Letters: Travelling to France with pets is not that difficult
Another reader says the process is just too expensive
One reader says that the mandatory health check before travelling saved her dog's life
Reshetnikov_art / Shutterstock
To the Editor,
Regarding your recent article about travelling to France with pets, anyone with a second home in France is eligible to get a French passport for their dogs.
This allows seamless travel between France and the UK and makes little difference to UK vets for medical visits, they just have to have vaccines in France.
Yea, dogs will still have to get tapeworm treatment ahead of every trip, but in most cases that is easy enough to do.
The Fitness to Travel assessment the dogs get should not be disregarded either.
On our return last November the vet found a lump on one of our girl’s legs that had not been there six weeks prior at her last assessment.
It turned out to be a very fast-growing cancer.
Without that visit we may not have found the lump for a further few weeks.
She had surgery and chemotherapy and is now cancer-free.
Everyone should keep the rabies vaccination up-to-date regardless.
We have two Bernese Mountain Dogs (and a cat) that we travel back and forth with every six to eight weeks.
They have been French since before Brexit, knowing it would likely be the nightmare it has become.
We have filled two passports already with tapeworm treatments and inspections and now just hand the stack of passports to the officers (because the rabies vaccination should not be transposed into a new passport.)
It’s not difficult, honestly!
M Wray, Var and London
Read more: Call for safer pet travel measures at French borders
To the Editor
We got our dog as a puppy last year and wanted to take him on our French holiday this year. We went to our local vets and paid £90 for the initial rabies vaccination, then had to sort the health certificate which cost £255.
I also had to locate and contact a vet in France near to where we were staying so that I could get the worming tablet issued and the paperwork endorsed to this effect, which cost £32.
So a week’s trip to France taking our dog, who was only 18 months old at the time, cost a total of £377 (€451).
This has now stopped us bringing him to France next year. We currently have two holidays booked. At current prices this would cost me £287 (€343) per trip, which is a lot of the time more than the cost of a four-night break.
Ben Johnson, by email
Have you travelled to France with pets? How was the process for you? Let us know at letters @connexionfrance.com
