Sunday, September 7--Jail Break

The crime wasn’t hers, but Alina did the time.

Japan is a rabies-free country, so they have some very stringent animal import laws to keep it that way. There is a very rigid protocol that must be followed in order to bring a pet from the States into Japan (unless you happen to live in Hawaii, which is also rabies-free). The whole process takes a minimum of 180 days, but closer to 210 days—which we didn’t have between finding out we were going to Japan and actually getting on the airplane.

First, your pet must be microchipped (thankfully done by the SPCA before I adopted Alina). Then the animal must have two rabies shots, at least 30 days apart. After the second rabies shot, blood must be drawn for a rabies antibody titer test (which can only be performed at two labs in the entire U.S.A.). From the day of the blood test, the pet must undergo 180 days of quarantine in the home country before being allowed to enter Japan. I still don’t get that part—there are absolutely no guidelines about the conditions of the quarantine. No one in Japan knew that I had a strictly indoor cat—for all they knew, I let her run free in the woods with rabid foxes and raccoons.

I followed every step of the import procedure, including filling out about 16 different forms and getting half of them stamped by the USDA, but we could not meet the 180 days of quarantine before we left. Instead of leaving Alina behind to be shipped over as cargo later (she may have done very well with this, but the thought of it gave me an anxiety attack), we brought her with us and arranged for her to finish out her quarantine at the kennel on base. For 34 days she stayed in kitty prison, listening to other cats meowing and small dogs yelping incessantly.

On Thursday, I paid her bail, and Alina got out of jail. She happily climbed into her carrier for the ride home, but was confused when she had to sit on the “wrong” side of the car. Once home, I showed her where her food and litter box were, then she seemed content to explore the rest of her new surroundings on her own. I thought she was adjusting pretty well, but she prowled around and cried most of the night. The next morning, I found her curled up in my sink in the bathroom. Today, when I went upstairs to make the bed, she had crawled down under the comforter, all the way to the foot of the bed. She’s having a hard time finding her comfort zone—at home it was under our bed, often in one of the duffel bags we kept stored under there (she wouldn’t go anywhere near the comfy kitty bed we put under there for her). Hopefully, once our stuff arrives, things will seem more familiar and she will settle down (like the rest of us).