How far would you go to save your pet?
For Ben Preston, who adopted a Mexican street dog called Muk, his effort involved 11 months of planning, 11 months in three different countries, 33,000 km travelled and $30,000.
“It seems excessive and it is,” Preston, 35, says of his “reckless” journey.
The commercial diver flew to Mexico at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to adopt Muk and bring her back to the Bay of Plenty, after finding her in a dog shelter two years earlier when he volunteered there as a backpacker.
Facing a logistical nightmare due to Covid restrictions, the pair spent 12 months trying to get home.
The story of what they went through has been turned into a self-published book called Moving Muk.
And their unlikely pairing begins with two chance encounters...
Finding Muk
A man left a party and was outside smoking a cigarette when Muk, looking more creature-like than cutesy, stumbled out of a church with a snotty snout, coughing unceremoniously under the moonlight.
“She approached me asking for love, and of course, I spent a while caressing her, and then I started to go home, and she followed me there,” the man named Ander recalls.
Ander lived at a dog shelter on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas.
The dog was given the name Muk (pronounced Mook), short for Moco, which means mucus in Spanish.
With a vet’s help, she recovered and was living at the shelter, on a mountain, in a jungle, when Preston showed up a year later as a volunteer.
He had found his way to Mexico after meeting a girl at a house party in his hometown of Mount Maunganui in 2018.
They bonded while drinking out of a lampshade, and the next week they’d booked one-way flights to Mexico together to work at the dog shelter.
“Muk very quickly became my dog,” he says.
Muk, aged 3, with her dark eyes, small black body, white goatee beard, chest and paws, was self-assured. She knew Preston was her “golden ticket outta there”.
“If I was sitting down with Muk and another dog came near, Muk would growl and snap at them, no matter their size or hierarchy, including Eba, a 20-year-old blind and deaf labrador, who would bump into furniture, oblivious to Muk anyway.
“It was as if Muk was saying, ‘go away, I’m coming with him’ and I quite liked that.”
The idea of bringing Muk to New Zealand began to form, even though the logistics were “insane”.
New Zealand customs will pull you up for mud on your boot or a banana in your backpack. How a dog living in a country with rabies would be granted a permit from MPI, was going to be the mother of all challenges.
Eventually, he had to leave the shelter on his own - back to New Zealand for a visit, then to Australia to start a dive salvage job in tepid, crocodile-infested waters in north Queensland.
This MacGyver needed time to plan.
Australia, 2019
Muk would need to be smuggled into New Zealand, forming a new identity en route, he decided.
He chose Canada for this to happen as it’s on the list of pre-approved countries for Kiwis to import animals from, provided they’ve spent time there and have vet sign-off.
He converted his dive certification to Canadian standards and booked flights to San Francisco.
From there, he’d go to Mexico, grab Muk, and go to Canada.
He was booked to depart in mid-April when Covid-19 hit and his bookings were canned.
The following five months were spent finding loopholes in evolving border crossing rules.
As a New Zealand citizen in Australia, he was exempt from their travel ban and managed to get out - just.
He hadn’t been able to find a paid Canadian job but got a volunteer job at a cattle station, which gave him a port of entry letter.
Only problem was, how did he grab a Mexican dog along the way?
He decided the only way to convince authorities that he’d be staying in Canada, was to trick them with a decoy flight.
On the same day as his Los Angeles to Mexico flight, he booked an $80 flight from Los Angeles to Vancouver - a flight that he knew he wouldn’t be on.
“I’ve played a few games of poker, but never with the stakes this high.”
His plan worked.
Life on the run: Mexico, August 2020
His reunion with Muk at the airport in Mexico was anticlimactic.
“Muk was more interested in the smells of random s*** everywhere.
“It wasn’t until later when I popped down to the shops and came back, that she went berserk.”
In San Cristobal de las Casas, he arranged a rabies vaccine, a travel crate, and a vet health certificate.
Then on to Vancouver.
“Once we landed, I ran straight to baggage to find Muk. Rather than calmly unlocking the padlock, I ripped the door clean off her cage, let her out and gave her a big hug.”
Vancouver, September 2020
After two weeks of isolation, they were free to roam, but Muk was uncomfortable encountering domesticated dogs being too used to “Mexican hood rats”.
They went to the farm, but it wasn’t for them.
It was time to prepare Muk for New Zealand. She needed a microchip, rabies vaccination, and Canadian citizenship, which would take months.
Vancouver, October 2020
Preston landed a diving job and found accommodation with flatmates who helped care for Muk while he worked in frigid conditions.
“It was the most Canadian job I could have asked for. A beaver eating a foam house and putting it out of level.”
He contacted a Canadian pet transporter company but there were no flights to New Zealand. He’d need to fly out from the US and stay there for 30 days prior, due to rules around preflight vet visits.
United States, April 2021
After almost a year of planning and a year abroad, it was time to leave Canada.
They made it into the US. No one even asked for health certificates.
They hired a car and drove 40 hours to Alabama to stay with a friend.
Preflight health checks were done in the US and New Zealand quarantine spots had been booked in Canada.
Muk became a Mexican-born, Canadian citizen, with US temporary residency, about to start a New Zealand citizenship. On paper, she is a Border Collie cross, but her actual breed is a guess.
Preston drove 3200 km back across the country. He had been denied a car rental due to Alabamian rules on debit cards but somehow miraculously approved for an empty U-Haul furniture truck.
About halfway back they stopped to get fuel in El Paso, Texas.
“I could see Mexico; it was very close - just a few kilometres away. I said to Muk, ‘here’s your last chance to go back to Mexico’. I opened the door to give her the option. I got the dirtiest look.”
Preston took his Covid test, passed, and flew out from Los Angeles the next day.
“We had nearly pulled off this heist.”
New Zealand, May 2021
Now in Rotorua, he sat in quarantine waiting for Muk who was in pet quarantine.
When he got out he made a beeline for Auckland: “she did her berzerk dance,” he says of their reunion.
Muk arrives in Te Puke
Just five weeks into New Zealand life in mid-2021, Muk got into a fight with a stray pit bull.
She used her “Mexican street fighting tactics” but still ended up with stitches.
A year and a bit on, she is content but there are signs of trauma.
She barks and growls at anyone that resembles a Mexican man or speaks Spanish to her.
She sees herself as the leader of the pack and is protective of Preston and his flatmates in Te Puke.
A “dog whisperer” encouraged Preston to ‘eat’ out of her food bowl before he fed her while looking her in the eye. This is to get her down in the pecking order, which he says worked “amazingly”.
Muk is still standoffish.
“She’ll go up to dogs and have a sniff, but she’s never fetched a stick or chased a ball in her life. If we have friends over with their dogs who are playing, she’ll just sit watching.”
They have been on a journey - and an expensive one.
Covid meant Muk’s adoption costs rocketed. Preston spent $30,000 on visa costs, flights, pet export fees, petrol and car rentals, vets, crates, medication and paperwork.
Imported dogs however aren’t uncommon. In the past five years, 18,409 dogs were imported into New Zealand under the Import Health Standard for Cats and Dogs.
And Muk is not the only dog living in the Bay from Mexico. Sarah Ferguson and her American partner Joey Zarick brought back their dog Esteban (‘Steven’ in Spanish) to Papamoa, after finding him dying on a remote beach in Baja covered in parasite wounds.
He came with the pair in their camper van as they travelled to America, and then back to New Zealand in February 2020, costing them around $10,000.
Fergusson has been working on a children’s book about Esteban, who has his own Instagram page @esteban.the.vagabond.
“Because we found him on a beach, and we live at the beach he seemed to instantly just feel at home.
“He is so social, so chilled out, and got such great manners. Dogs there, learn how to exist amongst everyone doing their thing without causing much trouble.
“You can tell when he looks at us that he knows we saved his life and for that, he’s immensely grateful.”
Renowned animal behaviourist Mark Vette says the process of importing an animal is a “real commitment” and “effort of love and compassion”.
“These incredible measures we go to shows the extraordinary nature of our bonds with our dogs. Akin to our human bonds, similar levels of oxycontin (the bond hormone) is ignited in us as with our children - and mirrored in our dogs too.”
Vette brought his own late rescue dog Reggie to New Zealand from England in 2016 costing about $16,000.
Reggie was found abandoned and wandering the streets, however, he was destined for greater things.
He was scouted for a British TV series that Vette was part of, Dog’s Might Fly, where he became the first dog to fly a plane; before ‘flying’ off to his new life in Whitianga.
Having worked with hundreds of rescue dogs, Vette says that once dogs are adopted out of an institutionalised environment or tough times, they can grasp that they’ve “landed on their feet”.
“Their needs, although met, are often at the minimum level. So, when they get someone who bonds with them and keeps them with them most of the time, they get attached quickly.”
Imported dogs will experience temperature and cultural change, and owners need to help ensure their emotional resilience is strong, and they’re social, he says, which sometimes requires professional help.
Pāpāmoa’s Misha Gildenberger of Roma Dog Behaviour Academy spent over 12 months and $10,000 bringing her rescue dog Roma to New Zealand from Argentina in 2018.
“Roma was eating rubbish in a dump and now is running freely, healthy, and happy on Papamoa beach.”
Gildenberger says there is a stressful element for dogs when being moved, but they see our human commitment.
“Before, during, and after the stress, we were there for them, telling them that everything was going to be alright.
“We improved their lives. For them, we mean happiness and always being safe. That’s what they care about, that we became ‘home’ for them, wherever we are, we will always mean home.”
Preston says primitive as Muk’s environment was at the shelter, she was cared for. However, most of the dogs live there for life, with the odd volunteer getting “sucked in” to take one home.
He was one of them. And he will always have one heck of a story to tell.
# Ben’s book Moving Muk is all-age-friendly and available to order from Te Puke Paper Plus or Amazon Kindle. Parts of this story have been taken directly from the book
