When Cookie was 9 months old, K and I decided to go back to Kerala to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Our destination was Calicut, the lovely seaside town where my parents lived. We decided to fly there with Cookie. I made calls to various airlines to find out how I could take my dog along with me. I was told by a couple that it was against their policies to transport animals. The rest told me I could take her along as cargo, but that I'd need an IATA-specified cage for it. Now, an IATA-specified cage for an almost-fully-grown Golden retriever costs around Rs. 15000/- (or so I was told), and there were no places where I could rent one in Hyderabad. We were debating about whether to get one, when I read the story about the two little pugs who were killed because a careless pilot forgot to pressurize the cargo hold. No way was I going to risk my baby's life like that! So then the only option left to us was to go by train.
In India, the rule is that you can take your dog with you only if you book AC- First Class or First Class tickets and have a coupe to yourselves. So if you're two people travelling with a dog, you need to get hold of the 2-berth coupe. There is no way to do this at booking time, all you can do is write a letter explaining the situation to the station master before the chart is prepared for the train and hope for the best. If you are not allocated the 2-berth coupe, you need to get written consent from your co-passengers allowing the dog to remain in the coupe with you. None of the Indian Railways officials we spoke to gave us any of this information. What we knew, we got off the internet.
There is no direct train from Hyderabad to Calicut, so we had booked tickets to Chennai, and then onto our final destination. Sadly, we were not allocated the 2-berth coupe to Chennai, and our co-passengers were unwilling to have Cookie in the compartment with them, so we were forced to shut her up in the dog box in the guards' van. The dog box is a tiny, dirty metal box with a slit for ventilation. We made it as comfortable as possible for her, and left water and toys. K spent the journey running to and from the guard van to check on her and walk her at every other station. By the time we got to Chennai, our beautiful Golden Retriever was a black, grimy mess. We took her to my cousin's place, cleaned her up and returned to Chennai Central to wait for our train home. I had been clever enough to book four first class tickets for the two of us so we would get a coupe to ourselves - or so we thought. Turns out, they will allocate the two empty seats to other people. Thankfully, our coupe-mate(?) was a nice young man who didn't have a problem with Cookie, so out journey was fairly uneventful. We really enjoyed our vacation in Kerala and managed to get a coupe on our return journey.
A few tips to end this post - Always keep your dog muzzled in the railway station. This will stop her from eating any rubbish that's lying around and also put the people around you at ease. Keep her well away from the tracks when there's a train pulling in. Carry lots of water and chew toys, and divide food into portions and put each serving in a ziploc bag. Trust me, you do not want to be measuring out food in a train. Carry a mild sedative with you if you fear your dog will react badly to the journey. Cookie settled in pretty soon and slept through most of the journey, so we didn't need to sedate her. Keep a first-aid kit with you. Carry a pooper-scooper and plastic bags to clean up any accidents. If you dog makes a mess in the train, clean it up immediately.
