HUMOUR
Print of a paw
|
AJIT DUARA observes a week of paw printing pet dogs at the JFK airport in the U.S.
|
"Pet dogs to be paw printed at JFK airport."
ALL of us, particularly frequent visitors to the U.S., have seen the news that foreigners are now to be finger printed at American airports. This is apparently for security purposes, to bring down the terrorist threat from sky blue to shocking pink.
But few of us have read the fine print of the new regulation, which states very clearly that pet dogs travelling with their owners will also now be paw printed.
The reason is simple. Intelligence reports have shown that some terrorist organisations in the Middle East have hit upon a foolproof way to sneak in — pretend to be a dog lover and take your pet along and no immigration officer in the dog-loving U.S. will suspect you!
The idea of taking the paw print of migrating dogs was a stroke of genius from a senior member of the immigration and naturalisation service, who does not wish to be identified. He says you can easily change the name of a dog from Rover to Spot, you can change the breed of a dog from a German Shepard to Labrador, but you can't change the paw print. Every dog in the world has a unique paw mark that needs to be kept on record. This regulation has now been in force for quite a few days and it has led to much confusion at the largest entry point in the U.S. — JFK airport.
On Tuesday morning, for instance, Major John Winchester (Retd.) arrived on a British Airways flight with his Fox Terrier, Skip (name changed for reasons of privacy). After being finger printed himself, he allowed Skip to be duly paw printed. The immigration officer asked him to fill in a form providing details about the dog. Under "Breed", the Major wrote "Terrier". The immigration officer was a little shortsighted and incorrectly typed "Terrorist" on his computer.
As the Central computer relayed the dreaded "T" word to the rest of the airport, all hell broke loose. Alarms rang off, JFK was closed to all air traffic and the FBI moved in for the kill. Meanwhile, Major Winchester and Skip had collected their luggage and were looking for the subway connecting the airport to Manhattan (very difficult to find). All of a sudden, the powers that be descended upon them. They were under arrest.
The Major protested saying "what's the matter with you buggers — he's just a terrier?" Unused to his clipped British Army accent, the FBI officer said, "So you openly admit that your canine is a terrorist?"
Unfortunately, this particular FBI officer was used to grilling people but unused to procedure to interrogate dogs. He vaguely recalled a media image of a suspected terrorist in Iraq being given a medical exam. So he asked the Major to open the dog's mouth, switched on his torch and bent down to gather material for a DNA test.
Now you and I know fox terriers. They look small but they are acrobats and can jump quite high (one of them does tricks advertising a particularly noxious brand of British beer). So Skip jumped up and bit the FBI man on the nose.
Well, you know the media in New York City. They latch on to anything. The New York Post ran a headline the next morning — "Terrorist bites FBI - ha, ha, ha!" — with a post card sized picture of Skip and no photo of the man.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday Madame Marie Godard arrived on an Air France flight with her Chihuahua "Sans Merci". Madame Godard was the wife of a radical auteur (the French word for movie director) and does not take kindly to finger printing, never mind paw printing her precious little dog. She was outraged ("you Kaapitalist peeg," she said), but submitted to the humiliation. Then she filled in the form and under "breed" she wrote in capital letters 'Chihuahua'. Now you and I know that a Chihuahua is the smallest dog in the world, not more than six inches tall and surprisingly ferocious for its size. But the man at immigration looked up and said, "that is not a dog". Whereupon Madame Godard, getting her French and English furiously mixed up, screamed, "is not a dog, eh, then what he is, eh, Osama Been Laaden?"
All hell broke loose. The next morning the very upright, and now very careful of fictitious reports, New York Times put the news on an inside page, with a very cautious and conservative headline: "Chihuahua allegedly mistaken for Afghan hound."
That was Wednesday. On Thursday, Prithipal Singh arrived on an Air India flight with his Lhasa Apso, "Jimmy" (all dogs in Punjab are called Jimmy). Now as you know, Lhasa Apsos have hair covering their entire face and are, therefore, very difficult to recognise. You can't tell a "Jimmy" from a "Tiger" (all dogs in Bengal are called Tiger). Sometimes these dogs can't even see each other's face, so they sniff each other from behind. At first the immigration officer was very sceptical. But Prithipal Singh said to him, "aha, I see, so it is because you cannot see Jimmy's face that you are taking his pawprint? Excellent security measure, my friend." The entire immigration department at JFK was stunned into silence by this unexpected praise for a vexatious regulation. The dazed officer handed him the required form to fill.
Smartly producing a pen from his inside pocket, Mr. Singh wrote under "breed", neatly and with a flowing handwriting, '"caste and creed not applicable to dogs" and walked right through U.S. immigration without any further trouble.
By the weekend, the new Director of the FBI, Mark Twain, and the new Chief of Homeland Security, Dave Barry, had cancelled the fine print in the regulation requiring all dogs to be paw printed at immigration. Speaking from his new headquarters on Miami Beach, Barry said: "These colour coded alerts only apply to the art decor architecture in these parts. Dogs are not a priority. People are. We got to stop these people from Cuba. They are a threat to our homeland. Particularly my home in Dale County."
Dog owners across the world were mightily relieved.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
