There is no doubt you will need the health certificate if you are flying. The option is that your pet will be quarantined since you are not bringing in verification of health. This was our experience flying with our two cats. The airline needed to see the health certificate for the cats. They were young and had never traveled so we asked at airport security to have a private screening so they took us into a small room where we removed the cats from the carrying cases and then ran the cases through the scanners and brought them back to us. When we eventually got to Customs in Mexico we had to present our paperwork to the animal health department and they did a fairly full exam of both cats including temperature, weight, eye and ear exam, etc.
If you bring your pet in via car it is possible (maybe even likely) that they don't care if you have the paperwork or not. I've heard so many stories about being waved through while the pet owner is waving their paperwork thinking "I went to all that trouble to get this and you don't even want to look at it!!"

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