Fifi flies in style: jet-setting Hong Kong dog snoozes through Istanbul flight in business class, sparking online row over pampering
- Snuggled up in blankets, mini dachshund sleeps all the way on long-haul flight; ‘she’s the most chilled dog’, owner says
- Online observers are not so sanguine, biting back at the overblown cost of pet pampering and the contrasting plight of hungry children
A Hong Kong rescue dog has become an online sensation after a video of the pampered pooch snuggled under blankets on a business class flight from Hong Kong to Istanbul went viral.
British owner Helen Rosalie, who adopted the miniature long-haired dachshund in Hong Kong when the dog was one year old – she’s now four – said Fifi was “calm and collected” throughout the 11-hour flight.
“She is the most chilled dog,” said Rosalie by phone from South Carolina in the United States where she now lives after five years in Hong Kong.
While Fifi looked comfortable, many online observers were not, with fur flying over Rosalie’s travel arrangements and her tongue-in-cheek posts about how she treats her dog as if it were her daughter.
“It seems a bit sad that you’d prefer to spend tens of thousands on a dog and call it your daughter, when there are thousands of children in care homes that could become a real daughter,” wrote one.
“I just grew up where the cost of a dog in first-class could feed a couple hundred starving kids, get them some clean clothes and maybe save literal lives, so this is hard for me to see,” wrote another.