How this site works
The chain from source to answer
Nothing on this site is written from memory or from another website’s summary. Every answer comes down the same chain, and each link is inspectable:
| Step | What it is | Where you can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Source | An authority’s own page or document — a government department, a border agency, a standards body or a carrier stating its own policy | The source register |
| Claim | One atomic proposition read from that source, with its locator, jurisdiction, layer, verification date and review date | The source register |
| Rule | A deterministic encoding of claims that can be evaluated against a specific case | The finder’s answer trace |
| Answer | A page, guide or plan assembled from claims and rules, showing its citations and dates | Every page’s source list |
A page cannot be published until each claim it depends on resolves to a real, read source. That check runs in the build itself: a citation to something that is not in the register fails the build rather than reaching you.
The four layers of a pet move
Requirements come from four different places, and they can contradict each other:
- Destination import rules — what Australia requires before it will admit your animal.
- Origin export rules — what your own country requires before it will certify the animal for departure.
- Transit rules — what any country you land in en route requires, even without leaving the aircraft.
- Carrier acceptance — what the airline will actually board, which can be stricter than either government and can change for a season, an aircraft type or a single route.
Meeting the government requirement and being refused at check-in is a normal failure mode. This site keeps the layers apart so you can see which one is about to stop you.
The three depths
- The free finder and the public pages. Complete answers, no paywall on facts. The finder screens your case for scope and for the hard stops that make a move impossible or much slower, and tells you plainly when it cannot answer.
- The $4 USD corridor guide. One origin, one species, one dated document: the ordered sequence with its citations, for people who want the whole pathway in one place.
- The $19 USD automated route plan. Your dates and your pet’s details evaluated against the encoded rules, producing a personalised, dated readiness plan with the earliest travel date the rules allow.
Neither paid product buys a different set of facts. They buy ordering, personalisation and the work of assembling them.
What “fails closed” means here
Every automated part of this site refuses rather than guesses. An unsupported country, a missing date, a stale claim or a case the rules were never validated for produces an explicit “cannot determine” and an official next step. That is deliberate: in this domain a confident wrong answer costs an animal weeks in quarantine, or a refused boarding at the airport.
Find my route — free