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Traveling is often stressful—and traveling with pets can make the experience even more anxiety-inducing.
A distressing video circulating online is highlighting the potential risks associated with pets and air travel, as airlines face criticism for their poor handling of people's beloved animals.
On Sunday, TikToker Ariel Dale recorded a video of herself in tears, found here. "American Airlines lost my cats... No one can tell me where they are," reads the video's onscreen text. Meanwhile, Elton John's I Think I'm Going To Kill Myself from his 1972 album, Honky Château, plays in the background.
"This is actually my worst nightmare," she added in the caption. "They've already been in the kennel for over 14 hours bcuz their flight was canceled."
The video quickly racked up millions of views, over 640,000 likes, and thousands of messages of support.
While relatively uncommon, these types of stories are not unheard of. Earlier this week, for example, KIRO 7 reported that a Seattle dog owner's pit bull died, allegedly while on a Hawaiian Airlines flight.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, airlines "reported six animal deaths, injuries to four other animals, and zero lost animals, for a total of 10 incidents, down from the 19 total incident reports filed for calendar year 2019." While the number of incidents decreased from 2019 to 2020, it's still unclear what role the pandemic, and its subsequent effects on air travel, may have played in the decline.
A couple of days after the ordeal, Dale returned to TikTok with the full story. The TikToker explained that she was embarking on a cross-country move from Los Angeles to New York at the time of the incident. And, unfortunately, the options for transporting pets were fairly limited. "Finally I decided it was better to have...one day of stress than have four or five days of stress on the road," she said in the clip, explaining her decision to have the cats fly cargo. In order to be ready when her pets arrived, she decided to take a flight that departed one hour earlier.
Things went awry when, after boarding her own flight, Dale learned that her cats' flight was delayed, and then canceled. The cats were reportedly put on a new flight—but that one, she said, also got delayed.
Eventually, Dale landed at her destination and received an email instructing her to pick up her cats, as well as a call from an American Airlines representative. She says she was then given the wrong location to pick them up and was forced to spend nearly an hour tracking down the correct spot.
When Dale finally got to the proper pickup spot, things got even worse. When she told a staff member that she was picking up her cats, he told her the heart-sinking news: "We don't have any cats."
"What are you talking about? We don't have any cats here," said the staff member, according to Dale.
In the clip, Dale said that she "just dropped to the floor and started crying."
The staff member reportedly began making phone calls—but no one he spoke to seemed to know where Dale's cats were, either. "Nobody can tell me what's going on. He doesn't know what's going on," Dale recounted in the video.
Finally, after several hours, the cats were located and returned to Dale. While apparently distressed, they were both okay and alive.
"I got them home, and it is a brand new apartment which in itself is stressful enough for these cats," she added. "This whole situation is just bad."
Newsweek has reached out to Dale and American Airlines for further comment.
