[Blort]

Well, their policy might be an issue:

Southwest Airlines does not accept live animals in the aircraft cabin or cargo compartment other than fully trained service animals accompanying a person with a disability or being delivered to a person with a disability.

Unless you can convince them its a seeing-eye-frog

Air Tran who is probably one of their closest competitors has this policy:

We accept small, domesticated pets that will fit in an approved carrier under the seat. This would mean no larger than 10" high X 11" long X 20" wide. The weight of the pet plus carrier cannot exceed 15 pounds or roughly 7 kilos.

Airfare for a pet is $65 one-way.

I think the paying to ship FedEX, DHL, etc., is probably worth it. If you are planning on bringing the animals through anyway, you could encounter all sorts of bad situations if they aren't registered with the airline and you certainly don't want them getting run through the x-ray machine.

I wouldn't try to bring the animals through and skirt the rules as you could run into all sorts of fines, impounding of the animals, etc. Maybe, I'm just old and paranoid now. When I was younger and a little wild, I tried that through an international airport and got the animal all the way through but it had to go through the x-ray machine which ended up killing the animal months later from radiation sickness (I think). I still feel terrible about that 20 years later.

I'm guessing most other airlines also charge a fee to bring pets which would make shipping the most viable option or finding an airline that allows pets.

$0.02

Marcos

 

[Blort]

I think they have turned down the amount of X-Rays in the machines since by one international reptile adventure several decades ago. I think a lot of the imaging done by the computers allows them to ratchet down the dosage.

Scott, let me know if you develop any Godzilla frogs :wink:

I'm probably just overly paranoid since my last job was in the personnel, industrial, and physical security field where I was paid to trust no one.

Marcos

 

[Blort]

For what its worth:

An article on pets and x-rays:
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q549.html

Another interesting issue is if the shippers, UPS, etc., start to x-ray packages. There is some talk that USPS may start doing just that:
http://www.vividlight.com/articles/1211.htm

Marcos

 

[Blort]

Considering that tens of thousands of people get x-rays done every day with no ill effects, I don't think we have much to worry about.

I have to agree with Navaros, that this is not the best basis for making a decision, but I think you are right in that it might not pose a threat. Here are the numbers I could find:

Maximum yearly exposure for adult (whichever is less): 5 rem whole or 50 rems deep or committed dose
For children it is: 10% of that or .5 and 5 rems
For pregnant women: .5 rem over the course of the pregnancy

Here is the only reference I could find easily for the amount in airport machines .15 to .17 milirad (1 milirad can be converted to 1 milirem; I also found a reference that the scanners used by TSA max at 3 rem/hr, which would makes the .15 and .17 figures make sense for the duration of time the bag is under exposure). So, on the high end that is .00017 rem which is orders of magnitude lower than even the standard for pregnant women. Granted the frogs could still be juveniles and in general more sensitive to radiation, but it seems that these are still very small numbers. I think you are probably safe, but I'm no radiologist.

Best,

Marcos

References:
http://cerhr.niehs.nih.gov/genpub/topic ... -ccae.html
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-colle ... r/part020/
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q549.html
http://www.orau.gov/reacts/measure.htm
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q3142.html
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/airport ... html#xray5