Your Dog's European Passport Is No Longer Valid. Yes, This Is A Real Thing.

Plus: workarounds for getting your dog from the US to the UK, what the IT car will be in the Hamptons this summer, the Alpha School, a mess at JPMorgan, and more...

I have a friend I see a few times a year in various cities around the world. Paris, Beverly Hills, London. We met two years ago at a charity event in London when I was living there for a month between apartments, and I’m not quite sure why, but we immediately hit it off. It’s hard to describe why lightning strikes with friendship, but that one night led to two American girls who are, despite being in different industries and 3,000 miles apart, still very much in each other’s lives.

I was chatting with her about my upcoming travel schedule recently when she mentioned that she had to make a last-minute trip to Europe in May (maybe Switzerland?) and that I should consider coming along. The reason, she explained, was that she needed to renew her dog’s European passport. I laughed, because a dog having any passport, let alone a European one, seemed genuinely absurd to me. But she was serious. Her longtime partner is British, they travel constantly, and the passport (her dog’s, to be clear) was not a bit. It was a real document, issued by a real European vet — and one that, as of April 22nd, is no longer valid for anyone who doesn't actually live in Europe.

A new ruling effectively closed the door on non-EU residents holding one, which means the pilgrimage back to a European vet to renew her dog’s rabies vaccination (the passport itself never expires, but the vaccination inside it does, every one to three years depending on the vaccine) is no longer the necessary errand it once was. The passport is now, technically, void.

So what does a dog who has logged more European air miles than most people do with that information? Well, nothing. Dogs don’t read legislation. (Duh!) But RPS does have some helpful information for what owners can do. Traveling to Europe frequently, or for any real stretch of time, has never been particularly simple for dog owners — but there are still routes through, for those unwilling to leave the furriest members of their household behind. Getting into the U.K. from the U.S., meanwhile, is its own category of logistical theater, which has been made even more complicated since Brexit.

We’re getting into both of these today — along with what the Hamptons IT car will be this summer, an event for the Alpha School last night, a messy lawsuit involving JPMorgan, Rich Face vs real rich, and a brand buy-up in the North Fork.

And a reminder that tomorrow EOD is the deadline to become a paid subscriber — for yourself or a guest — for those who'd like to be added to the invite list for next month's RPS event. DM me or email me at Carson@readrps.com with any questions.