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A EUROPEAN court ruled that the dog, which escaped from its cage and was never again seen while it was being loaded on an Iberia flight, should be treated as lost luggage.
Mona, a pet dog, escaped from its cage as the ground staff was preparing to load it onto a plane bound for Barcelona on October 22nd, 2019.
Three airport vans pursued her across the tarmac in vain, but she disappeared without a trace once they reached the airport perimeter.
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Grisel Oriz, an Argentinian passenger, was travelling on a flight with her mother. She had entrusted her dog to the airline, as she weighed eight kilos or more and wasn’t allowed in the cabin.
Ortiz was unable to do anything but watch from the terminal window as her pet vanished into the wild.
She created a Facebook page to help find Mona and offered a cash prize, but after months of searching, she found nothing.
Ortiz continued to post on the page for years, calling Buscamos a Mona, thanking those who assisted her in the search for information and appealing to them.
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She wrote, “We have infinite love and faith that keep us fighting until the end even if years pass.” “Some may think that it’s all over, but we won’t stop searching for her.”
In another message she insisted Mona was still alive and ‘with someone in a nearby house’, adding, ‘they know she has another family and they are not at peace. One day someone will tell me, ‘I saw Mona, she’s there.”
Ortiz later sued Iberia for €5,000 in moral damages, saying she had suffered deeply from the loss.
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The airline accepted the responsibility for the loss but only offered a limited amount of compensation in accordance with international baggage regulations.
It contested the €5,000 Ortiz claimed for emotional distress, and a court clash loomed.
The airline argued that because Mona was checked into the hold without a ‘special declaration of value’, she counted as ordinary luggage under the Montreal Convention.
This week – a full six years after Mona’s disappearance – the Court of Justice of the European Union reached its verdict, and agreed with Iberia.
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The Montreal Convention allows animals to be classified as normal baggage when they are transported in the hold of an aircraft.
The airlines will only pay the same compensation for a lost bag.
The court said: “The fact that the protection of animal welfare is an objective of general interest recognised by the European Union does not prevent animals from being transported as ‘baggage’ and considered as such for the purposes of liability arising from loss.”
Ortiz’s lawyer said she hoped Spanish judges ‘will be more sensitive to the new realities of our society’, arguing that losing a pet causes ‘not only moral but also psychological and even psychiatric damage’ which current laws fail to recognise.
Under Spanish civil law, pets are defined as ‘sentient beings’, but that status does not yet extend to air travel.
Click here for more Barcelona News at The Olive Press.
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