Johnny Depp’s pet dogs fly home

Sydney

Johnny Depp’s pet dogs Pistol and Boo flew out of Australia yesterday to escape threats to put them down, after a complex and often comical quarantine wrangle. Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce, who had warned that Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo could be destroyed within hours, simply tweeted “Dogs gone.” An agriculture department officer had escorted the dogs to the airport for their flight home, he said in a statement later. “Two dogs that were brought into Australia without meeting our import requirements have now been exported back to their country of origin,” Joyce said. The minister earlier said there would be an investigation as to how the dogs came into Australia. “Mr Depp decided that he’d step around our nation’s laws,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Depp, who is in Queensland state to film “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”, faces a formal interview with quarantine officers as part of investigations into how the Yorkshire terriers were allegedly smuggled in. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph said Depp and his actress-model wife Amber Heard, who have made no public comments on the issue, told the agriculture department they would fly out with Boo and Pistol yesterday night. However, Joyce also voiced fears the United States might not let the terriers back in. He said he was “seriously worried” they might not have the right permits to return home and could be left “stateless”. “The question is if he breached our laws, then did he follow the correct laws in the US?” Joyce said. “My worry is will the US let them back in? If not ... will they have anywhere to go?” And that, he said, could still lead to them being put down, adding, “Obviously my preference is not to destroy these two dogs.”