Well, ah. Here’s a yarn and a half for you. According to the Miami Herald, a woman flushed her ’emotional support hamster’ down the loo at the airport after she was told that the animal would not be permitted to fly.
Belen Aldecosea, 21, was flying home to Miami, Florida from college when she says her emotional support animal – a hamster, I remind you – was denied passage on a flight by employees of U.S. airline Spirit. Aldecosea insists that she was initially told that Pebbles would be allowed to fly, only to be stopped at the gate.
She insists that a Spirit employee suggested that she flush Pebbles down the toilet, which Spirit denies. After agonising over the decision for a while (and considering hiring a car to drive to Florida) she did the unthinkable: she flushed Pebbles. Pebbles the hamster was flushed.
“She was scared. I was scared. It was horrifying trying to put her in the toilet,” Aldecosea told the Herald. “I sat there for a good 10 minutes crying in the stall.”
Okay, this is clearly traumatic for her and and a colossal stuff-up on the part of the airline, but I have questions. Was flushing the animal down the toilet really the only option here? Could she perhaps have smuggled it onboard in her pocket or something? Did she have a friend she could give it to? Did it cause waterflow issues with the toilet?
The airline should absolutely reimburse this poor woman.
A spokesperson for Spirit admitted that Aldecosea had been given the wrong information and told that her Pebbles could fly, but absolutely denied that the airline would have recommended flushing the animal down the loo – a suggestion which is, by any metric, well beyond an airline’s jurisdiction:
We can say confidently that at no point did any of our agents suggest this guest (or any other for that matter) should flush or otherwise injure an animal. It is incredibly disheartening to hear this guest reportedly decided to end her own pet’s life.
Aldecosea is now considering filing a lawsuit, after she considered the company’s response to the incident to be inadequate. Her lawyer, Adam Goldman, thinks that to deny a hamster the joy of airline flight is absurd.
“This wasn’t a giant peacock that could pose a danger to other passengers,” he told the Herald. “This was a tiny cute harmless hamster that could fit in the palm of her hand.”
