It was a ruff start Down Under for a former NBA player who landed in Brisbane with his pet French bulldog — who was barred from entering the country and shipped back to the US on Friday.
Ex-Atlanta Hawk Lamar Patterson, 27, who is joining the Brisbane Bullets, was briefly detained at the airport Thursday after running afoul of Australia’s quarantine laws.
He finally cleared customs but his pooch, Kobe was collared and sent back to Los Angeles, according to Australia’s Agriculture Department.
Officials said flight attendants aboard Patterson’s Qantas flight from Los Angeles failed to notice that Kobe was on board without an import permit.
Patterson said the only reason a well-behaved Kobe was discovered was because he barked at customs search dogs at the airport.
“If this is big news then Australia is an amazing place to live at,” Patterson told reporters Friday. “It was on my ticket that I was traveling with a pet, even my return ticket. It was a miscommunication with the airlines.”
He had first boarded a domestic flight in the US on American Airlines, which allows pets on board, before connecting to the Qantas flight in LA, according to the BBC. Qantas only allows assistance dogs in the cabin.
Bullets coach Andrej Lemanis said there had been “some confusion” as Patterson had asked US airport officials about traveling with his pet.
When Patterson got to LAX with Kobe, “he asked if he could take his dog, and the response was yes, and it was even on his boarding pass that he’s traveling with a dog, but obviously there was some confusion as to whether — like, they probably thought that he only meant domestically,” Lemanis said, according to NBC News.
“No one said anything to him, and he went through security — somehow he got it on the plane,” Lemanis said.
“We should take some responsibility and say that’s one of the things, obviously, that we need to communicate in the future,” he said. “It’s a learning curve for us, as well, in terms of full communication.”
The incident didn’t land Patterson in the doghouse, Lemanis said, because he had not been scheduled to play in Thursday night’s game against the Adelaide 36ers, which the Bullets won, 108-98.
Patterson, a second-round pick by the Milwaukee Bucks in 2014 who played last season in the Italian league, is just the latest visitor to be hounded by the strict Aussie rules about traveling pets.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was well known for the tough stance he took on Johnny Depp’s pet dogs Pistol and Boo in 2015.
Joyce threatened to have the Yorkshire terriers euthanized after saying they were smuggled into Australia, where Depp was filming the fifth installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.
Depp’s then-wife Amber Heard pleaded guilty to falsifying an immigration document to conceal the dogs in a private jet.
She avoided jail under a deal that included Heard and Depp appearing in an awkward video warning against others breaking the country’s quarantine laws.
With Post wires
