American bought 3 seats on board to fly with his dog and "stunned" passengers
According to a New York Post report, a man in the United States left his fellow travelers "dazed and shocked" as he boarded an American Airlines flight to fly his huge Great Dane from Los Angeles to New York. Twenty-seven-year-old Gabriel Bogner paid for a total of three seats on the flight for himself and his five-year-old dog, Darwin, to keep him comfortable during the trip.
In the video, which is circulating on the Internet, Darwin, the Great Dane, enters the plane, peers into the cockpit with the pilots on the way and, having settled down, sticks his head forward to check who is sitting in the row in front of them. Bogner said it was his dog's first flight in an airplane.
“People were completely stunned and shocked, but everyone was so excited to see the dog. I have never seen so many smiling people at an airport,” Bogner said. He explained that his dog weighing under 65 kilograms "definitely shocked people walking through the airport when they saw a horse literally approaching them."
Gabriel added: “There were no problems, he was great and the whole team was great. They joked that he got an upgrade and I didn't, but the trip went very smoothly."
Bogner revealed on TikTok that Darwin was considered too big to fit in the airline's largest cargo box, so he had to buy a row of seats to accommodate the dog on the floor next to him.
However, after the dog spent some time on the floor of the plane, the flight attendants, seeing its calm and well-mannered demeanor, allowed the dog to laze in the seats, which is unusual given the airline's policy of not allowing animals to sit in passenger seats. “They joked that he got an upgrade and I didn’t, but the trip went very smoothly,” Gabriel Bogner said.
Mr. Bogner, who was diagnosed with Crohn's disease (a chronic inflammatory bowel disease), trained Darwin to be a service animal, which his doctors thought was fitting for the occasion. "I adopted Darwin as a puppy and immediately registered him as an emotional support animal due to being raised in a hospital and having a lot of pain from a chronic condition," Bogner said in the clip.
Although Darwin does not perform many of the "difficult tasks" that professionally trained service animals do, he does accompany Bogner to the toilet and soothe his stomach pain by resting his head on his stomach to offer warmth and pressure.
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