Megan Hallinan picks up a dog at Cargo City:

On any one day we have loads of goods passing through the world’s commercial centers, airports and harbors. You only pay attention to what is important to you at any one given time. For me, after standing around for four hours, I surmised that the order of precedence at least for this day at Cargo City was thus: the dead are moved off first, then the worms, then the breathing mammals. No amount of complaining or worried looks from behind my facemask would change this. Cargo City is one big nexus of “bigger than one single thing” transactions.

Moving around Ethan the Dog was in many ways simpler, but it had its own burdens. We flew with him overseas twice, once to Frankfurt and once to Oslo, and in both cases there was at least one brief panic, like the later-aborted rush to get a last minute rabies shot in Oslo, or the confusion in Dusseldorf about whether he was allowed to fly at all or not.