Beth Schuette and John Cucitelli wanted to create the framework for a business unlike any other: an animal arrival center for the amazing variety of creatures coming into the U.S. via John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The Naples husband-wife team would build a facility to handle everything from songbirds to racehorses, both of which land in JFK more often than the world knows.
The business operating the facility would house arrivals quarantined by U.S. customs and offer examination rooms for federal agents testing for animals carrying drugs, explosives or other contraband. This business would also coordinate critical testing for contagious diseases that could be transmitted to other animals, including humans. Finally, this business would have a welcoming, relaxing facility for animals, with dog runs and play times for some of the quarantined breeds.
Five years after they envisioned all that, the business that opened this impressive facility was—Schuette and Cucitelli.
“We discovered, once we got the facility built, that we knew more than anybody else did. And we still didn’t know everything.” Schuette said. “At that point, we just said, ‘Let’s go.’”
The couple operate The Ark at JFK, which they say is the most complete—and close to only—care center for animals coming into the country by air. The variety of those animals defies even the creative mind.
Greenwich residents John Cuticelli and his wife Elizabeth Schuette-Cuticelli pose at the Equine Export Center at the newly opened Ark, a multi-purpose animal handling and air cargo facility at New Yorks John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Ark covers more than 175,000 square-feet and has been developed as a portfolio company of New York City-based investment company Racebrook Capital, which the Greenwich couple own.
From talking rodents to Plan Bee
Take the capybara that came to their care, for instance. At 175 pounds full grown, the rodents look like guinea pigs that have become guinea bigs.
“It’s the largest rat in the world,” said Cucitelli.
“And they’re smart,” Schuette added. “They talk to each other.”
Schuette knows all about them, including what they eat, from the immersion she had had in learning dietary, behavior and health needs of animals. She has certification for every animal care license known, and a huge book of animal dietary habits. She and her husband remember their concierge zenith in animal care when they handled a pair of gray parrots: “They only ate sautéed vegetables,” Cucitelli marveled.
She is operations manager, and he is the administrative half, although Cucitelli has had to dash into a room where some 20,000 bees had awakened from dormancy in a location too warm for hibernation and broken out of a damaged crate.
He remembered walking into the 20-by-40-foot holding room and being literally bee-seiged. “They were all over my arms. I could just take my hand and wipe them off,” he said, still amazed. “They thought they were in Palm Beach.”
“Beth was on phone with me saying, ‘Don’t touch the queen. If you don’t touch the queen, they’re not going to sting you,’” Cucitelli recalled.
“But how do you know which one is the queen?” asked Schuette, chuckling at the memory. Said her husband: “I felt like a gynecologist.”
Still, he netted the fugitives without a single sting, and felt they’d done well with only 20,000 escaping from the shipment they were handling: 1 million bees.
Strange flight friends
For those unconformable with the knowledge all those stingers could be beneath your feet on your next flight, consider that snakes—yes, snakes on a plane—travel by air. There are jet-setting tarantulas, too. Many of them lay over at The Ark.
Schuette recalled one shipment of venomous animals for which the customer warned her to be especially careful: “They told us there were no anti-venoms for these,” she said.
Most of the traffic is much more benign. Horses, of which The Ark handles between 4,000 and 6,000 a year, travel frequently by air.
“Competition horses fly all over the world,” Cucitelli explained. Racehorses, show horses, performing horses all need to get there. Most face a quarantine if they’re staying in the U.S. for any time, although The Ark limits its guests to only a short-term quarantine stay, for up to seven days.
Some of the animals stay for only four to seven hours. The Ark gets its share of traveling pets whose owners want either their arrival or departure to be low-stress.
“The animal is not immune to the noise, the variation in the temperature, the handling of the forklifts. And some of the workers are very well meaning. They’ll walk by and give the dog a piece of bread. Well, that could be the worst thing possible for some animals,” Cucitelli said. Or they open the cage to give the animal water, and it escapes.
“Then we get the call. ‘There’s a dog on the runway. Can you come get it?’” he continued. Escaped cats are tougher to corral, said Schuette: “They get up into the eaves of buildings.”
By contrast, Ark customers can pick up or deposit animals around their flights, so they’re treated well until they’re loaded onto the plane. The Ark even offers route coordination so the animal will fly to its destination while avoiding airports that have no animal care protocol.
Their largest customers were two elephants bound for the Bronx Zoo. Because of their size, the behemoths don’t actually come into the Ark. But two freighter 747s wheeled up on its tarmac one day for the couple to unload the pachyderms onto a flatbed truck. The animals stayed in their—if one can wrap the imagination around the concept—elephant kennels, while The Ark cleaned stalls and fed and watered them and did its own check of the animals’ well-being.
First, however, the usual agents inspected the animals—Centers for Disease Control, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security—“and everyone wants a picture with the elephants,” Cucitelli added. With all that done, the elephants were sent on their way to the receiving zoo.
Homeland Security, or TSA, may seem like a strange segment of the work at a transit animal care center, but much of the work there supports security.
The couple and their employees are all badged and trained in security and part of their service is obtaining information about the senders, as well as their animals. Schuette remembered the shipment of dogs from Iran that were coming, she learned, from a man who had been embedded with ISIS.
Bomb-bearing pets aren’t a phenomenon, and The Ark is part of the support system that makes certain they won’t be. The FBI joins those inspections when there are suspicions. In fact, The Ark can deal with up to 17 agencies for various animals. Because JFK airport is part of New York City, it is subject to all the city’s animal regulations, as well as those of its port authorities and the aforementioned USFW, CDC and USDA.
Schuette has made herself an authority on working with them, and has become so known in the industry that she advises federal agencies on best practices in animal transit care. She is on committees in the worldwide Animal Transportation Association and is a member of the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association. She stays in touch with other airport animal handling specialists around the world and flies between Naples and New York every week.
However, the couple’s retirement plans have sailed away on The Ark. In 2012 Cucitelli took up the idea of opening a pet handling center to replace what Cucitelli called the outmoded, three-car garage built so long ago that JFK was in its first incarnation as Idlewild Airport. Since then they’ve become Floridians—“I moved my offices from Madison Avenue in New York to Fifth Ave South in Naples,” said Cucitelli of his Racebrook Capital Private Equity firm.
They’re both proud of what they’ve accomplished with the center: “We’ve become the prototype of what should be at all major ports of entry,” Schuette said. But they’re hoping to pass the business generation on to another entrepreneurial generation sometime soon.
“We’re not getting any younger,” Cucitelli explained. “And after all, we did move to Naples.”
This story was published in The Naples Press on July 19.
