The 14 specialists completed their military training in Germany and had received papers to report to Dallas. But they had to stop first at the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and there were no flights from Dover to Dallas.
No problem, said Jerry Godfry. He arranged to have all 14 picked up at Dover and driven to the airport in Wilmington. He helped process their papers and made sure they had food and drink.
He also checked to see if their cages were locked.
Only then did he bid adieu to the bomb-sniffing dogs, which were loaded into a cargo hold and sent off to assignments in Texas.
It was a relatively easy job for Godfry, proprietor of Professional Pet Transport of Frazer, Chester County. Often he is called with more challenging requests, such as getting a dog to Alaska, sending a couple of kittens to Czechoslovakia or transporting horses to Saudi Arabia.
Godfry will move just about anything. Need your parrots shipped to Portland? Your turtles to Tupelo? Your monkeys to Montevideo? No problem. He has handled four-footed creatures, two-footed creatures and creatures with no feet at all. Snakes and sharks fit into the last category.
He offers everything from vaccinations to paperwork to airport delivery.
"We're the only ones in the area offering the whole package of pet transportation," he said. "Say you're moving to California and your house is not ready in California and you're going to live in a hotel that doesn't accept your dog and you have to be out there before the dog gets there and . . ."
Well, you get the picture. Fido and Tabby need a travel agent, and that's where Godfry comes in.
A veterinarian for 15 years, in charge of the Frazer Animal Hospital, Godfry added the transportation piece about seven years ago after getting a request to get a military's man's dog out West. As more shipping queries came in, he decided to incorporate.
Not long after, he joined the Independent Pet and Animal Transportation Association, which gave him access to an international network of animal movers. There are 44 national and three overseas members of IPATA, according to Walter Woolf of Tampa, Fla., the group's president.
"I just got a lot of business from people coming out of the Army in Germany," he said. "They were coming into Fort Dix to be processed out, but the animals came into Philadelphia."
