Medicine Must Evolve Away from Prehistoric Crabs’ Blue Blood—Before the Next Pandemic

UPDATE (August 1, 2024): Two years after our investigative piece, and due to campaigning by major environmental organizations like Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Pharmacopeia has finally issued new guidance to push U.S. biomedical companies toward synthetic alternatives to horseshoe crab blood! As we previously exposed, a half million of these sentient, prehistoric animals have their blood drained and are left weak and dying each year for the medical industry, despite alternatives being available! This historic step will finally give these animals a chance to rebuild their dwindling populations and live in peace. But we must remain vigilant to ensure that the industry continues moving in the right direction over the coming months, and continue to urge regulators to make the shift mandatory. Thank you to everyone who has taken action to speak out for these remarkable sea animals!

Original story posted July 31, 2022

If you got a COVID vaccine, or any vaccine—or really any medical intervention over the past several decades—you can be sure that the blue blood of 450-million-year-old prehistoric arthropods known as horseshoe crabs was used to keep you safe. But in the U.S., lurking behind this magic potion is a fragile industry stubbornly dependent upon the traumatic bloodletting of a vulnerable species, compounded by a sea of red tape thwarting the widespread adoption of a viable alternative.

I have a bundle of murky memories of visiting the Baltimore Aquarium periodically with my grandparents as a youngster, but vividly I remember two things: laughing with glee while being splashed by a wall of water at the end of a dolphin show (which I now, regretfully, reflect upon much differently: from the dolphins’ perspective of perpetual captivity); and being horrorstruck when a horseshoe crab in a touch tank was flipped over, revealing what appeared, to my 7-year-old self, to be hundreds of sharp robotic claws.

My grandparents told me to go on and touch him. So I extended a finger slowly like E.T., just barely making contact with the shiny surface, and then recoiled with a shriek. Thus marked the beginning and end of my childhood foray into hands-on horseshoe crab encounters.

Until this year, at age 34. I was planning to visit a friend in New Jersey this past June and remembered having read recently that these crabs (who are really more closely related to spiders than actual crabs) congregate annually on the shores of the Delaware Bay, home to their largest population in the world, to spawn and continue on their ancient species. Google Maps told me my friend’s place was just under an hour from the nearest hotspot. I had also read of the role these living fossils’ blood had played in concocting vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact that plunged me into an ethical quandary: I knew we desperately needed the shot, but I also knew that the “bleeding” of horseshoe crabs left me feeling oddly seasick. Ultimately, then, I knew I had to make it there to witness them, the beings to whom we owed our life-saving intervention, in order to process my inner tsunami.

In advance of my trip, I dove into researching just how, exactly, to maximize my chances of spotting horseshoe crabs in this pivotal act that has kept them surviving, without evolving, for eons. They aren’t just hanging out on any beach at any given moment. Each May and June, these magnificent beings appear in vast numbers on the shores of the Bay only at the evening high tide, and most abundantly during the full and new moons. Thus, the best time to spot their gatherings with enough daylight is on the few days of the month when sunset and high tide collide, within a few days of a full or new moon. It took my human brain an entire hour of matching up tide, sunset, and moon charts to pinpoint that sweet spot. I have no idea how these creatures make all of these calculations themselves, except that they must have unlocked some sort of ancient wisdom unbeknownst to our species.

After wrapping up a fun weekend with friends, I chomped down a vegan cupcake from Wildflower Vegan Café in Millville, New Jersey, and set off. As I drove down the lengthy road toward the East Point Lighthouse, a popular crab destination, I noticed my cell phone losing signal. My battery was hovering around 7 percent, the GPS sucking up all the juice my car charger had to offer. The sun was sinking lower into the sky. I knew I had mere minutes to arrive with enough light and enough cell phone battery to capture the spectacle. The road suddenly came to an end almost at the water’s edge, and I slid to a stop. I scampered over the dune, clasping my Canon camera and cell phone in each hand, hoping at least one would succeed in documenting the magical moment. There were several other people dotted about, lured by the vibrant hues of the sunset against the lighthouse. But I looked downward.

Immediately, I saw them, a group of greyish brown helmets playing bumper cars in a relatively calm pocket of water by the shore. I knelt down and, fingers shaking, started snapping photos furiously between my phone and camera, aware that it was the only chance I would have for the remainder of the season when sunset, high tide, and the eve of the full moon would all align. Through my lenses, I watched as the crabs tangoed together, males sliding up on females’ backs for their chance to pass on their 450-million-year-old, virtually unchanged DNA. Then a wave would pass, separating the pairs and leaving them to swim in circles again to resume the act.

I bent down for a clearer look. The entirety of their visible, above-water bodies, or carapace, comprised two connected, smooth structures, bending at the middle joint—plus a rigid tail jutting out of the rear end. Bordering this tail, on each side of the posterior shell, was a row of spikes. And seamlessly embedded into the round front shell were two deep brown, hard pearls—their eyes. They did not blink or move; there were no corneas or pupils. Yet, somehow, they stared back at me. As I moved my lens toward them, they’d slowly steer away.

The sunlight retreated as I walked along the shoreline atop a geotube. The Bay waves crashed with more fervor here. Clumps of horseshoe crabs attempting to spawn were knocked about, flipped around, and jettied back and forth. They were at the mercy of the sea, carried by its unrelenting movement. Were they relying on luck to eventually float them into less violent waters? Somehow, this strange methodology has worked without modifications for hundreds of millions of years. Despite eroding shorelines and rising temperatures, these crabs resist change, century after century, millennium after millennium. They stagnate in an apparently already impeccable state; it’s only the world around them, our world, that has evolved, unleashing troubled waters.

I reached a tiny inlet, where water had dug a channel into the sea grass, and the stench of rotten seafood met my nostrils. Upon their retreat back to low tide, the Bay had left dozens of flipped-over horseshoe crabs behind to die. I took in the sight over their undersides, the complex joints and appendages that were normally hidden underneath their sturdy shells. Their legs, wielding those alien-like pincers that had intimidated me as a child, pointed upwards, motionless. Here, they now fascinated me, a relic of a time long before I, or any of us, had ever been conceived. Plus, as an adult, I now knew they posed no threat. Alien as they seemed, these “claws” do not pinch; they simply swim and dig, the instruments that carry the crabs through their underwater realm.

I carefully stepped around the upside-down crabs and poked their bodies with my toes, one after another. All dead. Then, one began to move her legs like a claw game in an arcade. I reached down and carefully flipped her over just before the next wave approached. Slowly, she pushed herself back into the water and was joined by one of her peers. There was no time to reflect on her near-death experience; only to complete that singular mission of carrying on the species.

I sat on the geotube, filming as the final rays of sun were overtaken by moonlight. In those 30 minutes, I saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of crabs flipped around by the waves. Any who were left on land flung their rigid tails up and down, bucking their bodies and waving their legs frantically. Through this series of motions, most were able to right themselves without help. Their peculiar methods, again, worked.

By the time I packed up to leave, everyone else who’d come for the sun’s glorious exit was long gone. I drove back up the dirt road with 4 percent left on my phone battery, begging my signal to return and chart my course home. But the surrealness of the experience lingered; awe rushed over me and calmed my nerves. I’d just seen a process that originated long before humankind, and that somehow persisted, just as it always was, through the birth and death of the dinosaurs, alternating ice ages and interglacials, and the rise and fall of emperors and dynasties.

But now, their species will either sink or swim in response to perhaps their greatest threat yet: modern man.

The decline of the American horseshoe crab, also known as the Atlantic horseshoe crab, began decades ago, first spawned by the roundup of millions of crabs to be ground up into fertilizer in the early 1900s, and then exacerbated by overfishing for bait (used to catch other fishes and sea snails), as well as strandings on man-made structures. By 2002, there remained only just over 300,000 individuals left in the Delaware Bay, down from over 1 million in 1990.

The most calculated, organized, and enduring assault on horseshoe crabs in the 21st century, though, has been that thing that propelled my visit to the Delaware Bay in the first place: horseshoe crab bleeding for human medicine. Scientifically (or at least pharmaceutically) speaking, their blue blood is pure gold—to the tune of about $60,000 per gallon. The clotting agent unique to horseshoe crab blood is used to create Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), which is instrumental in modern medicine because it detects endotoxins—deadly poisons to the human bloodstream. Today in the United States, crab-derived LAL is the nearly universal tool used to protect vaccines and other medical equipment from these toxins. Every single childhood shot, every intravenous drug, dialysis equipment, insulin, medical implants, and yes, every single American COVID vaccine, were brought to you by horseshoe crabs. All in all, LAL has evolved into an approximately $100 million industry in this country alone.

Among the Atlantic horseshoe crab’s cousins, the Chinese horseshoe crab was recently classified as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List, owing to intensive harvesting by the medical industry in Asia, and now conservationists worry that the American species isn’t far behind. Here, since their crash in the early 2000s, populations of the American species had somewhat stabilized, thanks both to nonprofit programs like reTURN the Favor, whose volunteers patrol beaches and flip over thousands of stranded crabs, as well as legal protections, like bans on the capture of female crabs for fishing bait. Such regulations, promulgated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), were designed not for the crabs’ sake, but to protect migrating shorebirds like the red knot, who feast on horseshoe crab eggs each summer.

Despite these efforts, though, by 2013, red knot population levels had dropped by 80 percent over the course of 10 years, earning the bird a designation of “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet that didn’t faze the ASMFC earlier this year when it voted to lift horseshoe crab harvesting restrictions in blatant defiance of the ESA in a move Defenders of Wildlife blasted as “hastening the [red knot] species’ march toward extinction.” Environmentalists further warn that horseshoe crab numbers correspondingly remain at historically low numbers, and the IUCN still lists the American crab as “vulnerable to extinction.” (It should be noted that IUCN classifications carry no legal mandate, and although some countries have implemented protective measures at a national scale, the United States has missed the boat.)

Each year, the American biomedical industry uses 500,000 horseshoe crabs, a figure that has likely surged with the rush to deliver a COVID vaccine to billions worldwide. The so-called “harvesting” process is as follows: “Collectors” wade through the waters, grabbing crabs who come ashore to spawn. South Carolinian crabs in particular have fared prolonged disturbances, as they’re rounded up into ponds for days or weeks by the $22-billion Charles River Laboratories (aided and abetted by the state’s lax policies) before it extracts up to half of the crabs’ entire blood volume. (Update: As I was finalizing this story for publication, I learned of a monumental legal victory for crabs who were being poached by the thousands in the dead of night by Charles River contractors in South Carolina’s Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Thanks to Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center, this region is now protected.)

At the lab, crabs are fastened into what looks like a stationary assembly line, and a needle inserted into the middle of their backs, in the highly sensitive area containing their heart between the two sections of their shell, siphons their pale blue blood into glass bottles reminiscent of milk jugs. They are bled just enough to be weakened, but not enough to die. About 30 percent perish anyway. The remainder are released, exhausted, to attempt to recover in the wilderness. Many don’t, succumbing to the effects of blood loss compounded by water deprivation and temperature changes. Piles of dead horseshoe crab bodies have been documented on the shoreline in the aftermath of these harvests. After studying these consequences, researchers from Plymouth State University declared that “it is critical that their role in medical research does not disrupt their natural role as a keystone species.”

In the midst of a catastrophe like COVID, where a robust vaccine supply is crucial to our own species, we especially should not be relying on the blood of such a vulnerable animal to ensure our safe supply of medical tools. For the past 20 years, an effective, man-made alternative has been at the ready, in which a horseshoe crab gene is cloned, and cells grown from it are cultured in a lab to produce commercial-grade recombinant factor (rFC). rFC is already displacing horseshoe crab blood across Europe and trickling into Asia. In the United States, though, our revolving-door bureaucracy, like the crabs themselves, appears steadfastly opposed to evolution.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates LAL, has excused itself from governing rFC, so, technically, biomedical companies may make the shift—with a small catch. According to U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), which sets standards for the medical industry that are then enforced by the FDA, they must undertake time-consuming and costly steps to document that rFC is performing just as well as its animal-based predecessor. Plus, in the U.S., rFC has been patented by a single company (at least, until it expires later this year), which can fix its prices and make it less attractive to vaccine and device makers. In this foaming mess of red tape, only one maker, Eli Lilly, has set sail on a more humane trajectory with rFC, while the rest of the industry tightly clings to their billions. (As I publish this, news has just broken that the aforementioned foe, Charles River Laboratories, not to be thwarted by its South Carolina defeat, has expanded its crab harvesting operations into Cape Cod—rather than shift to rFC.)

In mid-2020, as the pandemic floodgates opened, USP, which had been considering changes to its standards to recommend rFC, abruptly reversed course, citing “comments” it received (perhaps by the industry itself, which stood to turn immediate profits amidst the calamity) requesting further research on the alternative’s efficacy. The move cemented the use of Atlantic horseshoe crabs in hundreds of millions of COVID vaccines and will likely stall a widespread transition to rFC for another four years—despite the European Pharmacopeia already embracing it, and existing scientific research touting its success.

If I’ve learned anything from my encounters with horseshoe crabs—once marked by horror, now by marvel—it’s that human beings, unlike them, are imperfect but have an infinite capacity for transformation of thought and behavior. And, unlike theirs, our 300,000-year presence has been but a mere blip on this 4.5-billion-year-old rock. We must turn the tides on our destructive conquest of sea life before the next global health crisis drives horseshoe crabs, and with them, shorebirds like red knots, to extinction. Or, if not for them, let’s do it to ensure a stable supply of our own life-saving innovations, lest we, like t-rex and brontosaurus before us, become just another visitor on the horseshoe crab’s 450-million-year journey.

Thank you to Tina Marie Johnson of Blue Mountain Poetry Salon for the coaching behind this piece.

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Here’s Why Trademarked Glowing Fish Aren’t Such a Bright Idea

Saltwater aquariums, though prized for their glorious colors and living reefs, are a massive undertaking. And the havoc the exotic fish trade wreaks on tropical sea life is no secret. But for people who are itching to adorn their homes with vibrant fish, science came up with an easy solution: fluorescent freshwater fish. And the pet industry lapped it up–but at what cost?

A couple years ago I stumbled upon the GloFish® website–yes, trademark and all–and I was transfixed by the words: “GloFish® fluorescent fish are born brilliant! They are not painted, injected or dyed. They inherit their harmless, lifelong color from their parents. They get their stunning color from a fluorescence gene and are best viewed under a blue light.”

I was floored. It read like an advertisement for a new car. Toying with living beings this way hardly seemed harmless. I needed to know more.

These fish were among the first genetically modified animals to have been made available on a commercial scale. But their journey to pet store shelves was not quite intentional. At the turn of the 21st century, scientists from Singapore were attempting to engineer fish who could glow in the presence of certain environmental toxins as a biomarker for pollutants. They inserted fluorescent jellyfish genes into zebrafish, creating the first iteration of glowing freshwater fish.

The patented technology eventually caught the eye of the company that would ultimately create and trademark the GloFish, available now in zebrafish, tetras, danios, sharks, and barbs. As I write this, the brand is currently marketing its “Mardi Gras collection” on its website, comprising two Moonrise Pink tetras, two Galactic Purple tetras, and two Sunburst Orange tetras, to commemorate the festive occasion.

Video captured at a Virginia Petco store

Despite opposition from groups like the Center for Food Safety, the glowing fish made their way to American store shelves with a stamp of approval from officials who claimed that the captive fish posed no threat to wildlife or the food supply. (And a study later attempted to back that up, documenting that non-GMO male fish out-competed GloFish with female mates, which would eventually lead to the disappearance of the fluorescent trait in a population–should a stray GloFish ever make his way into the natural environment, that is.)

The GloFish line, from a commercial perspective, has been a massive success. The company’s sales now comprise about 10 percent of the entire aquarium industry.

And it’s easy to see why: Many people don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining a saltwater aquarium just to enjoy brilliantly colored fish in their living rooms. Freshwater is (relatively) easy. Plus, more and more consumers are becoming aware of the death and destruction caused by the saltwater fish trade, which pulls over 20 million fish from the waters of places like the Philippines and Hawaii every year and results in six fish deaths per live fish sold due to dangerous and cruel capture and shipping methods. And let’s not get started on the extensive coral reef damage.

Breeding fish in a captive, contained environment seemingly circumvents most of those issues.

But I was still left wondering if, throughout these past two decades of tinkering with the genetics of these tiny beings in a lab, anyone ever stopped to consider a fundamental question: What’s in it for the fish themselves? Admittedly, apart from making them the life of a house party, the modification doesn’t seem to inflict any other known physical changes on them. They eat, swim, and live just like regular zebrafish, tetras, and barbs. The process of breeding fish from already modified fish is not inherently invasive (unlike chemically dyeing or injecting inks into fish–two common, but undoubtedly cruel, practices in the aquarium industry that lead to illness and high mortality).

Yet, clearly, fluorescence won’t provide an average tetra with an evolutionary advantage, either. (Imagine a neon orange freshwater fish trying to hide from a predator behind a few strands of seaweed or a pile of grey rocks.)

So are we left with net result of zero in our cost-benefit analysis of GloFish welfare? Not quite.

The moment that Yorktown Technologies, the original company behind the GloFish, entered the picture, this genetic manipulation in the name of science became a gimmick.

The goal: Make the look and feel of saltwater tanks more accessible. Make freshwater fish prettier, more enticing, more consumable. Like a vacuum, a new car, or a frozen burrito, these fish needed to be branded.

The aquarium industry has turned these fishes’ genetics into a commodity that it markets to us as an innovative way to spruce up our home decor. After all, like any industry, it has to churn out fresh products to keep us interested. And, so far, it’s worked: There are over 9 million fish sold by this multi-billion-dollar industry living in American homes, from an endless array of Betta fish varieties to the dainty angelfish and the goldfish brought home after a carnival game victory.

For many years, I was one of the millions of consumers lured in by the appeal of having my very own fish tank. In college, I was gifted with a tetra who looked remarkably like the “Moonrise Pink” variety of GloFish–with one major exception: He didn’t glow.

Miraculously, I loved this fish, whom I named Clapper, just the same, regardless of his slightly less lustrous hue. Clapper traveled with me from dorm room to dorm room, to my first house after graduation, and to my apartment after my relationship with my boyfriend at the time fell apart.

We shared many memories, including one that made my heart skip a beat: Midway through a thorough tank cleaning, I noticed that Clapper was missing from the jug I’d temporarily placed him in. Within a few seconds, I found him–on the floor, wedged between the washing machine and the wall. Somehow, I managed to slowly slide the machine out enough–without crushing the tiny being–and scoop him back into the water before suffocation set in.

I spent every day for months silently apologizing to him. Because I loved him.

I was diligent with his care, and Clapper remained physically healthy up until a couple of days before he passed. He met his expected lifespan of five years–and then some.

Yes, we shared many memories: memories of me crying; memories of me laughing; and, most often, memories of me leaving and coming back again, sometimes with a friend, or a new love, or a new painting.

Every day, though, Clapper stayed there, swimming in circles, silently watching me from behind his glass wall.

I didn’t know the inner toll captivity was taking on this social being for much of his life. I didn’t realize that he was lonely and isolated because tetras need schools to thrive. Or that with only a few artificial plants and rocks to enrich his environment, his life was just a slow, drawn-out death.

Today, most of us have started to question the ethics of confining magnificent mammals like dolphins and whales to the equivalent of a bathtub at marine parks for guests to gawk over. As the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) explains, films like Blackfish have “challenged people to recognize the cruelty of keeping large, intelligent, and sentient animals in such small tanks.” However, AWI continues, fish are also “sentient—showing far more cognitive abilities than they are given credit for—and few, if any, spend their entire lives in the wild in the volume of water contained in a standard fish tank.”

Remember the fish who used a rock as a tool to crack open his meal? Or the pufferfish who builds an intricate sand sculpture to attract a mate? Fish scientist Dr. Culum Brown states that “it would be impossible for fish to survive as the cognitively and behaviorally complex animals they are without a capacity to feel pain.”  The scientific research for fish complexity and sentience abounds, and in 2018, Smithsonian Magazine (finally) declared, “It’s official: Fish feel pain.”

Gaining traction for the notion of fish as individuals worthy of ethical consideration is an uphill battle, though, especially with outfits like Amazon offering up 1-gallon aquariums (a volume infinitely too small to house any fish species long-term) accompanied by descriptions like, “Compact design fits almost anywhere – perfect for dorm, office or home.”

As my fellow animal advocates and I try to rewrite the public discourse on how we ought to think about our relationships with fish, such captions continue hammering home the message: Fish are decorations, trinkets, objects. We don’t maximize their space for their well-being; we minimize it for our convenience.

And, in the case of our genetically engineered friends: We don’t have to settle for dull fish when we can have spectacularly striking GloFish.

It’s time to embrace fish for who, not what, they are. And we can start by letting them keep their natural colors.

 Petition closed with 499 signatures.

Our Cockatoo Died Flying Cargo. Don’t Let This Happen Again.

He was supposed to live 70 years. Instead, as he traveled to his forever home in paradise, a series of mistakes and, ultimately, negligence killed him.

When I was about 11 years old, my family adopted an umbrella cockatoo. Instead of resembling the mighty white birds with towering head crests soaring through the forests of Indonesia, though, he was skinny, trembling, and rather naked when I first laid eyes on him.

His pale grey torso reminded me of a turkey corpse, plucked bare before Thanksgiving dinner. But he had inflicted this damage all on his own. Before my family took him in, his first guardian, who’d had him since he first hatched, gave birth to a human child, who soon consumed all her attention. The bird was often relegated to his cage, and there, languishing in boredom and isolation, he grew neurotic and angry, quite possibly jealous of the newborn stealing away all his mom’s affection.

So this bird turned on his own flesh, plucking feathers from his chest and dancing anxiously to and fro just to release some energy.

Such behavior is all too common in the captive population of parrots worldwide. Because of captive breeding and the illegal wildlife trade, tens of millions of parrots now occupy US homes and facilities–and thousands of them end up homeless every year as they become too rambunctious and under-stimulated in a caged environment or they outlive their human caretakers.

This particular cockatoo was one such bird–but, fortunately, my mom was ready and willing to jump to his rescue.

He came into our home with the name Lilah. But at the first vet visit, we learned that Lilah was indeed a he, not a she. Yet the name remained, as it was the primary tool from the English language he’d clung to for communication with our species. We couldn’t take that from him.

“Lilah?” he’d often ask in a quivering voice, as though pleading for food, affection, anything at all.

And those things, he soon learned, he would receive in abundance. At the offset, he became my cuddlebug. We were, more or less, around the same age. As an only child, I began to see him as a bit of a younger, talkative brother–like a toddler, first learning about the world and expressing his thoughts via a series of babbles and chuckles.

One evening, I approached his cage wearing a bright red tank top and reached in for some snuggle time, as I had done dozens of times before. But this time was different. This time, he rewarded me with a sharp, deep bite to my finger. Blood immediately pooled, and I wailed in response and ran away.

At that time, I was a loud, boisterous preteen with an opinion about everything. And the vivid red hue of my shirt was like a blaring “danger” sign. I’d scared him, and he reacted the only way he knew how.

But the incident scarred me enough to keep a healthy distance from him from then forward. And in my sulky teenage years, I found myself increasingly annoyed by his calls and shrieks, natural vocalizations that are used freely by flocks of wild parrots inhabiting the jungle, but are often found to be a nuisance by those attempting to confine these exuberant birds indoors.

I’ve always loved animals, but with Lilah, I could only love him from afar.

My mom, though, never wavered in her bond with him. Despite the handful of times he’d hauled off and pierced her nose with his beak upon being frightened by a man in a baseball cap or the vacuum cleaner, she adored him.

So, naturally, as my parents planned their big move to the Big Island of Hawaii in 2014, Lilah was coming with them. My mom plotted out the magnificent habitat she’d build for him in paradise, where he could soak in the sunlight, watch the flittering yellow finches, and eat exotic tropical fruits for decades to come.

But Lilah never made it there.

Hawaii has a host of complex requirements for importing animals, and birds specifically, to prevent the spread of disease–and my mom mastered them backwards and forwards.

A quarantine for 7 days at our local vet and a mountain of paperwork: check.

As my parents prepared to depart, leaving their two dogs and Lilah at the animal intake area of the airport, I bid farewell to the bird who’d once felt a little like my nemesis during my darkest periods of teenage angst, but now, cowering in his carrier, was like a fearful little child once again.

I didn’t know then that it would be our final goodbye, but it felt peaceful, like a long-awaited truce.

“I love you,” I said.

“Lilah?” he replied.

Later that night, my mom called me from California. Unfortunately, the vet had incorrectly completed the quarantine paperwork necessary for Lilah to enter Hawaii, so he had to redo his 7-day quarantine at a vet there. My parents opted to continue on to the islands with their two dogs and pay an animal transport company a hefty sum of money to handle Lilah’s trip a week later.

He would be in good hands, they were promised. He’d be given the utmost care.

A week later, I received another call.

“Laura, Lilah’s dying. He’s dying!” My mom’s blubbering voice could hardly make out the words.

He was in her lap, having just been picked up from the airport, and was listless, lethargic, barely hanging on.

“Can’t you find an emergency vet?” I begged over the phone.

But they were in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from anyone who could help. He died there, in her lap, moments later, after suffering a seizure.

To this day, my mom has trouble speaking about this tragedy. The sadness, the overwhelming guilt of putting her beloved companion in the hands of someone who was supposed to provide for his safety. I know it so well–I’ve been there myself.

But what happened was a string of errors my mom never could have anticipated or prevented, starting with the vet’s quarantine paperwork, which led to another crucial error: the animal transporter, who was paid to see Lilah directly onto his inter-island flight between Honolulu (the only port of entry for animals) and Kona on the Big Island.

Instead, to save money, she’d checked him into a cargo flight and left him there, where he sat for hours without water or food before being boarded up. Then, the transporter went dark, failing to answer my mom’s texts or calls. My parents didn’t even know his flight number. They had nothing.

Thus, when Lilah arrived in the cargo hold of the Kona airport, my parents had no idea of his whereabouts and couldn’t reach anyone who knew anything at all.

By the time my mom was finally contacted to pick him up, he’d gone over 24 hours without water–and likely without being checked on at all. That neglect, compounded by the stress of flying cargo, ultimately killed him.

And so my family was left to grieve in their paradise, Lilah’s empty cage on their front porch a forever reminder of what could have been.

Flying animals in cargo is always risky. Every year, animal companions die. In 2018, a report revealed that there had been 85 animal deaths in the last 3 years on flights in the US, with nearly half occurring on United Airlines. And just a few weeks ago, in the wake of two cats’ deaths on a Russian airline, guardians took to social media with photos of their dogs and cats to tell the airline that animals aren’t cargo–they’re passengers–in hopes of changing in-flight policy.

As for Hawaii, the state requires that all animals coming into the islands be taken immediately to the quarantine holding facility in Honolulu for inspection–but it doesn’t prescribe how these animals must enter, which is up to the individual airlines. While many of them will allow companions to fly in-cabin between islands, only a couple allow this for flights from the mainland to the state, leaving thousands of cherished companions relegated to the cargo hold. Or, even worse, they’re put onto a cargo-only airline that deals mostly with inanimate shipments, leaving actual live animals with very little to no care or oversight.

Why? Because the logistics of ensuring that animals flying in-cabin make it over to the quarantine hold facility for inspection would take time. And time is money.

It’s been over five years, but it’s time for Lilah’s story to become more than a black cloud over my family. It’s time for me to share it with the world and help other dogs, cats, and birds from suffering the same fate.

It’s time for the major airlines from the mainland U.S. to the Hawaiian Islands to apply, at a bare minimum, the same rules they use for flights within the lower 48 states–which allow small animals in carriers to stay in the cabin with their families.

And for animals who are only given the option to travel in cargo either into or between the islands, these carriers must implement rigid standards for animal companions, including constant tracking of animals’ whereabouts, hourly monitoring in holding facilities, and provision of water at regular intervals.

Please join me in calling on these airlines to protect our beloved animals who are entrusted into their care by signing my petition below.

Petition to be delivered to: Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Aloha Air Cargo.

Petition count: 1,439 signatures