Have you ever moved with a pet, to a whole other state? Like a dog, cat, rabbit, chinchilla, etc... What did you do? How?

I never intended to get a cat till I was settled into my own place with my fiancé. Well, as (unfortunate) luck would have it, I ended up with a kitten whose now a 4 mo. butthead because my former roommate couldn't keep her, due to her kids. (Don't get me wrong, I adore cats and she is my baby, but I wasn't going to get an animal till I was actually settled somewhere!) The most moving baby girl has had is taking her from where I was living to a friend's apartment because of apartment inspection and the like. Her longest move was an hour drive from one city to another, in her cardboard box with her blanket and a little food; she slept majority of the way. Now we're making a bigger move, and stopping at the midway point as we go since it's 20+ hr drive. I'm just not sure how to handle moving her?! She's excellent about car rides though, no crying or anything other than occasional box escapes (when she does "short" rides).XD

What are your pet-moving stories? Any tips for a first-time move? The chosen hotel is okay with pets luckily! :D

We transported our kitties to stay with family while we are overseas, a 15 hour drive. We unfortunately split it up over two days which was stressful, they refused to use the litterbox that we set up in the hotel and hid behind the beds which were a nightmare to get them from. One managed to hold her bladder the two days and the other had an accident on her blanket in the carrier (we knew right away since her carrier was right behind me so I could try to comfort her during the trip). Needless to say, the blanket was tossed since we had another 4 hours left to drive. If we did it again we'd probably get up first thing in thing in the morning and drive straight through. We had rescue kitties and they are big time scaredy cats, car rides are terrifying and long trips are just the absolute worst. Our littlest one always cries, she cried when we adopted her for the whole 3 hour trip and the long move was not exception - she was hoarse by the time we arrived. :( After that, it was decided that our family were permanently adopting them because it would simply be too hard on them to follow us overseas once we were settled. They are also older cats which made it harder and hard to leave them behind but at 12 and 14, it wouldn't be fair to them to make them travel on a plane for 15 hours through airports and without us by their sides to keep them calm.

On the other hand, a friend of ours had a really laid back kitty that traveled quite a bit with him and he was just as calm and cool about a cross country drive as he was any other trip - even went on planes without a problem. I would guess if your kitty is good on short trips it'll be pretty pain free for longer. :)

A few years ago, I moved from Ohio to New Hampshire and stayed there a year, taking both my cats with me. They're both adults (at the time, one was eleven and the other was five - they're fifteen and nine now). The older one handled the trip much better, as she's slightly senile and by the time I'd been in the new place a week, she'd forgotten she ever lived anywhere else and was happily wandering around enjoying the new window view. Poor Mimi, bless her heart, was traumatized by both the move there and the move back. She stayed with her face pressed into the corner of the crate the entire trip, barely ate for a week, and generally avoided me for a month both times.

The one thing that helped a little bit, since the older cat hates car rides and tends to get carsick, was a vet recommended herbal supplement that has a calming agent in it. She only had one accident in the first hour of the trip, and after that she was pretty calm.

Ughh, I'm so scared of this. I have two cats, a bearded dragon, and a snake. I'm almost done university so I'm planning on moving provinces in a few years.. Ideally I want to take all the animals including the reptiles. I can't see my cats being a huge problem,, but ugh I don't know what it's going to be like for my reptiles ;-;

I have six cats, all of whom have been moved. Recently, all but one of them were moved two hours away from home where they spent 3 months living with my friends while my husband and I were moving into our new location. One of them stayed somewhere else with me the entire time we were moving, because he's a little special. I have never had trouble moving a cat, except for this one. When I first move in with my then boyfriend (now my husband) I was moving my cats about 3 hours away. We didn't have an apartment set up or anything, as it turns out, so we had to stay with friends of his until we found a place. It only took like a week, but we had someone who was willing to watch our cats for us. Matisse, my orange cat doesn't like change. Any time anything changes, he freaks out and spends a lot of time puffing up and hissing about it. He dosen't like to be moved, especially. So we had him in his own separate carrier. We dropped them off and told the friend not to let him out, and that I would come up to her house and change out his newspaper and feed him, etc. But she didn't listen, and she let him out about five minutes later. So the friend that we're staying with gets a phone call. And all the caller says is "hell cat can't stay here". So we have to go pick him back up. We get to this girl's apartment and there's her and these three guys and they're all sitting around on the couch in various stages of bleeding. And they're all pretty freaked out by this cat. All of my cats and all of their cats are hiding somewhere. We start looking around and cat faces start to pop out from behind furniture. And then I hear it. Matisse is screaming from behind the tv. So we get his carrier and we're trying to herd him back into it, and we're chasing him around this apartment. He ends up getting back behind the entertainment center, and I'm thinking, well we need a way to get him out. So I say to my husband's friend the fateful words that made him hate me forever: "Poke him with the feather duster, Richard." So he pokes him with the feather duster, and this screaming blur of orange comes flying out from behind the tv towards his face, and he jumps back, and Matisse goes flying into the kitchen, where we finally corner him under the sink and force him into the box. Four years later and Richard is still afraid of Matisse.

Generally though, my other cats don't mind all that much. Some of them sleep in the car, and some of them whine because they don't like it a whole lot, but it's not awful. And their adjustment to the new circumstances never takes all that long really. It kind of depends on the cat. If you're worried, you can always get your vet to give you a mild sedative just to calm them down.

When we first got my one (now passed away) cat, we were in BC for our summer holiday. One of our neighbours cats had had kittens and my parents decided we were going to bring one home. It was about a 12 hour drive back to our province, and we spent the night in a hotel and she did really well! She slept most of the time on a little fluffy bed between my brother and I, and spent the night in my parents hotel room (after I finished cutting all the little sticky bits out of her fur from living outside).

My youngest cat came from the college I went to, which was only about an hour drive away, and he also did really well in the car and basically slept the whole time. He is not a huge fan of the car now however, and he shakes and meows really loudly whenever we have to take him somewhere, poor kid, haha!

I never had to move a pet, but this summer I adopted my lovebird Buddy from my work place . He came with the cage and everything, so my boss lent me a blanket to throw over his cage and the drive home was only 3mintues, but he did well. His biggest stress was moving into a bigger roomier cage months later.

I know that doesn't help... Good luck with the move! Those are some pretty crazy driving hours.

My mother, cat, and I made TWO trips from BC to Ontario in the span of a year. Once there, and one fleeing back again. (Lovely province, too different for us.) Anyways, at the time Willow an orange tabby was 10 years old. It's a 4 day trip. We started off with her in the carrier, and when we stopped at rest stops she could get out and stretch, eat etc. but after the first day we quickly realized she wasn't happy, getting dehydrated, and none of us were comfortable. So we opened the carrier and let it be.

Mind you, our back seat was pretty full too. TV, cat litter box, luggage, snacks, carrier. Not a lot of room, but nothing she could fall into and get trapped. After the shock wore off (which didn't take long) she turned into a real road warrior. She'd climb over the tv to cram herself into the back window when there was good sun. Use her litter box as needed, and we'd offer her water constantly. We kept her feeding schedule as accurate as possible. She thrived really well after she left the carrier. She'd sometimes slip into my lap, but mostly she lounged around in the back seat watching the scenery.

Truck stops were good fun because no one could believed the cat just flopped on top of the luggage.

Dehydration is the big risk I think, and that's part of what prompted us to open the carrier because it wasn't working out otherwise. If you do open the carrier make sure everyone is settled into the drive, all your stuff is strapped down or positioned so it doesn't flop around. They get their 'sea legs' pretty quick.

On our second trip the one back home, we ran through a drive through, rolled up the windows, and then popped open the door. By that point she was an old salt and knew exactly what to do.

Jeez, everyone's stories! I've read them all and some are nuts, haha. I love the story of Matisse :,D

We have her carrier and she seems... Relatively okay with a harness.XD She hated the hour drive to get her to where we're staying before the official move, but she was in a cardboard box she chewed holes in. :( Sadly, I haven't been able to take her to the vet yet (finances don't exactly allow given that vet services here are costly and there aren't any discount charity/shelter-run vets) so no sedatives for her! >_<

I intend to let her out with the harness to chill out and do what she needs when we stop unless she just sleeps. Hopefully I can keep her water out without it spilling. She may not want to eat unless we're stopped.