Help Bring Agatha Home From USDA Quarantine

Hi everyone, my name is Chris and I have a seven year old pet budgie named Agatha.

Agatha was born in the United States and joined me for over five years in Japan, I returned to the US ahead of her after Covid begun and finally was able to get her ready to be brought back stateside.

Usually you'd want to use a pet travel broker, but after a year of trying to find any who would work during a pandemic and coordinate for us to bring Agatha back, none had even responded to our emails or phone calls.

So with a great deal of effort and reading we arranged to have Agatha travel back on an ANA flight to the US. We contacted the USDA, the USFWS, the MAFF (a Japanese equivalent of the USDA) and started getting permits filled out and forms filed. Finally the big day came, August 17th, Agatha hopped on a plane in Tokyo and made her way back stateside...

Except upon arrival the USDA inspector discovered the Japanese vet had signed on the wrong line.

This became a frantic four day struggle to secure Agatha's safety. Because the form couldn't be accepted first we attempted to verify the document with the MAFF, who refused to sign off on the vets work, as the vet in question hadn't reached out to them earlier. Customs didn't want Agatha either, and the USDA needed someplace to keep her and assurances she would now be immediately sent to a Federal quarantine center in New York instead of the home quarantine we had planned for her. If I couldn't secure her transit and coordinate an acceptable route via all of these agencies Agatha would be surrendered to the USDA and then be destroyed for being a potential danger to the public.

I managed to secure her transport to New York, where USDA vet's took possession of her and secured her in their quarantine facility where she will remain for 30 days, a tiny beeping political prisoner.

She's molting too, so she'll be extra irritable to them!

At this point I received word from the USDA as to the outstanding bill for their services up to this point, including a lot of labor and overtime when we were trying to figure out how to save her from destruction.

So...I don't know how to explain this but, I do not have 4,000 dollars, but I also will not allow Agatha to be destroyed by the state. So I'm asking everyone out there, bird owner, bird aficionado, bird adjacent person of interest to help me pay for these expenses so I can, in 30 days, fly to New York and confidently retrieve little Agatha Christie and bring her back to her home in Washington. Where she will spend the rest of her presumably long life not traveling internationally and being possibly the most well traveled budgie in the world.