Hi there,

Can anyone point me in the right direction for information on bringing my dog to Spain - trying to find out costs for getting the pet passport etc she is micro-chipped already.

Thanks
Kate

Hi Katie,

Have a look at the Defra website, all the rules and regs of bringing animals to Spain is on this website.  It doesn?t list any costs because that largely depends on the vets you use.  Not all vets are registered to issue passports so my suggestion through my own experience which was to take my two dogs to the vet and discuss with them because it can be a complex issue as you are no doubt finding!  You can also ask whether they are registered and find out costs at the same time.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for that,I have been to the Defra website and it only seems to talk about bring animals into and back into the UK and not about taking them out - I will have a look again, maybe I missed it.

Kate

For anyone who may be interested…this is what it has cost for a passport from Vet:-

?21.50 - Microchip
?34.72 - Rabies Vaccination
?93.71 - Blood test 30 days after Vaccination
?68.56 - Passport provided and written up by Vet.

Total = ?218.49 per passport.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/quarantine/pets/eucountries.htm

Hope this is what you are looking for.

Thanks to both of you - very helpful information.  Exactly what I needed.

Kate

I bought my 2 dogs out to spain and sorted everything out through the vets.
You need to decide how the dogs are getting here first as there are different regs for land or plane.
Mine came out by land half the price.
We only got a one way passport so did not have to wait the 6 month for the blood test res,did thst once we got here much easier.
If you want the name of the company we used PM me.

Thanks Pepsi- I have PM’d you.  Kate

If you are making a permanent move to Spain, it isn’t strictly necessary to wait six months after the blood test, but rescue centres in Spain are experiencing a surge of animals coming to them from expats who for unexpected reasons, find they have to return to the UK and can’t take their animals because they haven’t kept up the inoculations and have to wait 6 months before the animal can travel.

We are moving permanently to Spain in the summer, and I am bringing our two cats with us but even though I don’t INTEND to have to return to the UK, I am going through the full process of getting the six months after the blood-test so that we COULD bring them with us if something desperate happened and we had to return. After all, it would be as tragic as leaving one of the children behind!

I would recommend being a responsible owner in the circumstances, as no one can know what is round the corner

Got all the information from the vets and it#s actually not going to be as expensive as I expected it to be so that’s good news!  Going to start in a couple of weeks, she’s already micro-chipped so the first thing is to get the rabies vacination and then the blood test.

Thanks everyone for all your help.

Kate

I just wanted to reinforce what Lynn said, about the sad state of animals abandoned in Spain.  Our neighbours recently did a skip-out back to the UK overnight, we didn’t really know them, but it appears that in addition to whomever they owed money to, they abandoned 6 cats to ‘fend for themselves’.  How can anyone do this? 

Most of them seem to have moved on but a young female, beautiful longhair, was crying on our doorstep for days… it took ages of phoning and asking around until I found a charity that would take her, and we still had to drive all the way to Benidorm with her and pay a donation, just to stop our own hearts breaking.  But we knew that we would be away for the summer (and spending a fortune boarding our cat), as well as possibly coming back to a different house, so we couldn’t start feeding her at the house or caring for her, only to do the same thing as her previous owner.  I thought it would be easy to find a sanctuary or shelter to take her in but they are all absolutely inundated with both cats and dogs dumped on them by Brits going home - some I spoke to said people would call them, they’d explain they were full and could not take their pet, then they’d drop them off in the middle of the night anyway!  Most of the shelters don’t seem to receive any statutory funding, and are very glad of donations either in hard cash or also items for boot sales etc - if anyone has saleable stuff to get rid of it was the Gatami shelter in Benidorm that came to our /Fluffy’s rescue last week,

Maya x