Flying FedEx

Shipping a small animal, like a house cat, across the country by air in a sky kennel is a fairly simple process.  After all, lots of people ship their pets when they move.  The process becomes a bit more complicated when you up the scale of the animal.  Say, you're talking a somewhat larger cat... like a lion.

Most commercial airplanes are fairly limited in how large a piece of cargo they can take, due to the door size on the baggage hold.  Also, it's important to remember that the cargo needs to go in pressurized hold; unlike your suitcase or your duffel bag, the animal needs to be able to breath while in transit.  Not surprisingly, most flights are not able to accommodate animals in crates much larger than those that would hold a large dog.  So what else can you do?

Surprisingly, one of the best options for traveling by air may be FedEx.

FedEx transports all sorts of livestock, from commercial poultry to race horses to, yes, zoo animals.  From its live animal desk, animal shipments across the country can be coordinated.  Shipments of large zoo animals require the presence of usually two trained attendants, who will actually accompany the animal in the cargo hold during the flight.  These attendants must undergo a thorough screening before they are permitted to fly, since they have access to almost the entire plane during travel.  A FedEx shipment is not something that you book on a whim.  Because of the size of the animals usually involved, the airfare for the attendants, and (assuming you want your keepers back), the commercial airfare to get back to your zoo, FedEx transports tend to be much more expensive than shipping animals by Delta or American.  It'll cost in the thousands of dollars, as opposed to the hundreds.

One interesting quirk about FedEx is that the vast majority of their flights all connect at their main hub in Memphis.  That means you don't usually get a direct flight anywhere (unless you are or are shipping to the Memphis Zoo).  Instead, you fly from, say, DC to Memphis, unload, then reload at Memphis and fly to San Diego.  On the one hand, it makes it easy to plan travel.  On the other, that means an extra set of loading and unloading a crate containing a large and potentially dangerous animal, and based on my observations, the loading and unloading process is the part of the transport that most animals (and keepers) find the most stressful.  There has been more than one occasion on which I've looked at the flight plan from the airlines, looked at Google Maps, and said, "Oh heck, we'll just drive it..."

The FedEx hub in Memphis is not a relaxing place.  There are hundreds of planes on the ground at any time, swarmed by a vast fleet of carts and trams zooming all over the place with luggage, popping in and out of various warehouses, each larger than some zoos I've worked in.  There is, theoretically, a designated holding building for zoo animals in transport, where their crates can be kept dark and quiet while waiting for their next flight.  I wouldn't know about that - the one time I took FedEx, the room was taken, so my animal and I spent five long, loud hours in a busy warehouse, hoping no one would back over us with a forklift.

Still, to give you an idea of how safe and reliable FedEx transport normally is, look no further than the most famous animal passengers that use the service - the giant pandas of the National Zoo.  As per contract agreement, all pandas born in the US are the property of the Chinese government and are to be repatriated at a certain age. FedEx is the company that transports them there.  Fun fact: While almost all FedEx planes are christened after the children of FedEx employees, the planes that transport the pandas back to China are all named after the individual pandas themselves.