Another Dog Died, This Time on Delta
Jennifer Billock June 05, 2018
Another flight, another animal travel mishap – this time a Pomeranian dog mysteriously died on a Delta flight at the end of last month, and the owner is still waiting for the airline to provide at least some semblance of an explanation.
Travel for animals has seen much better days than those of late. Last month, another dog died on a layover – though this time no one knows why. The dog’s owner, Michael Dellegrazie, is looking for answers.
Alejandro, Dellegrazie’s 8-year-old Pomeranian, was flying in the cargo hold on Dellegrazie’s Delta flight from Phoenix to Newark. The flight had a layover in Detroit. When the plane landed in Michigan at 6:30 a.m., Alejandro was fine. But before boarding the next flight, something happened.
“When we landed here in Michigan, he was alive at 6:30 a.m., and then at 8:20, he wasn’t moving, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Dellegrazie told WDIV-TV. “We lost a family member.”
Delta said a flight attendant was checking on the dog during the layover and found it dead, with no obvious explanation. Delta is investigating the incident.
Delta is “conducting a thorough review of the situation to find out more about why this may have occurred to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the airline said in a release.
This is just the latest in a series of mistakes with animals on flights over the past year – from accidentally sending pets to Japan instead of Kansas to the deaths of a giant rabbit and a French bulldog. In 2017, about 500,000 animals flew on commercial flights, and 24 of them died.
