Due to a recent spate of fatal mishaps, airlines have had to make it pretty clear which animals you can and can’t bring on flights: Dogs, cats, and, weirdly enough, mini horses are totally fine; pretty much everything else—like peacocks, hamsters, and snakes—are a definite no. But somehow, a woman in Florida apparently thought it’d be totally chill to take her “emotional support squirrel” on a recent flight, only to wind up getting kicked off the plane once the crew found out she’d brought a live rodent into the cabin, ABC News reports.
Squirrels can be vicious, bloodthirsty creatures, liable to terrorize small towns and attack innocent parkgoers, but if you can domesticate one, they make for pretty cute pets—and apparently for this woman, therapeutic little friends. Unwilling to endure her Frontier Airlines flight from Orlando to Cleveland without her little buddy, the woman somehow managed to sneak it all the way past security and onto the plane—but Frontier explicitly bans “rodents” in its emotional support animal policy, along with “reptiles, insects, hedgehogs, rabbits, sugar gliders, non-household birds or improperly cleaned and/or animals with foul odor,” for those who might be curious. So she and her squirrel had to go.
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“The passenger noted in their reservation that they were bringing an emotional support animal,” Frontier said in a statement to local ABC affiliate WFTV, “but it was not indicated that it was a squirrel.”
Unfortunately for Frontier, this woman wouldn’t back down: When the crew asked her to leave the plane, she flat-out refused. The airline then had to call in the cops to deal with her, and they made every single passenger onboard get off the plane so they could go in and wrangle her, along with, of course, her squirrel.
Eventually, the cops managed to escort the woman off the plane in a wheelchair, while she toted her squirrel in her lap in what looks like a cat carrier. Her fellow passengers were, understandably, pretty pissed that they’d been delayed for two hours and forced to evacuate their flight over a tree rat, and cheered as she made her way out.
In a video of her dramatic exit, you can hear her yell “shut up, bitch!” at a passenger before throwing up a defiant middle finger, and then, perplexingly, a thumbs-up as she’s wheeled toward the main terminal.
Did this woman inconvenience dozens of people? Sure. Is she a good pet owner? That’s unclear. But at the end of the day, did she stand up for something she believed in? Absolutely—the right for, yes, even squirrels, to serve as emotional support animals and get a seat on the plane. Though seeing as she seemed, well, a bit agitated, it’s possible that Frontier might have a point: They may not be quite right for the job.
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