For the past few days, while Johnny Depp‘s dogs obliviously sniffed each other’s butts, the world hung on on their story, and the Australian government’s threats to put them to death after being smuggled illegally into the country.
A Change.Org petition gathered more than 20,000 signatures asking for the puppies to be spared, and the world’s media got the opportunity to crank out all those ‘Bart Vs Australia’ gifs it had been holding on to.
Depp and his wife Amber Heard were given a 72-hour deadline to remove the dogs from the country, returning them to the United States, or face the prospect of them being seized and euthanased.
Per reports in News Limited, Yorkshire Terriers Pistol and Boo left the Gold Coast home where they had been staying at about 7pm yesterday, arriving at Brisbane Airport in a convoy of four cars some time later.
Depp and Heard were planning to accompany the dogs back to Los Angeles, but faced with the prospect of a $250,000-per-day delay to filming on the troubled Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, they stuck around.
Instead, they opted to pay $400,000 for a private jet flight for the pups. This, on top of the $340,000 in fines they now face for breaching Australia’s biosecurity laws by smuggling the pups in, makes for a fairly expensive exercise.
This means that the dogs’ brief sojourn to Australia could end up costing in the neighbourhood of $740,000, chump change to the star of the Pirates franchise, but still a fairly eye-watering amount.
Yesterday, Kyle Sandilands got himself into a fairly amusing blue with Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce, accusing him of mishandling the situation in an attempt to come off as a tough guy.
Joyce, who made it his mission to torment the two small animals before, presumably, moving on to larger victims, Tweeted the following last night:
Dogs gone.
— Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) May 15, 2015
‘Straya.
Photo: Jason Merritt via Getty Images
