Pet travel: the lesser known threats to UK pets

Immediate pet travel considerations most frequently concern tapeworm, ticks, rabies and pet passports. It is essential that pet owners abide with legislation when travelling abroad with their pets, but prevention against parasites, disease and spread into the UK goes far beyond legal requirements. The fluid nature of parasite distributions means that an increasing range of parasites need to be considered and general principals in parasite control and biosecurity implemented. This article considers some of these control measures as well as some of the more novel parasites that have entered the UK in travelled and imported pets in the past 12 months.

The Pet Travel Scheme (PETS) is designed to protect countries against the introduction of zoonotic disease. This legislation also serves two-fold to protect pets from disease, but there is significantly more that can be done to protect pets. For example, tick protection was removed from PETS in 2012 after the risk of Rhipicephalus sanguineus ticks entering and establishing in the UK was deemed negligible. The ability of mandatory tick treatment to prevent zoonotic tick-borne diseases entering the UK was also considered questionable. However, removing the tick prevention from PETS has contributed to the UK border being unprotected against the entry of tick-borne parasites such as Babesia spp. and Ehrlichia canis, both of which pose significant risk to UK pets. Pet travel advice should consider both mandatory and advisory parasite control measures in order to fully protect both the pet and the UK from exotic disease. The current PETS legislation is summarised in Table 1. It is important to always check the pet travel requirements of the country being visited and remember that the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man have their own regulations for pets travelling from outside of the UK.