Questions—and answers!—about moving with pets to Abu Dhabi!

Today we received this email from a woman who would like to pet move to the UAE with her cat, from Canada:

I am planning to bring my pet cat with me to the UAE-Abu Dhabi and I have looked at your services and guidelines. My main question now before going ahead with the service is about the health certificate. Once I get the certificate from the vet, do I need to authenticate it at the UAE embassy in Canada or is the certificate itself enough when I arrive at the airport in the UAE? I really need to know if it is necessary or not because I wil then have to plan to go to the embassy before I travel. Also, what is USDA?

This is a great question so I thought I'd share our answer.

Our international pet import regulations are from the perspective of people moving from the USA to another country.  This is a bit US-centric, however at this time, it's a great starting point for researching a pet move.  With this being said, for someone coming from Canada to the UAE, the process would be a little bit different. You would get the health certificate and then it would need to be stamped by the Canada Food Inspection Agency, or CFIA, which is Canada's version of the USDA. This is a different organization, obviously, from the UAE consulate in Canada.

If you are utilizing the PetRelocation door to door services to transport your pet, we arrange sending the documents to the CFIA on your behalf. Otherwise, you would need to do this on your own, prior to travel to Abu Dhabi with your cat.