London ? All the scores of weeping American children who move here every year and have to lock up their beloved pets or leave them behind. …

All the great and glitzy of America too – Elizabeth Taylor anchoring a rented yacht in the Thames just for her dogs, David Hockney choosing to paint in California rather than in his homeland because of his dachshunds, a diplomat who had to think hard about accepting the ambassadorship at the Court of St. James’s, all because of this island nation’s stringent, century-old rabies quarantine.

Now all that could be a thing of the past, consigned to the kitty litter bin of history.

The British government, which raised hopes and spirits of peripatetic pet lovers this summer by letting it be known that it might roll back the quarantine requirement for the United States and Canada “subject to satisfactory conclusions” to its research, says it will announce its findings this month. A paws-up ruling on a “pet passport” program could allow U.S. pets into Great Britain without the harrowing six-month “no-walkies” sentence of solitary confinement in small cages. That law has prohibited quarantined pets ” even guide dogs ” from so much as sniffing the soil of Britain and forced owners who want to cuddle to climb into the cages with their critters.

In a nation that loves its pets enough to allow them on public transit, thousands of foreign pets have been sentenced to time in government-approved kennels, and dozens have died there and thereafter ” not from rabies but from ailments, stress and just plain loneliness. (Precise numbers are hard to come by, but in the three decades preceding the lifting of the quarantine for selected European countries, more than 200,000 dogs were caged.) To pet parents among the quarter-million Americans living in the United Kingdom, and to others who’d like to settle here with menage and menagerie, the new program would be not only welcome but a “what took you so long” cause for celebration. Take the word of a former ambassador.

“I talked about it by kidding on the square, kidding by being serious. I would say that I thought (the quarantine) was the biggest obstacle to improving Anglo-American relations,” says Raymond Seitz, appointed by the first President George Bush, and the first career diplomat to hold the ambassadorship in modern times. Seitz loves his dogs, mostly mutts; he devoted a chapter to them in his memoir, “Over Here,” and became a founding member of a British organization, Passport for Pets, that has lobbied to change the quarantine he characterizes ” in language not remotely diplomatic ” to be “ludicrous, awful and dreadful,” serving “no obvious purpose” in an age of vaccines and med-tech.