Death of dog Joca boosts animal regulation on plane
O Fantastic This Sunday (28th) it exhibited, exclusively, the last known images where the dog Joca, a golden retriever breed, appears alive before embarking from Fortaleza to São Paulo. The pet should have been taken from Guarulhos International Airport, in São Paulo, to Sinop (MT), but was placed on a plane that boarded for Fortaleza (CE).
Upon realizing the error, the airline ended up sending the animal back to Guarulhos and, when the owner arrived to meet him, the dog was dead.
“When I arrived in Sinop, a Gol manager called me and said there was an error. That they put the dog on another flight that went to Fortaleza”, says João Fantazzini, Joca’s guardian.
The company provided a ticket for João to return to Guarulhos and meet his dog. The problem is that with this logistics, the dog would spend practically ten hours locked in a box.
The images obtained by Fantastic show the dog on Ceará soil. After the plane lands, it passes through the cart inside the transport box and is on its way to the other plane, to return to São Paulo.
“Then Renato, I don’t know who Renato is, started sending me photos. Saying that the company received Joca in Fortaleza, that he was fine and was receiving water”, says João.
In the video, you can see a person interacting with the dog inside the box.
“There you go. Little dog, calm down, there’s water. Daddy’s boy, baby. It’s calm, cute. It’s OK? He will return to Guarulhos”, says an employee who appears with Joca.
When the clock hits 12:38, the plane with Joca begins to leave Fortaleza. What happened next, the whole of Brazil found out.
“Then I saw him dead. I remember I put my hand on him, he was wet”, says João, crying.
The tutor says that Joca was five years old and healthy and happy. Why did Joca come out alive and be handed over to João lifeless? That’s the question two delegates are trying to answer.
Antônio Carlos Desgualdo is the delegate from Guarulhos. To the Fantastiche says it is the first time he has come across a case of such high profile.
“We have gone from a phase in which the animal was simply seen as an object, as property,” he says.
In Fortaleza, the police have already informally interviewed five witnesses. Ceará police chief Wilson Camelo explains that he spent 40 minutes on Ceará soil and that the investigation is trying to elucidate whether he was taken out of the box at any point.
“The time he spent here in Fortaleza was approximately 40 minutes. We will confirm this line of investigation with the statements that will still be collected next week”, he says.
The delegate confirms that the dog was alive when it was placed inside the plane that was going to São Paulo.
It is suspected that Joca had a cardiorespiratory arrest due to the heat.
“Due to the fact that there was saliva in the surrounding area, it could be that there was actually a case of hyperthermia there, which is excessive heat. But the necropsy will be able to clarify this”, says the veterinarian who gave the report.
Veterinarian Rira Ericson saw images of Joca in Fortaleza, before he died on the flight to São Paulo. According to the expert, in these cases, the ideal would be to have more precise temperature control.
“The ideal would be for us to have climate control or even a thermometer inside the box. And in an ideal world, we would have a human being monitoring the live load all the time, because there can be variations, both in temperature and behavior,” he says.
Box with wrong identification
The transport box in which Joca was placed belonged to the airline itself. The pet’s owner says that he paid R$2,400 for transportation and that he didn’t even have correct identification.
“When the box arrived with him, they saw that there were tags from other cities on the box, for a 13 kilo dog that wasn’t Joca’s. And this label here, which is green, says “Chiara contents”, was on all sides of the box. So, they don’t even pay attention to know his name”, he says.
João reports that he did not have any tag with Joca’s name.
This is not the first time that airlines have made mistakes when transporting animals. Fantástico has already told the stories of Mel, Tol, Zyon, Pandora and, now, Joca.
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