Flight travel with pets can prove to be difficult experience, with passengers having to deal with their multiple behavioral changes before and during the journey.
A passenger flying from Colorado to California on a Southwest Airlines flight was reportedly thrown out for not keeping her 8-week-old pet under control and not following flight protocol, an Insider report said.
In a video shared by TikTok user Sara Price, the trouble began when the dog, named Sitka, travelling with an unidentified woman began whining which led to the flight crew approaching the passenger and requesting her to quieten her pet.
Despite the warning, the woman continued to pet her dog after boarding the flight thereby going against the Southwest Airlines policy, which said that pets must be secured in a carrier while boarding and deplaning from the flight. "The puppy was whining a little and the flight attendant boarding everyone walked up to her and said, if your dogs doesn't be quiet, you may not be able to fly," Price wrote in the video caption.
Things got heated when the flight crew asked the woman to stow the carrier under the seat and the woman declined to do so. The report said that the dog's owner then unzipped the carrier to calm her pet down. This infuriated the crew, who then returned to the gate and asked her to leave the plane.
The crew's decision to deboard her did not go down well with the woman, who said she would never fly on Southwest Airlines, in future.
"I'm not going to have you touch a thing of mine. You are rude. You are a mean person. And I will never fly Southwest again," she said.
Southwest Airlines reacted to the incident and said that their employees were trained to ensure passengers followed the flight policies and they had to take the step of asking the passenger to deboard, after she failed to comply with the rules.
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