Chapter One: Pet Theories1. Listening to Prozac: "Bow-Wow! I Love the Mailman!"
Prozac has greatly improved life for Emily Elliot. She had tried massage therapy, hormone treatments, everything; but she couldn't relieve the anxiety, the fear, the painful shyness.
Or the chronic barking. So, after three years Ms. Elliot recently put Sparky, her dog, on Prozac.
Sparky (not her real name) suffered from "profound anxiety" of strangers as well as "inter-dog aggression," says Ms. Elliot, a veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania. The pooch "has a problem thinking through solutions to what is bothering her," she adds. So, in March, along with other therapies, doctors at the animal-behavior clinic where Ms. Elliot works prescribed Prozac.
Sparky, a show dog, quickly lost that hang-dog attitude. "It's been a big relief," says Ms. Elliot, who asked that Sparky's real name not be used because her Prozac use might influence dog judges.
Among American humans, of course, Prozac has become fashionable as a treatment for depression and obsessive/compulsive disorders. "It's the designer drug of the '90s," says Bonnie Beaver, chief of medicine at Texas A&M University's department of small-animal medicine. "People think, 'Gee, if I can have Prozac, why can't my dog?' "
The field is still new, but the growing potential for using Prozac and other human psychiatric drugs to treat destructive or antisocial animal disorders will be discussed at next month's meeting of the 52,000-member American Veterinary Medical Association. Prozac proponents say the drug, particularly for dogs, may represent the last chance to keep a maladjusted canine off of death row. Unruly behavior, which leads owners to abandon pets to shelters, is "the leading cause of canine and feline deaths" in the U.S., says Karen Overall, a University of Pennsylvania veterinarian.
"These vets are dedicated to finding ways to help pets stay with their owners," says an AVMA spokeswoman. "It's important to use all the avenues they can."
The University of Pennsylvania animal-behavior clinic has put depressed puppies on Prozac, feather-picking parakeets on antidepressants and floor-wetting cats on Valium (Prozac, for reasons not completely understood, has proved toxic and ineffective for cats, some veterinarians say). The clinic has also treated emotionally troubled ferrets, skunks and rabbits.
Some dogs on Prozac will be weaned off the medication, while others may be listening to Prozac for the rest of their lives, says Dr. Overall, who heads the clinic. "It's a great drug for some animals," she adds -- though she stresses that owners and pets should never take each other's medication.
The number of animals, including some birds, on Prozac is currently small, but anecdotal evidence as to its effectiveness is encouraging. In a letter to be published in the upcoming issue of DVM Newsmagazine, a veterinary journal, Steven Melman of Potomac, Md., describes a five-year-old dog suffering from "tail-chasing mutilation disorder." Conventional treatment failed and one vet suggested amputating the tail.
After five days on Prozac, though, the pooch was a "much more mellow, less restless patient," he writes. After five weeks on the drug, the dog's disorder was cured. Dr. Melman writes: "I had literally saved my patient's tail."
Using human drugs to treat certain animal conditions is "not at all controversial in mainstream medicine," says Dr. Melman. But Prozac has long been dogged by controversy. Thus, when Dr. Melman published a paper in the April edition of DVM describing Prozac use for dogs' skin problems caused by obsessive/compulsive urges, the fur began to fly. "I mentioned Prozac and people went nuts," he says.
The Church of Scientology, for example, responded with warnings that pets on Prozac could "go psycho." Since Prozac's launch six years ago, the Scientologists, who oppose the use of mind-altering drugs, have called it a "killer drug" linked to murder and suicide -- a charge roundly derided by the medical community.
If owners put pets on Prozac, "You may be forced to defang your dachshund or put Tabby in a straitjacket," warns a recent press release from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group founded by the Church of Scientology. Yet, when reached for comment, the commission conceded it hadn't received any reports of injuries from Prozac-deranged pets.
Other groups are concerned as well. "There's a lot of room for fear and worries," says Bob Hillman, vice president of the Animal Protection Institute, a Sacramento, Calif., animal-rights organization. "Giving a Rottweiler or a Doberman Prozac could be dangerous for the neighbors" should the drug have an unintended effect.
The Food and Drug Administration and Eli Lilly & Co., Prozac's maker, have denied any link between Prozac and acts of violence or suicide. But "our clinical data support use of Prozac in treating only humans," says a spokeswoman for Eli Lilly. "We're not actively pursuing the study of Prozac for veterinary use."
Some animal advocates argue that, instead of turning to wonder drugs, people need to look for "gentle, noninvasive ways" of getting along with their pets, says Ken White, vice president for companion animals at the Humane Society of the U.S. in Washington. Ellen Corrigan, director of education for In Defense of Animals, another animal-rights group, suggests "a more holistic approach" that might include alternative treatments like acupressure and herbal remedies.
Indeed, doctors to humans often counsel patients to first try conventional therapy or behavior modification before they turn to Prozac. Pro-Prozac vets agree. With the appropriate diagnosis and dosage, drugs like Prozac can help pets, says Texas A&M's Dr. Beaver, but owners and doctors must find the real root of a pet's distress. "If you don't remove the stress, you don't fix the problem," she says.
Pennsylvania's Dr. Overall, who has plumbed the minds of pooches, notes: "If you pet them while they're moping, it just reinforces sad behavior." Instead, she recommends trying to get them to "take an interest in something they enjoy: Play with a ball, go for a car ride, sit on the sofa and watch TV. When they look happy, relaxed or outgoing, then give them a treat."
But determining a pet's neurosis takes time, and even Sigmund Freud wouldn't have gotten far with Fido on his couch. "We can't go up and say, 'Tell me about your traumatic puppyhood,' " says Dr. Overall. Still, she points out that depressed dogs exhibit many of the same signs that down-in-the-dumps people do: They don't eat, they don't sleep and they don't make eye contact. Many problems occur when the animal reaches social maturity, notes Dr. Overall. "The teen years are when we see a lot of social disorders in humans; gang involvements, schizophrenia. It's the same thing with cats and dogs."
Dr. Overall knows there are some people opposed to pet drug use of any sort. But she has put one of her three dogs on human antianxiety medication (though not Prozac) and is high on the idea. "I go home to normal dogs," she says.
-- Carrie Dolan, June 1994
2. Surgery on an Odd Scale
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Three veterinarians stood over a $4.95 goldfish named Hot Lips, prepping her for surgery. The senior vet, Craig Harms, slipped a syringe into the nine-inch-long fish's swollen belly. He drew out clear fluid -- a bad sign.
Dr. Harms retreated to the hallway, pulled out his cellphone and called the owners in New York's Catskill Mountains. It was Wednesday morning, August 14.
"Hot Lips is doing OK," he said, before delivering the bad news about the liquid. "It puts the possibility of liver disease or kidney disease back in the picture....We'll keep you posted as we move along."
Dr. Harms and his colleagues are among about 20 vets in the nation who perform surgery on pet fish. Not one of them makes it his sole practice. But the need for such services is growing. Americans are building more backyard fishponds, stocking up on pets that they swear have personalities of their own.
Large "pond-kept fish" rank as the fastest-growing fish-pets in the nation, while the broader category of fish ownership grows faster than dogs, cats, lizards or any other pet type, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association in Greenwich, Conn., and pet fish tend to grow bigger when they have more room to swim. Koi, the goldfish's fancy and often-expensive cousin, are particularly popular. They can live well past 30. So when these much-loved pets grow lumps or quit swimming, some owners give surgery a shot.
More are reaching out to Dr. Harms and his colleagues at North Carolina State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. One reason: Surgeons there have developed an advanced way to keep their patients alive on the operating table -- a portable device that pumps fluids, including anesthesia, into their mouths and out their gills.
The North Carolina surgeons will take cases that other vets consider hopeless. In March, they fused two crushed vertebrae along the spine of a 21-inch, $900 koi named Ladyfish. The three-hour procedure followed X-rays and a CAT scan. Ladyfish's owner, a North Carolina Roto-Rooter manager named David Smothers, recently brought in a smaller koi named Wendy for similar work. "To see this little girl swimming again, it's just incredible," Mr. Smothers says.
That expertise caught the attention of Deb and Greg Ireland, who live in Liberty, N.Y., about 90 miles northwest of New York City. The couple, in their mid-50s, bought Hot Lips three years ago when she was a three-inch baby. They picked her out of a pet-store tank because of the fish's striking snow-white body, reddish-orange back and small spot of color above her mouth.
The Irelands acclimatized Hot Lips to their pond, in a backyard oasis of gentle waterfalls, a barbecue grill and lounge chairs. Hot Lips grew into a svelte beauty, making friends with the couple's 25 other fish, among them Pinto, a large koi, and Alice, a naturally round oranda, a type of goldfish.
Last fall, the Irelands noticed some lumps on Hot Lips. "Maybe she's got some oranda genes in her," Mr. Ireland told his wife, hoping to ease her concerns. By spring, Hot Lips's stomach had swollen like a baseball. Mrs. Ireland gave her regular injections of antibiotics. That cleared up the sores but didn't reduce the swelling.
Mrs. Ireland began looking for a surgeon. By early August, she was telling surgeons at North Carolina State about a pink, bumpy growth protruding from Hot Lips's vent.
"How soon can you get her here?" veterinarian Greg Lewbart asked.
Three days later, the Irelands took Hot Lips to an aquatics shop in Warwick, N.Y., where she was specially packaged for overnight shipping. "Hang in there, Champ," Mr. Ireland said.
That night, Mrs. Ireland couldn't sleep and spent her time tracking Hot Lips's travel itinerary on the UPS Web site. By 10:00 a.m. the next day, Hot Lips had arrived safely in North Carolina. The operation was to take place the following morning.
The Irelands had reason to feel good about their surgeon. A native of Iowa, Dr. Harms earned his bachelor's degree in biology at Harvard, where he became taken with the idea of working with aquatic animals. He then went to vet school at Iowa State University. He has since had advanced training in microsurgery.
During the past eight years, Dr. Harms, now 41, has operated on about 125 fish, for pet owners and while teaching seminars for other vets. All but one fish survived. The pet owners generally pay between $350 and $1,000. Dr. Harms's research-journal articles have chronicled, among other cases, the removal of a hematoma the size of a pencil eraser from a three-inch gourami.
Operating on Hot Lips, Dr. Harms wedged the Irelands' goldfish into a V-shaped bed of foam rubber. The sedated fish was still, save for the motion of her gills as water and chemicals flowed through. A water pump provided the only constant sound in the room.
Dr. Harms, wearing aqua surgical scrubs and a light-blue mask, cut and retracted enough of Hot Lips's sides to reveal the first of two growths. With his fingertips, he gingerly probed beneath the yellow, slimy mass. "Looks like we got a big ol', fluid-filled, nasty ovary," Dr. Harms told his team.
The growth had been pushing into Hot Lips's central organ cavity, wending its way around her tiny colon. At Dr. Harms's request, one of the other vets inserted a catheter into Hot Lips's vent, hoping that it would support the colon as he cut near it.
No good. By the time Dr. Harms's instruments reached the colon, it had torn. He would have to repair it with surgical thread the thickness of a human hair.
At 11:04, Hot Lips stopped gilling.
Pam Govett, a vet assisting in the surgery, switched the anesthesiology flow device to pure, dechlorinated water. This supplied Hot Lips with oxygen in the same way a ventilator keeps human patients alive in a hospital. Next, the fish's heart became the big concern. Jenny Kishimori, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer now in veterinary school, put a tiny audio probe just below Hot Lips's throat. They couldn't hear a pulse, just water sloshing through the gills.
The team adjusted the probe. Finally, the sound of a steady, though slow, beat filled the room. "Thump-thump...thump-thump..." A low-normal 28 beats per minute.
Dr. Harms eventually removed two growths, which together accounted for about 40% of Hot Lips's weight, which had been 13 oz. But it was then clear exactly how sick she'd been. Damaged kidneys, scant body fat and pale gills suggested anemia.
Dr. Harms turned back to the frayed colon. He pinched its underside with forceps, rotating it enough to sew together a lateral tear. An assistant retracted the catheter slightly as saline solution ran back into Hot Lips's colon to test the fix. It held.
In New York, Hot Lips's owners waited by the phone. Nervous, Mrs. Ireland finally called the vet school, but could reach only an intake room. "Hot Lips hasn't made it back yet," she was told.
Forty minutes later, her phone rang. "It's not looking real good," Dr. Harms told her. He explained all his team had done. "The biggest concern for me right now is: She's been on pure water for over two hours and she hasn't started gilling," he said.
"Keep trying," Mrs. Ireland said.
Back in the operating room, Hot Lips's pulse had faded to 14 beats per minute. Dr. Harms injected her with adrenaline, which spiked her heartbeat to 32, but he didn't really expect that to last.
"Come on, Hot Lips," the soldier-turned-vet-student Ms. Kishimori pleaded, "wake up!"
Dr. Govett smoothed out Hot Lips's tail. "Such a beautiful fish," she said.
Nearly five hours after the procedure began, Hot Lips's pulse faded to nothing. Dr. Govett extended her thumb and forefinger into Hot Lips's chest, applying several minutes of CPR to try to start her heart.
"I think not," Dr. Harms said finally, walking out of the room to call New York.
-- Dan Morse, September 2002
3. A Horse Is a Horse,
Unless of Course...
LEXINGTON, Va. -- The world will little note nor long remember what was said here, but many will never forget the weirdness of what they did here this week. Six score and 14 years after his last ride in battle, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's war-horse was finally laid to rest in a walnut casket with prayer, pomp and a parting carrot.
At least part of him was.
"I wish they'd bury the whole horse," says Martha Boltz, gazing at Little Sorrel's hide, mounted on a lifelike frame on display at the Virginia Military Institute's museum here. Studying the horse's oft-repaired flank, she adds, "He looks like he's been reupholstered one too many times."
Mike Whitaker, another visitor, disagrees. "I've got deer mounts on my wall that look a whole lot worse," says the cookie distributor from North Carolina. "I say let the ol' boy keep riding as long as he's able."
How Little Sorrel came riding here at all is a long, strange story winding back to 1861, when Jackson, a brilliant Confederate commander, procured the reddish-brown horse from a captured Union train. Jackson, an awkward rider, liked the gelding's gentle gait -- "as easy as the rocking of a cradle," he wrote -- and often slept in the saddle. Mount suited master in another way; both were unimpressive physical specimens whose attributes weren't obvious. "Little Sorrel was as little like a Pegasus as he [Stonewall] was like an Apollo," wrote one Jackson aide. Others recalled "a dun cob of very sorry appearance" and an ugly "old rawbone sorrel."
But the small, dumpy mount proved tireless on the march and calm under fire, surviving a bullet wound and bolting just once, when Jackson was accidentally shot in the arm by his own troops as he rode in the dark during the battle of Chancellorsville in northern Virginia. His arm was amputated but the wound proved fatal to Jackson, who had earned his nickname for his "stone wall" defense of rebel lines at the first battle of Bull Run.
After the war, Little Sorrel toured county fairs and rebel reunions; souvenir seekers tugged so many hairs from his mane and tail that the horse required guards. In death, at the age of 36 -- just three years short of Stonewall -- the horse's fate again mimicked its master's. Jackson was buried in pieces, his amputated arm at Chancellorsville, the rest of him in Lexington, where he had taught at VMI before the war. His horse, meanwhile, was mounted on a plaster of Paris frame by a taxidermist who took the bones home to Pittsburgh as partial payment.
Both bones and hide eventually found their way to VMI, where the skeleton was used in biology class and the mounted hide displayed in the school museum. Then, when the science department relocated in 1989, the bones languished in moving boxes in the museum storeroom.
"It seemed weird and sad to me that Little Sorrel was never buried," says Juanita Allen, head of the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Not long ago, she visited the horse's boxed remains. "I picked up his teeth and rubbed his nose bone. I was petting it and talking to him, telling him how sorry I was and how we'd take care of him."
Ms. Allen, an executive assistant at McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm, decided the Daughters should bury the horse with military-style honors. To her, this seemed the Christian thing to do, as well as a natural extension of the never-ending interest in the Civil War. "You can only talk so many times about what your great-grandfather did at this or that battle," she says. "But no one ever talks about the animals, who had no choice in the matter. They were just faithful beasts of burden who suffered terribly." An estimated 3.5 million horses and draft animals died in the war. Ms. Allen got VMI to agree to bury Little Sorrel's bones on the parade ground where the horse had once grazed, but this raised a ticklish question. What about the hide? Standing stiffly in a diorama-like display scattered with stones and leaves, Little Sorrel's hide has cracks on its face and lines on its flank where the leather has separated over the years.
"He's done with the Yankees -- humidity's his worst enemy now," says the museum's director, Keith Gibson, who calls in a taxidermist from the Smithsonian Institution every few years to glue the hide's tears and seal the cracks with beeswax. Despite its flaws, the horse remains the main draw at VMI's small museum, which attracts 50,000 visitors a year. The gift shop sells Little Sorrel postcards, refrigerator magnets and cuddle toys. Visitors even leave apples at the mounted hide's feet.
"This place is a reliquary, it's a piece-of-the-true-cross kind of thing to be close to Sorrel's remains," says University of Pennsylvania Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust, visiting Lexington to witness the horse's burial. Even so, Ms. Faust finds the mount's fate and enduring appeal a tad strange. "You have to wonder," she says, "if Southerners wanted to stuff Stonewall Jackson but stuffed his horse instead."
Nor is Little Sorrel's hide the only shrine in Lexington, a Shenandoah Valley town of about 7,500. Robert E. Lee, the South's most prominent general, also worked here. For Civil War pilgrims, the town's other holy sites include the two generals' graves, Stonewall's house, an exact life-size statue of Lee and the nearby grave of his war-horse, Traveller. Visitors often leave carrots and coins on Traveller's grave, and flock to the stable -- now a garage -- where he was kept.
"If it wasn't for our dead generals and their dead horses this town would be, well, dead," says Doug Harwood, publisher of the Rockbridge Advocate, a Lexington newspaper. He is often bemused by the town's idol-worship. "You turn a corner in the VMI museum and come face to face with the mighty Stonewall's mighty war-horse -- and it looks like it couldn't pull Donald Duck in a wagon." But even Mr. Harwood turned out this week for the burial of Little Sorrel's cremated bones. Originally, VMI hoped to keep the interment quiet, even planning a night burial for fear of turning the event into a circus. But as word leaked out, and interest grew, it became clear that Little Sorrel would not ride quietly into the night. In the end, it took a minister, bagpipe player, fife-and-drum band, color guard -- even a Stonewall impersonator astride a horse meant to resemble Little Sorrel -- to lay the horse's remains to rest.
Nikki Moor, who bought the horse for her Stonewall-playing husband, concedes that the handsome Arabian isn't a perfect match of Jackson's mount, but it is the closest she could find. "Most people don't advertise that they have a short, fat ugly horse for sale," she says.
The interment, held beneath a statue of Stonewall, drew about 500 people, including women in period mourning garb. After prayers and speeches and the playing of "Dixie," pallbearers clad as rebel soldiers lowered the coffin as Confederate riflemen fired musket volleys. Then the crowd filed past the grave and scooped in clods of dirt gathered from 14 battlefields where Little Sorrel served. Some mourners also tossed in carrots, oats and horseshoes.
"Once again, Little Sorrel is beneath Stonewall Jackson," intoned James Robertson, a Jackson biographer. "May you continue to have good grazing in the boundless pastures of heaven."
After the burial, the crowd proceeded to the nearby museum to pay their respects to Little Sorrel's hide, still on its frame. Even the cynical publisher, Mr. Harwood, was struck by the dignity of the event. "You didn't see anyone trying to cash in with T-shirts or tacky mugs," he said. "There wasn't even a politician here."
But Mr. Harwood did wonder if the remains might have been put to better use. "We could have traded these bones for Stoney's arm up in Chancellorsville and brought the limb back here," he said. "Now, we've got no more relics to swap."
-- Tony Horwitz, July 1997
4. Much Chow, No Hounds
CARNATION, Wash. -- Edward Kane is up to his whiskers in cats. Cat posters adorn his office walls. Cat food crowds his shelves. Cat magazines clutter his desk. Cat eyes stare from a pin on his starched white lab coat.
The 37-year-old Mr. Kane talks cats, cats, cats. Cat business litters his mind: cats to mate, cats to groom, sick cats, cats that won't eat.
Especially cats that won't eat. Cats that won't eat are a real problem.
Mr. Kane sneezes, then excuses himself. "Allergic to cats," he says sheepishly.
The bespectacled, affable Mr. Kane runs Carnation Co.'s "cattery." Here in the pastoral Snoqualmie Valley about 20 miles east of Seattle, more than 500 cats reside in a sort of feline commune -- and eat for, not into, the corporate profits.
They are the cat version of gourmet food tasters, nibbling a pungent pâté of this, sampling a crunchy nugget of that. Their food preferences are computerized and scientifically translated by Mr. Kane and others for Carnation's pet-foods division, based in Los Angeles. There, product managers and marketers gamble that what tickles these feline palates will please cats all across the nation.
The cats, which taste-tested about 250,000 cans of moist cat food and 70,000 pounds of dry varieties last year, seem to be doing a good job. Carnation, the nation's No. 2 pet-food maker (behind Ralston Purina Co.), had pet-food sales of $486 million in fiscal 1983. About 60% of the total came from sales of the company's Friskies, Fancy Feast and other cat-food brands.
"The cats," says Ronald Stapley, Carnation's farm-research director, who formerly ran the cattery, "aren't just necessary: They're critical."
Dwight Stuart, Jr., a great-grandson of Carnation's founder, E. A. Stuart, says, "It's kind of neat knowing that our success is largely in the hands of those little beasties." The 38-year-old Mr. Stuart is, so to speak, the Top Cat of Carnation's pet-foods division. At least once a year, he visits the cattery to look in on his furry helpers.
The cattery, as it happens, is just down the hill from the barns where Carnation's famous Contented Cows still lead an idyllic bovine life. It's also one of only two large-scale cat taste-testing and nutrition-research facilities in America. Ralston Purina runs the other, near St. Louis.
Carnation began its cattery with only 44 cats in 1953, about the time commercial cat food was beginning to jump onto supermarket shelves in quantity. The cattery grew slowly to about 300 cats by 1970. Until then, Carnation and other pet-food companies concentrated on the lucrative multibillion-dollar dog-food market, which had its beginnings in the 1930s. (Carnation has operated a taste-testing kennel for dogs since 1932.)
But in the 1970s, pet cats, to the surprise of pet-food producers, climbed sharply in popularity. Mr. Stuart attributes the boom partly to the "mystique of the cat" -- cats not long ago even made the cover of Time magazine. But the main factor, he thinks, was a shift toward urban living, which favors pets that fit into compact living space and need less attention. The cat, small, cheap to feed, independent and fastidious, answers the job description, he adds.
Today, cats have begun to challenge dogs as America's favorite pets. Though dogs still hold the lead -- there are perhaps 55 million to 60 million pet dogs in America -- cats have almost doubled in just the past 15 years to 43 million currently.
And cat-food sales, a modest $500 million nationwide in 1973, grew to about $1.6 billion last year and are expected to hit $2.7 billion by 1992. Americans also spent another $1 billion or so last year on feline vaccinations, vitamins and veterinary services.
"The cat-food side of the industry is where the growth is," Mr. Stuart says.
To capitalize on that growth, Carnation decided to get even cozier with cats. So, since 1970, it has almost doubled the cattery's capacity to 550 cats and has stepped up its research to answer lingering questions about cat nutrition and food preferences.
The nutritional requirements are fairly well known, Mr. Kane says. The mysterious things are the finicky feline appetite and the cat's penchant to seem bored one day with the very food that it downed voraciously the day before. This "food fatigue," as Mr. Stapley calls it, helps explain why pet-food companies make so many flavors and textures of cat food -- and why they are as nervous as cats at a dog show.
"We know we've basically got one chance with the consumer," Mr. Stuart says. "If the cat walks up to the bowl, sniffs at it and walks away, the owner is probably off to the supermarket for someone else's brand."
So, Mr. Kane spends long hours trying to demystify cat idiosyncrasies about food. He oversees perhaps 200 to 250 tests a month, mostly dealing with "food acceptance." The tests are straightforward: White-coated clinicians scoop out measured portions of cat food into stainless-steel bowls. The food is weighed, the weight punched into a computer.
The cats, each with his own computer number, eat. The bowls are taken away, and the food is weighed again to determine the amount consumed. That information is also punched into the computer, which calculates how much the cat liked the vittles. The tests not only involve new products, which can take up to two years to develop, but often cat food on the market for years.
"Quality control," Mr. Kane explains. The cat palate is so sensitive to even minute changes in flavor that Carnation uses taste testing results to make sure that its longtime products don't drift from the tastes that made them popular.
Sometimes, too, the company has to change an existing recipe slightly because it can't get a customary ingredient from a supplier. In those cases, the cats -- under considerable deadline pressure -- help make multimillion-dollar business decisions.
"If we have to change an ingredient, we don't want to make a large batch of food using the new ingredient without knowing how the cats will react," Mr. Stuart says, so, a factory often air-freights a test batch to Mr. Kane, who feeds it to his cats overnight, quickly runs the results on his computer and phones headquarters the next day with the results. Whole factories sometimes are held up until the cat data are digested. Sometimes, so much is at stake that the cat stats go all the way up to Carnation's chairman, H. E. Olson, before the company decides what to do.
"The results are only a tool. We might say, 'Well, it looks pretty good to our cats.' But they [pet-foods division officials] make the final decision," Mr. Kane adds.
The cats also help Carnation check up on the competition. They often eat rival brands, served in identical bowls alongside Carnation products. The company concedes that now and then, its cats devour competing food with disconcerting relish.
"If that happens, I don't get depressed, at least not right away. But I get very inquisitive and want to find out what's going on," Mr. Stuart says. Mr. Stapley adds cryptically, "We probably know as much about our competitors' products as they do."
Though the testing is done with scientific efficiency in a hospital-clean environment, all sense of clinical decorum is lost at feeding time.
"Hold on, it's coming," says a cattery worker as she pushes a large cart full of pungent cat food into a room where about 25 cats live in airy, stainless-steel "apartments." She is greeted with a cacophony of meows. Cats in the next room join in, and suddenly the whole place is vibrating with hungry-cat noises.
Down the hall, a few cats are singing different tunes: wails, purrs, shrieks.
"Oh, that," Mr. Kane says. "Mating season, you know." Mr. Kane, in fact, is the principal matchmaker, importing one or two male cats a year to add vigor to the cattery's bloodlines. But almost all the cats here are descendants from the original 44. Most are just plain tabby cats; Carnation discovered long ago that what common cats eat, fancy cats eat, too.
Common or not, the cats here seem to be treated royally. They all have names -- such as Faustus, Pong, Sly, Secret Agent and, yes, Garfield -- and Mr. Kane knows practically all of them. Each cat is groomed and weighed weekly, gets regular physical checkups and is fussed over by a full-time veterinarian on call 24 hours a day. There aren't any fat cats here; tubby t