A bizarre event unfolded on a Frontier Airlines flight recently that centered on a hidden dog. On a crowded aircraft, a flight attendant announced that someone had smuggled a dog onboard, and then asked the entire cabin to help identify the culprit.
Frontier Tells Passengers To “Snitch On Your Neighbor” To Find Hidden Dog During Boarding
According to reports and social media posts, the flight attendant said aloud that a dog was onboard and would not depart until it was found, imploring other passengers to speak up if they knew who was responsible. Passengers looked around, whispered among themselves, and searched for a canine interloper as boarding stalled. Ordinary travelers suddenly found themselves cast in the role of deputized investigators rather than guests awaiting departure.
Her exact words:
“So someone in here has a dog aboard. Listen folks, we are not leaving until we find…what we’re looking for…If you think it’s your neighbor…Go ahead and snitch on them.”
And here’s the video (which popped into my Twitter feed several times over the last two days…):
Some folks have wondered how a “hidden” animal could get past security, but the Transportation Security Administration’s procedures make it clear that pets, including dogs, are allowed through checkpoints so long as they are under the owner’s control and the pet carrier itself is screened. Proper documentation and payment for an animal to be in the cabin, however, are separate airline requirements, so there is no conflict here.
What This Says About Animals On Planes
I have written before about the nonsense that arises when passengers blithely treat animals as service animals for convenience rather than need. Fake service animals have become rampant, with many travelers claiming their pet is trained to avoid fees or cabin restrictions. The result is chaos: oversized animals in cabins, anxiety among other passengers, reluctant crews trying to enforce ambiguous rules, and now, apparently, entire flights turned into reluctant sleuthing expeditions.
Airlines should enforce clear standards for animals in the cabin, period. If someone wants to travel with a pet, there should be a fee and a clear, enforceable process. Dog barks? Ejection. Dog jumps up on someone? Ejection. If an animal qualifies as a legitimate service animal with recognized training and documentation, that’s one thing. But the current process of self-certification has led directly to the problems we see today.
That’s a more general observation, because it seems the problem here is that a dog was snuck on the airplane, likely to avoid the in-cabin pet fee, which suggests the owner was not clever enough simply to claim it was a service animal…
There’s another issue in this particular case. As View From The Wing points out, “Snitching on your neighbor isn’t the best way to handle any of this. It’s a recipe for harassment and conflict.” He suggests an announcement like “If you have an animal not yet verified with the gate, press your call button now so we can resolve it quickly,” which does strike me as a better approach.
CONCLUSION
In this case, it is not clear if the dog was ever found or whether the owner finally admitted it.
I like a more subtle approach, but I’m not sure that asking your neighbor to snitch on you was the worst way to handle this if there was a desire to get the flight out on time. Certainly that would have created hostility between the dog owner and the person who ratted the owner out, but my guess is that the dog owner would have stepped off the flight before paying Frontier’s $99 cabin pet fee, which likely was much more than the cost of the ticket itself…
We gonna digress into religion and politics like when Gary posted on this over at VFTW, or just focus on the misbehavior and ‘snitches get stitches’ angle?
I didn’t read the comments on VFTW. How did this go into religion and politics?