By Jonathan Underwood

I am writing this article in early January as my wife, Annelise, ‘de-Christmases’ the house. When I was younger this was the time of the ‘thank you’ letter – I used to fill up my Parker vector with a new royal blue ink cartridge and set to work.

It was certainly tedious but a good way of making me consider all the presents that I had received. Even in the age of the email, it would be wrong not to enforce the same regime on our two children – mainly because if we had to do it, so should they! Watching them complete the thank you letter task reminds me of how bad my handwriting has become. Granted, it was never a perfect copperplate, but now nearly everything is written on a keyboard, there has certainly been some significant deterioration. I’m not sure you could tell the difference between my handwriting and my six-year-old Owen’s – except he can’t neccessarily, necesarily, necessarily spell as well…

This brings me on to form filling. In particular, the debacle that we are now faced with in terms of the paperwork required for pet travel into the EU post-Brexit. You can imagine the joy in my heart when I (and the rest of the veterinary profession) discovered - at very short notice - that the pet passport was to be replaced with a ten page ‘Animal Health Certificate’ (AHC) as of 1st January. I had a particularly warm feeling inside on learning that this was one of those forms where use of the wrong colour, an inadvertent lower case letter where a capital should be, or a tick in the wrong box could result in having to start the whole thing again! Furthermore, each certificate is unique to the country that the pet is entering from the UK, and has to be certified, stamped and printed copies taken of the certificate and all supporting documentation.

And the best bit of all? This has to be repeated every time a pet travels to the EU. Now, I am no bureaucrat, but it would seem to me that a far simpler system would be to have a single document with the pet’s identification in it, where you could record information such as rabies vaccination status and health checks. You could then use this document every time the pet travels without the need to fill out a new one for each journey. Maybe you could make the document blue and like a little booklet and give it a name. Perhaps ‘pet passport’, or similar?!

Apologies for the sarcastic rant! Here is some constructive advice with regards the changes to pet travel. From 1st January 2021, GB pet passports will no longer be valid for travel to the EU. Instead you will need an AHC. You will need to bring your pet for an appointment with an Official Veterinarian (OV) within ten days of your date of travel. You will need to bring evidence of date of microchipping and rabies vaccination with you. The AHC is valid for four months and will allow you to return to the UK within that time frame. There are obviously many other possible scenarios, such as where you are travelling, travel through other countries and how long you are travelling for. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into all these details, but I have written a comprehensive guide on our website (www.hawthornvets.co.uk/news). We have four OV’s at Hawthorn Vets, so while it may not be our favourite thing to do, we are well set up to complete AHCs and support you and your pet on their journey – whenever that is allowed!

Please feel free to contact us (01273 495227 or reception@hawthornvets.co.uk) if you have any queries about pet travel or anything veterinary.

Henfield Surgery
Hawthorn House
High Street
BN5 9DA