Dog’s Death On Delta Flight Raises More Airline Pet Safety Issues

Delta Airlines said it will conduct a “thorough review” of the death of an 8-year-old family dog traveling in a pet carrier on a flight from Phoenix to Newark, New Jersey, Wednesday. Michael Dellagrazie said his Pomeranian, Alejandro, was alive around 6:30 a.m. when he boarded the flight, but was motionless almost two hours later when the plane landed at Detroit International Airport for a brief layover.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Dellagrazie told Detroit television station WDIV. Vomit and other fluids were found in the carrier, and Alejandro’s blanket had blood stains on it.

The Dellagrazie family has retained an attorney to look into what happened to Alejandro during the Phoenix-to-Detroit leg of the journey to the New York City area, where the family is moving. Delta said in a statement that it will look into the situation “to find out why this may have occurred to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” and also offered to pay for a necropsy to determine why the dog died.

“We lost a family member,” Dellagrazie said. “That’s exactly what happened, and somebody has to be responsible for it. He was in their care, and they didn’t take care of him.”

The dog’s death raises new questions about the safety of pets traveling with their owners. In March, a string of three pet-related incidents in a span of about a week raised awareness of airlines’ handling of pets. All of the March incidents involved United Airlines, which for the past three years has accounted for three-fourths of all pet deaths on airlines.

On March 12, a French bulldog named Koketo died after a United Airlines flight attendant made its owner stowe the dog in the overhead bin during a flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Houston. United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said the passenger explained a dog was in a carrier to the flight attendant, who “did not hear or understand her, and did not knowingly place the dog in the overhead bin.”

The airline took full responsibility, saying the accident “never should have occurred” and that “pets should never be placed in the overhead bin.”

Then, a day later, a mixup sent a 10-year-old German Shepherd named Ingo to Japan, instead of Kansas, where the Great Dane that was supposed to be en route to Japan arrived instead.

While the pets all ended up where they were supposed to in the routing errors, the airline said in May that it was working with American Humane, the nation’s oldest humane society, to make changes that would improve safety for pets aboard its flights. Beginning in July, the airline will resume pet-shipping, but for cats and dogs only. The new regulations ban 25 breeds of dogs, to include pit bulls, boxers, bulldogs and pubs, as well as Persian cats. Pets traveling in the cabin aren’t affected.

For three years, from 2015-2017, United led all airlines in pet deaths among all airlines that ship pets, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records that show three-fourths of the 18 animals that died on U.S. airlines in 2017 were on the airline’s flights. The report said several of the animals had pre-existing health conditions.

United cited its volume and greater risk associated with shipping exotic species like birds and geckos, which are now banned, but even accounting for those factors, the airline still has a much larger rate of deaths per 10,000 pets than any of its competitors.

The Dellagrazie family is represented by lawyer Evan Oshan, who is also representing the family that owned Koketo, according to WXYZ, another Detroit television station.

“To say they are distraught would be a gross understatement,” Oshan said. “They are completely devastated.”

He said the issue “stretches beyond just pets,” he said. “I think this is the way that airlines, commercial airlines in general, treat people. They are treating people horribly.”

Dellagrazie said he will be present for the necropsy to learn more about how Alejandro died.

Delta said in its statement pledging a thorough review that it recognizes “pets are important member of the family” and said it is “focused on the well-being of all animals we transport.”

File photo by EQRoy / Shutterstock