I often travel with my small pet parrot in a carrier in the cabin with me. At checkpoints, I take him out of the carrier, his carrier goes through x-ray and I walk through the metal detector with him perched on my hand. Usually the TSA people don't hassle me. Except this time. I walk through the metal detector and before I can put the bird back in his cage, I'm approached by a TSA agent with a cloth pad in his hand. He tells me there's a new policy: if you carry a pet through a metal detector, they insist on swabbing your hands and running the swab through their machine. Seems they believe you could be hiding something underneath your pet! Now this parrot weighs maybe two pounds and stands about 8 inches high. His legs give a clear space of about an inch between his body and my hand. No place to hide anything. But policy is policy....