LAX-centered company helps overcome pet lag

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

LAX-centered company helps overcome pet lag

Facility handles confused animals in transit and under quarantine at airport-area site.
By Doug Irving
Daily Breeze

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Jet Pets is in the shipping business, but it's not that simple. It handles live animals, from show horses stunned by a day in the air to dogs and cats exhausted after a trip around the world.

Its kennels and stables stretch across the scrubby fields of an abandoned missile site. It's close enough to Los Angeles International Airport for the whine of jet engines to mix with the yelps and whinnies and clip-clop of hooves.

"I've shipped ostriches, everything," Hasenauer says. "Ostriches are not fun. Kangaroos. We used to do a lot of lions. ... We used to ship dolphins, have to hose them down. Sea lions." Hasenauer's father, Frank, worked for the airlines and saw animals sitting for hours in tiny crates on the tarmac. He opened Jet Pets as little more than a stable in the late 1960s.

A few years later, the federal government approached the small company about housing animals during the quarantine required for international travel. Hasenauer remembers that his father's reply was always the same: Sure, send them over.

The rules about shipping animals were looser in the early days. Baby elephants came through so often that Hasenauer learned to feed them by hand. A shipment of surly chimps once stopped over on the way to a retirement park. A member of the Black Panthers once shipped his own black panther through Jet Pets.

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http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/articles/2119452.html