A US college student has claimed that she was forced to flush her beloved pet hamster down an airport toilet after airline employees refused to let the animal on board her flight.
Belen Aldecosea, 21, said that she had twice contacted US airline Spirit to confirm that she would be able to bring her dwarf hamster, Pebbles, onto her flight from Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall airport to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as an “emotional support animal”.
Aldecosea told the Miami Herald that she had bought Pebbles earlier in the year during a cancer scare. “She was so loving. It was like she knew I needed somebody,” she said.
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However, when Aldecosea arrived at the airport on 29 November last year, Spirit staff informed her that rodents were not allowed on board the airline’s flights.
With no family or friends nearby and too young to rent a car, Aldecosea agonised over what to do.
At this point, she claims, a Spirit employee suggest that she release Pebbles into the wild or “flush her down the toilet”.
As her flight time neared, Aldecosea faced a choice - and decided it would be more humane to end Pebbles’ life than abandon her outside.
“I didn’t have any other options,” she said. “It was horrifying trying to put her in the toilet… I sat there for a good 10 minutes crying in the stall.”
“She thought she was following the rules,” Adam Goodman, a lawyer representing Aldecosea told NBC News. “Ultimately, the airline didn’t provide what they said they were going to provide for her.”
Spirit has admitted that a representative did erroneously tell Aldecosea that her hamster could join her on the flight, despite the airline’s “no rodents” rule.
However, the airline strenuously denies that its employees played any part in encouraging Pebbles’ untimely death.
“To be clear, at no point did any of our agents suggest this guest (or any other for that matter) should flush or otherwise injure an animal,” spokesman Derek Dombrowski said in a statement.
Aldecosea’s story comes two weeks after a similarly high-profile instance in which United Airlines refused to allow a performance artist to bring her “emotional support peacock” on board a flight from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
The broadening definition of what constitutes a service or support animal has become “a lightning rod for controversy”, says the Miami Herald, with some passengers grumbling their fellow travellers are taking advantage of federal law to get humble household pets on planes”.
United Airlines said that requests to bring emotional support animals onto flights have risen by 75% in a year, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Another major US airline, Delta, said that the animals passengers requested to bring on board for mental health support include “‘comfort turkeys’, possums and snakes”.
Both airlines have recently imposed stricter rules around support animals in response to the sharp uptick, requiring documentation from a medical professional and advance notice.
The traveller must also be able to demonstrate that the animal is tame and housebroken, following complaints from airline staff of bites, scratches and mess left behind by a growing menagerie of support animals ranging from squirrels to pot-bellied pigs.
