentina: A Drama in Three Acts

Prologue:

I glance across the room, and there is Norman, sitting beside his food bowl in a hinty kind of way. He has come a long way from that industrial estate in South Auckland where I rescued him some seven years ago—a kitten so feral he spent the first two weeks hiding under the bed. For this little interaction is taking place in an apartment in Buenos Aires.

Norman may well be the first feral New Zealand kitten to migrate to Argentina (or one of very few, at least). Often, as now, I look at him and wonder, How on earth did this happen?

But there’s more: Lucy, the farm dog from Taupo, is here also. Although she is my son’s dog, I look after her whenever he is away, which is often. He’s here too. And so am I. How on earth did this happen? But that’s a whole other drama.

This particular drama is about Lucy and Norman, and how, against Everest-steep odds, the feral kitten and the farm dog found themselves in Buenos Aires. So steep were the odds against, little less than a miracle was required. For in the universe of pet transportation, New Zealand is arguably the worst country in the world from which to attempt to transport a pet. Dogs, cats, horses and hamsters appear to flit freely around the globe from pretty much anywhere, pretty much all the time, so long as their papers are in order, but not so from New Zealand, Nanny State par excellence.

While a country supervised as closely as a kindergarten is a great place to be during a global pandemic, and I can attest to that, when all that energetic nannying is applied to moving a furry one overseas, well, it’s just not that great.

As befits a well-run kindergarten, to fly an animal from New Zealand requires the official services of your very own nanny, your very own “accredited pet transporter.”  There’s no actual law about this, I discovered, but there might as well be, since the airlines only accept bookings from members of this exclusive group of gatekeepers, with their captive market and freedom to charge like wounded bulls. Which they mostly do.

Act 1

It was thus a dark day, early in the process, when a quote arrived for the gut-punching sum of NZ$12,000 (that’s about US$8,000), roughly five times the cost of transporting a mere human. And that was just for Lucy. The company turned unsurprisingly coy when asked for a price breakdown. “No worries!” replied Brad, or someone with a name like that, in an email. “We don’t provide price breakdowns.”  It was unclear what “no worries” referred to, except presumably no worries for Brad. Plenty for us, though.

This opacity around pricing shrouded the entire nightmarish process. In the rare instances when information was forthcoming, it inevitably contradicted the previous snippet. Only Air New Zealand can transport animals on international flights from Auckland! Not true, even though it says so on their website. The only way to send a pet to Buenos Aires is through Los Angeles! Not true. Well it would have been true if the first part had been true: i.e., that Air New Zealand was the only commercial airline permitted to fly animals from Auckland. (They terminated their Buenos Aires route during Covid, so no direct South American flights.)

Fortunately, after wandering blindfold and despairing up and down endless passages of illogic and obfuscation, it turned out Latam were also allowed, willing and able to transport pets from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and not via Los Angeles, as we’d been told, but via Santiago, Chile.

But this is to jump the gun and glide over months of obscene quotes and dead-end investigations that made the whole expedition seem impossible. The alternative, though, which was leaving Norman and Lucy behind, was unthinkable.

The miracle came in the form of a pet transportation agency whose nannies did not wear livery or drive custom-painted company vehicles, and who more than made up for the lack of all that with affordability and efficiency.

Finding a nanny worthy of the name was not the end of the matter, of course. It was just the curtain going down on Act One. It’s all a bit of a blur now, Act Two, for I have blocked out various traumatic scenes.

Act 2

Vet visits, of course, lots of vet visits, many of which seemed entirely unnecessary. Rabies injections, health checks, worm treatments, flea treatments, more health checks, vaccinations, certificates, forms,  more certificates, pages and pages of rules and regulations to ponder. For all this a competent vet was required. We were not blessed with one of those. I can’t really blame him, given his lack of experience with  farm dogs and feral cats headed for Argentina. So he muffed various things: he failed to specify the active ingredient in the worming tablets; he got owner details muddled up. These little mistakes would come back to bite us at the eleventh hour, that critical hour before boarding when everything needs to go smoothly, because if it goes wrong, you are screwed, and because by then you are almost catatonic with the stress of it all.  

Act Two included comic relief to do with IATA approved travel cages (Lucy’s didn’t fit in the car and Norman’s had a bolt missing) and a ten hour car trip from the Wairarapa to Hamilton, with all my worldly possessions crammed in the boot, and with Lucy and a wailing Norman crammed together on the front seat because the back seat was fully occupied by Lucy’s dismantled cage. Only retrospectively comic, of course. Nothing of the sort at the time.

It was from Hamilton that our nanny—as the responsible adult in all this—was to take both critters to the airport prior to their flights (they went separately, a fortnight apart). The final two scenes of Act Two thus took place in my absence: those all-important visits to the Government vet for the final green light. Perhaps it is as well I was not present, as I may well have had hysterics when the various vet blunders from an earlier scene came to light, but Sarah, our nanny, did not. That is the advantage of nannies.

And so to Act Three, which opened with me taxiing down the runway in the surreal knowledge that Norman was cowering in his cage somewhere in the bowels of the same metal bird. All I could do was hope and pray.  

Act 3

The relief at landing at Ezeiza airport, Buenos Aires, was tremendous. Just a tad premature. For there remained the process of liberating Norman from the cargo terminal, a daunting prospect if my son’s experience with Lucy a fortnight prior was anything to go by.

The cargo terminal was a sprawling set of mostly empty, darkened buildings some distance from the arrivals hall. Empty and dark because it was the middle of the night—not an optimum time to elicit the cooperation of a quite staggering number of airport and government officials. First was the freight office, where I would sign a lot of forms, have my passport photocopied, and hand over a large wad of pesos. Then it was off to the office of the government veterinarian, who kept us waiting an eternity in an empty hallway before he eventually appeared. Not to check if Norman was still alive and/or healthy enough to enter the country or anything, mind you. His job, it seemed, was to get me to sign a lot of forms, photocopy my passport again, and relieve me of a further wad of pesos. 

Before we got to the area where apparently Norman was located we had to pass through some sort of gatekeeper. He thumbed through my passport several times. Photocopied it several times. Handed me various forms to sign in three different places and in triplicate, whereupon another official arrived to photograph my son’s friend Carlos, who was there to help with it all, and this made no sense at all. It wasn´t Carlos’s cat.

Scene three of Act 3 took place in yet another building, and starred a couple of elderly gentlemen who redid all the various unnecessary things that had already been done thrice more, and again exceedingly slowly. It  was hard to remain calm as the two took turns examining my passport, photocopying it, and making three fresh copies of the pile of previous paperwork which had now reached quite mountainous proportions.  A new man appeared in the midst of all this. His job, it seemed, was to go and check on Norman. He returned another eternity later with the good news: Norman was still alive.

 Scene four: the inner bowels of the desolate cargo complex. Suddenly men appeared from nowhere, at least half a dozen of them, and mostly operating forklifts. They hadn’t been there before. Highly active they were, lifting crates and thumping them down a few yards further on. I could see no reason for any of this. It was as if they were putting on a show, and perhaps they were, for at this point we were joined by yet another individual waving a demand for a very large wad of pesos. This was unexpected, as there had been no mention of it before. Perhaps this was why we were being treated to the forklift ballet, which functioned as a kind of  prequel to the appearance from backstage of a solitary forklift, and upon it Norman’s cage. There was no need for a forklift. It was a cat cage. A twelve year old could have carried it with ease. So there we were, walking beside an enormous forklift bearing a cat in a tiny cage to the gate of the inner complex, because Norman had to be ceremoniously transported to the gate before I was permitted to lay hands on him.

 At last I had him. Still alive, although he didn’t look particularly thrilled. Then we were through the gate and into the carpark where a taxi awaited to transport us to our new home in a vast city I had never even visited before, yet to which I had committed sight unseen. There was no going back, and this because of Norman. I’d just contracted an arranged marriage with Buenos Aires, if you will, and it had not been the most reassuring of wedding nights. I was the bride who has just met her pre-arranged groom at the altar and is filled with heart-sinking dread. But all that would change rapidly, for Argentina was to surprise me again and again, and mostly in a good way, although more about that next time.

I’ve written several books in my life. Here are two of them:

The Wrong Shade of Yellow

I was middle aged and homeless, soon to be penniless, and really and truly no different from that bag lady sitting on the bench over there. I couldn’t jack it in and go home, because I didn’t have a home to go to anymore. The bicycle and the tent were now home. Wherever I found myself on any given night was now home. And that meant, for tonight, Genoa Piazza Principe Railway Station was home.
I was cycling across Europe in search of Utopia, a place I believed was located somewhere in Greece. When I found it, I would start a new life there. It was my big, fat, Greek midlife crisis. But now I was having a crisis within a crisis. What on earth had I been thinking?

Everything will Be Just Perfect

From a review by Viga Boland for Readers’ Favourite: Margaret Eleanor Leigh is, if I dare say it, slightly crazy. But crazy in the nicest and cleverest way when it comes to entertaining her readers. Though she doesn’t classify the book as such, Everything Will Be Just Perfect! is a memoir about nothing being perfect, no matter how hard one tries. It’s also a humorous travel memoir, and what better way to travel from South Africa to New Zealand, from Greece to Wales than to move residences 92 times! Why would anyone move 92 times in a lifetime? Well, Margaret Eleanor Leigh and her mother, Polly, who ends up dying by the time all the moving’s done, have perfectly good reasons for doing so. And those reasons find readers sometimes appalled, occasionally surprised, often confused but always amused.

I really don’t want to tell you too much about Everything Will Be Just Perfect! because if you enjoy humor, you need to experience Margaret Eleanor Leigh’s crazy life, motivations, musings, fears and unfulfilled dreams for yourself. She spends much of that travel and moving time reading, observing people, writing about them, and submitting books to publishers. Then she watches her mail for rejection slips, gets them and moves on, because after all nothing is perfect even when Polly assures her everything will be.