Bringing a Cat to Panama - A Story of Form and (Dis)Function
The short version: For pet-travel into Panama, be sure your vet knows about the Panama-specific health certification form. Be aware that electronic approval of that certificate by the USDA is not instant. Know that transferring funds electronically to a Panamanian Consulate in the US is not as slick as it would be in Panama. And be aware that your airline will need to see and bless your official, original, authenticated, USDA-approved and Vet-signed certificate at check-in.
Now the story...
Lots has been said about bringing pets into Panama. Jackie Lange of Panama Relocation Tours has wonderfully detailed instructions in her Online Relocation Guide. Based on our experience, I learned a few important ‘gotchas’ about your pet’s Vet-signed, USDA-approved, Panama Consulate-authenticated International Health Certificate for entry into Panama.
The basic sequence is:
1. Your vet examines your pet, then fills out and signs a Veterinary Health Certificate for international travel.
2. You or your vet send that certificate to the USDA, where vet there reviews, approves and counter-signs the certificate.
3. You send the vet-signed and USDA-approved certificate to a Panamanian Consulate, where it is authenticated.
4. The Consulate sends the authenticated hard-copy certificate back to you.
5. You take the authenticated certificate with you when you travel with your pet to Panama. No pet entry to the country without it!
6. All those steps 1-5 have to happen within 10 days of your arrival in Panama. More than 10 days between the vet’s exam and Panama arrival mean the certificate is invalid.
I started planning for our cat-move well in advance. I researched the process thoroughly. I contacted and engaged Jose Saenz of Golden Frog to assist us with the vet-inspection process at Tocumen. And I reached out both to our vet and to the nearest Panama Consulate in LA (actually Long Beach).
The department of the USDA that deals with pet travel is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS. Here’s a link to the APHIS webpage about bringing pets to Panama. On that page, there are links to the online system that vets can use to complete and submit international health certificates. That online system is called the Veterinary Export Health Certification System, or VEHCS.
We had learned that a vet must be ‘accredited’ with the USDA to use the VEHCS system. So we checked the listings of USDA-accredited vets at this link. Sure enough, our long-time local vet was on the accredited list.
Weeks (months!) before we were due to travel to Boquete with our cat, we asked our vet’s office staff if they could fill out the required health certification forms. They said they were well experienced with this, and had completed those forms many times for cats travelling to many different countries. We thought all was good. So weeks before our cat-travel flight, we made a vet appointment for nine days before our planned arrival in Panama.
When Copa cancelled our long-planned cat-travel flight, we rebooked for another flight three days earlier. That meant we still had six days to get the International Health Certificate done. Our vet appointment was on a Wednesday morning, and we were flying late the following Monday. Do-able!
But....
It turns out that many countries accept a simple, generic international pet-health certificate. But Panama requires a very specific certificate that our vet’s staff didn’t know about. We didn’t discover this until some hours after our vet appointment when the staff had completed the generic, not-for-Panama health certificate.
We then had to scramble to educate the vet’s staff on how to find the correct form. I directed them to the first link above which includes a PDF of the correct certificate, plus a link to VEHCS to complete and submit the certificate. Fine.
Not fine. Your vet must be ‘registered’ to use the VEHCS system. While our vet was accredited with the USDA, it turns out that she was not registered to use VEHCS. The vet staff had to go through a process to apply for registration, which presently was accepted. Then they completed the Panama certificate online in VEHCS. But since the vet herself had left for the day after examining our cat (!), the staff had to wait for the vet to return from the beach so they could get her to sign-in-ink the new, correct certificate. Once signed and scanned, the ‘Submit’ button was pressed to send the certificate to the USDA for their approval and signature. The VEHCS system acknowledged the form submission and created a tracking number. The vet staff could check the status of the application using that number. The certificate’s status was “Review in Progress”.
It was now 2:45pm Wednesday afternoon. Still fine, I thought.
I had been in email contact with a wonderful man at the Panama Consulate, Francisco Guerrero. He had told me that I could scan the vet-signed, USDA-approved certificate and email it to the Consulate. He then would email me instructions to transfer $50 to the Consulate’s bank account ($30 for the authentication plus $20 for FedEx shipping). When I emailed confirmation of the funds transfer, the Consulate would immediately print the scanned certificate, officially authenticate the hard-copy, then FedEx it out for next-day delivery.
I have an account at Multibank in Boquete which I use all the time to send money to workers, stores and businesses in Panama. So I had asked Francisco if the Consulate’s account was in a Panamanian bank. Nope — it was Bank of America in California. I use a couple of banks in California, but none would do one-time, next-day funds transfers to a business. Wire transfers, yes. ACH (instant, low- or no-cost) electronic transfers, no. I checked Zelle. Same story — not for businesses. I finally landed on Western Union. Using either a browser or phone app, I could enter bank info and do a ACH transfer. I tested it by sending some money to my wife Debbie, and happily got an instant verification with all the details.
So, getting the certificate back from the USDA on Wednesday afternoon would work fine. We could email it to the Consulate, transfer the $50 and get our authenticated certificate back the net day.
But that USDA approval didn’t happen on Wednesday afternoon. The vet staff checked back on VEHCS every few minutes, but the status didn’t budge from ‘Review in Progress’. And the same story the next day, Thursday. All day Thursday — no USDA approval. Calling the USDA APHIS office produced a recording saying the office was closed due to COVID, staff may be working remotely, and email response would be long delayed. YIKES!
I sent APHIS an email anyway, giving our certificate’s tracking number and explaining our time-critical pet-travel situation. I also updated Francisco at the Consulate, who counseled calm and predicted a happy ending. He said I could opt for FedEx Saturday Delivery for an additional $20.
By mid-morning Friday, two full days after the exam by our vet, the USDA posted the approved document. The vet staff downloaded it and emailed it to me. I emailed it to Francisco, and used the Western Union app on my phone to transfer the $70 the Consulate’s Bank of America account. But a few minutes after I executed the transfer and Western Union debited my credit card, I received an email from Western Union saying they wouldn’t send money to a business. The wire was cancelled. It was Friday, 11am. Tick Tock.
Chastened, I drove down to my local bank and paid $35 them to wire-transfer the $70 to the Consulate. Once the paperwork was finally done in the bank, I took a picture of the wire order with my phone and sent it to Francisco. He immediately accepted it as evidence of payment, and proceeded to authenticate our Health Certificate. He later sent me the FedEx tracking number for Saturday delivery of the document. Yay!
I checked the tracking number on the FedEx site: Expected delivery 10am. On Saturday, 10am came and went. Now the online estimate was12 noon. Noon passed. Later, the estimate was 4pm. We finally got the delivery about 6pm. But it was 6pm Saturday, and we had the precious Certificate in our hot little hands, in all its stamped and signed glory, for our use on Monday. Whew!
I won’t bore you with how receipt of our thoroughly planned 48-hour-in-advance-of-Panama-arrival COVID test results were unnervingly delayed until nearly the last hour before our flight. (Advertised ‘Instant’ or ‘24-hour’ results don’t happen with Sunday tests for Monday flights.) But I will tell you that at the airport, surrounded by our luggage and cat-in-carrier, the agents at the Copa check-in counter were REALLY picky about every signature, seal and stamp on the Health Certificate. Apparently, an upstairs manager had a book with pictures of what the certificate should look like (and probably did look like sometime in the past), but which didn’t match our certificate. The gate agents didn’t think they could allow us to fly with our cat. Nooooooo! We pleaded, and finally convinced the agents that if the Panamanian Consulate had signed off on it— and they obviously had — that our certificate must be genuine and acceptable. It was just thirty more minutes of stress on an excruciating process.
I should note that when we arrived at the Tocumen airport, the MIDA and MINSA vet-inspection officials there had no hesitation at all about accepting our cat’s Health Certificate. And as a side note, Jose Saenz of Golden Frog was well worth his fee for smoothing and speeding the MIDA+MINSA animal-approval process at Tocumen.
We’ve now been at our Volcancito home for a couple of weeks, and our cute cat has acclimated beautifully. So Francisco was right — all worked out happily in the end.
Would we want travel to Panama with a pet again? Nooooooo! But if we did, we (and now you) better understand some of the pitfalls.
