Travel can broaden your horizons, but crossing international borders can stress horses and owners. The process becomes complex with travel on land, sea, or air. Required quarantines, longer distances, and tests for import and export increase the risk to individual animals, and arriving horses can impact the health of existing equine populations.

For owners who seek to transport horses out of or into the United States, the operation involves planning and orchestration of three crucial elements: logistical, regulatory, and medical. We”ll explain the basics by focusing on transcontinental shipment by air, as horses travel this method most frequently. Travel to Canada or Mexico might be overland, but the operation must still follow the three elements.

Logistics

To send a horse from here to there, no one just buys a ticket and pops the animal on a plane. Equine passengers travel as live cargo, and timing of their trips requires advance planning