New Yorkers, with their dog-averse landlords, have an unusual number and variety of exotic pets. Throughout the years, the city has been swept by vogues for potbellied pigs, Day-Glo anole lizards, and sugar gliders—a nectar-eating Australian marsupial. Most owners don’t really know how to care for these animals (sugar gliders, for instance, are prone to osteoporosis in captivity), so the A.M.C. sees a steady circus parade of patients. On a recent day, the exotics unit treated a ferret with a hair ball, an anorexic bearded dragon, a pigeon with a fracture, two wild Canada geese that had got tangled in fishing line, a four-year-old guinea pig awaiting a five-thousand-dollar surgery on a ureteral stone, and a hummingbird with a broken wing. Two X-rays hung on a light board on a wall in the corridor. One was of a duck called Nip-Nip, who had swallowed a metallic object. The other showed a long, elegant spine strung with eight perfect ovals: a corn snake with a clutch of eggs stuck in her birth canal.
In 1910, when the A.M.C. was founded, animal welfare was a relative term. Officers with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals carried guns with which to dispatch horses, several hundred of which collapsed from heat and exhaustion in the city every summer. It was considered unladylike to bear firearms, so the women’s auxiliary to the A.S.P.C.A. founded the New York Women’s League for Animals, and opened a clinic. Situated on the Lower East Side, the clinic was devoted to the city’s strays and to the pets of poor immigrants, and funded by charitable donations. Its first patient, carried across the Brooklyn Bridge by a young girl, was a cat whose tail had been caught in a door.
In 1962, when the clinic moved to the Upper East Side, veterinarians were still a utilitarian breed and more than 90 percent of them were men. Much of their work was of the kind made famous by James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small: dosing sheep, midwifing cattle. Then, gradually, women began to enter vet schools. By 1975, they represented half of all students; by 2000, nearly three-quarters—and most of them wanted to treat pets. Hospitals sold vets their outdated CAT scanners and MRI machines, making high-tech medicine more affordable. And, as the birth rate dropped, pets came to take the place of children in some families.
Between 1980 and 2001 alone, the number of dogs and cats in the United States grew from ninety-eight million to a hundred and thirty million. Two generations ago, fathers still gave their sons sacks of kittens to drown in the river. Today, according to a recent survey by the American Animal Hospital Association, 63 percent of pet owners say “I love you” to their pets every day. Eighty-three percent refer to themselves as their pet’s mom or dad.
The current director of the A.M.C., Guy Pidgeon, has lived through both halves of this history. He was born on a farm in western Nebraska in 1947—though you’d never guess it from the stout, Friar Tuck–ish figure he now is—and went to the Colorado State University veterinary school, intent on becoming a country vet. “Then, at some point, I began to see an incredible dichotomy between agricultural and veterinary medicine,” he told me. “One was driven by economics, the other by emotion.” A sick cow could merit only a few shots before it was sent to the slaughterhouse; a sick hamster could motivate a six-hour surgery. To a veterinarian interested in cutting-edge medicine, the future lay with pets.
“My staff likes to tease me about the time my father came here for a visit,” Pidgeon said. “He’s eighty-six now and still lives on the farm. He tries to maintain a sense of humor about what I do, but he doesn’t really understand it.” The poodles getting root canals, the rabbits in radiation wards, were strange enough; but the crowning absurdity was the sight of two prairie dogs in the intensive-care unit. Members of the latest exotic pet craze, they had contracted pneumonia and were having trouble breathing. “If you’re a farmer in Nebraska, you’ve been waging holy war against prairie dogs all your life,” Pidgeon said. “And here I was giving them oxygen therapy.”
Before I visited the A.M.C., I had a certain cartoonish image of its clientele: the dragon lady from Carnegie Hill kissing her lapdogs on the lips; the Wall Street power broker sending his wolfhounds to have their teeth cleaned. I thought of the German countess Carlotta Liebenstein, who in 1991 bequeathed her eighty-million-dollar estate to her dog Gunther. Of J. Paul Getty, who refused to return from Europe when his twelve-year-old son died of a brain tumor but had a vet flown in when his dog developed cancer. When the disease proved fatal, he spent three days weeping in the dog’s room.
Lady’s owners were different. Like many of the rumpled, red-eyed people I sat with in the A.M.C. waiting room, they could scarcely afford their sympathies. Shawn Levering works with mentally disabled adults, finding them jobs and visiting them weekly at their workplaces. He recently turned forty and makes twenty-seven thousand dollars a year. His wife, Karen, who is thirty-four, is the caregiver for a disabled teenager and is earning a degree in child psychology. They live in a three-room apartment in a plain brick building on the outskirts of Wilmington. At night, trains rumble in and out of the nearby Saturn car factory, delivering parts, and you can hear the thrum of Interstate 95 half a mile away.
(illustration credit 14.2)
When I visited them at home, on a Wednesday evening, Lady was scheduled for a transplant the next morning. She had made it through the dialysis treatment at the A.M.C. and had been transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. Karen had been to Philadelphia that morning to see the kidney donor. The hospital maintains a pool of cats for the purpose, often taken from local shelters and research labs. The surgery seems to have no ill effect on the donor cats’ health, and it solves the problem of having to put them to sleep: the owners of the transplantee have to agree to adopt the donor. In the Leverings’ case, the new cat would bring their feline population to four.
As we talked, Jimmy, a fat brown tabby with a cream belly, slinked warily past Bogart, a scruffy white tom lounging on the couch. Karen had found Bogart starving in front of a 7-Eleven one night and brought him home, only to find that the cat was stone deaf and deeply irritable. The first time Shawn tried to pull Bogart and Jimmy apart, he was bitten so deeply that he had to go to the emergency room. The second time, he had to take a round of antibiotics and get a tetanus shot. Karen’s asthma flared up so badly, with all the dander in the air, that she had to use her albuterol inhaler repeatedly. “But I really think my system has adjusted to them,” she said.
“You look just like your profile picture.”
Karen has strawberry-blond hair and a moon-shaped face unmarked by her relentless bad luck. When she met Shawn, in 1997, through a dating service on the local radio station, she was a teacher at a Christian school. A month before their wedding, her car was rear-ended when she stopped at a yield sign. Her injuries were serious enough to warrant visits to a chiropractor during her honeymoon, and they were compounded, three months later, when she was rear-ended again. With a fractured vertebra and several torn disks in her spine, she couldn’t stand in front of a classroom anymore, so she stayed home, on constant medication. When she tried to start a family, she couldn’t get pregnant.
“I don’t know what I would have done without the cats,” she said. “Shawn was working long hours, and the pain was so extreme sometimes that I would just go to the bathroom and cry.” Lady seemed to sense her moods. She would leap onto the bed at night and nestle on her chest. Karen had studied enough psychology to suspect that her feelings for Lady were partly misplaced mothering instincts, but she also knew that relationships like theirs could have a particular intensity. In the early 1970s, for instance, the biologist Erika Friedmann, of Brooklyn College, studied how heart-attack patients respond to social support. Patients who had a dog or cat, she found, were more than four times as likely to survive a year after a heart attack than those who didn’t have a pet.
Research like Friedmann’s has since spawned its own scholarly journal, Anthrozoos, and a “prescribe-a-pet” movement has sprung up among some therapists. Three years ago, Karen Allen, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, stud
ied two groups of hypertensive stockbrokers from Wall Street. One group was given drugs and a pet, while the other received only drugs. Six months later, the brokers took a stress test. They were asked to appease a client who pretended to have just lost eighty-six thousand dollars, thanks to their advice. Everyone’s blood pressure rose, but for those with pets it rose half as much. Allen later ran another series of tests on pet owners. This time, she had them perform stressful activities alone, in the presence of their pets, and in the presence of their spouses. The results were unequivocal: pets made people’s blood pressure drop; spouses made it shoot up.
Sitting side by side on the love seat in their living room, Karen and Shawn could have passed for two of the pet lovers in Allen’s study. Karen argued that her cats deserve “the respect of life.” She described the prayer group that she belonged to at a Methodist church and said that the other members would be sending their blessings to Lady the next morning. Shawn reminded her that they were already in debt—“We’ve gone from getting by to barely scraping.” He said the first time she mentioned a transplant he was tempted to have her sanity checked. The cats wound their way between them, filling the silences with their purring.
There’s a cat on the payroll of the New Yorker Delicatessen at Madison and Thirty-sixth Street who has learned to sit on the green bananas and ripen them.
| 1944 |
Late that night, Shawn and I took a drive through the deserted streets of Wilmington, past strip malls and sandwich shops to the garage where he works on his street rods. Inside, a 1940 Ford truck lay on blocks, its body sanded and primed, waiting for parts from the crippled car beside it. Shawn and his friend Eddie had bolted the truck’s body to a Chevy S-10 frame. They had chopped five inches from the frame, dropped in a burly 305, and laid in a steering column and brakes from a 1987 Monte Carlo. Then the money ran out.
“Before Karen and I got married, I was hoping to have this car done in two years,” Shawn said. He glanced around the garage and chuckled. No, he said, he wasn’t imagining what fifteen thousand dollars could buy. He, too, had come to depend on Lady’s company. “I can’t say I haven’t compared this transplant to a down payment on a house,” he said. “But you can’t go too far down that road. If Lady comes through this thing alive, I won’t think about it twice.”
I was reminded of the two trucks the next morning, in the operating room at the University of Pennsylvania. The donor cat, Jasper, was lying on one table, his kidney stripped out and strung from its blood vessels like an old transmission. Beside him, Lady, covered with surgical drapes, was awaiting her replacement part. An oxygenation monitor had been clipped to her tongue, an anesthesia tube was pumping Isoflurane gas down her throat, and nylon cords anchored her limbs to the corners of the table. As soon as one team of surgeons cut her open and located her renal blood vessels, aorta, and vena cava, another team would cut Jasper’s kidney free. Then the transplant would begin.
Lillian Aronson, the head surgeon, strode in with her forearms scrubbed and dripping, her face set in an uneasy grin. She’d begun the day in good spirits, joining the nurses in the kidney chant they had made up: “K-I-D-N-E-Y, You can do it if you try! Kidney! Kidney! Kidney!” Then things began to go wrong. Every cat has two kidneys, though it needs only one to survive, but not every kidney is fit for a transplant. Jasper was Lady’s second donor. The first donor, Jack, seemed to have an ideal kidney: a CT scan showed that it was neither too big nor too small, and that there was a single artery and vein servicing it. But when Aronson opened the cat up, she found a second artery tucked behind the first. This artery would have to be sacrificed in a transplant, depriving part of the organ of blood. Luckily, Jasper—Jack’s littermate—was available for surgery, and his blood type was a match for Lady’s.
“It’s all very scary,” Aronson said, putting on her surgical gloves. “I ought to just open up a bed-and-breakfast and hang a ‘No Vacancy’ sign.” Aronson, who is thirty-six, has been transplanting kidneys for ten years. Though her success rate is high—94 percent of her patients leave the hospital, and more than half are alive after four years—the procedure still fills her with a pleasurable dread. The night before, I’d watched her practice in this room, sewing stitches into a sliced rubber glove. A cat’s renal artery is only about two millimeters thick. To stitch it to another artery of the same size, Aronson has to use an enormous surgical microscope suspended above the patient’s open belly, with dual eyepieces for the surgeon and for her assistant. That brings the sutures into view but throws her eye-hand coordination out of synch. Seen through the eyepiece, the most delicate forceps loom like pliers.
As Aronson took a scalpel and placed the tip on Lady’s belly, I could see her bracing for the start as if for a pistol shot at a racetrack. Animal lovers are often accused of anthropomorphism, but after you’ve spent a few weeks in a veterinary hospital it’s hard to resist the opposite urge: the doctors all begin to look like their patients. Aronson is unmistakably a greyhound: lean and tightly wound, with dark, downturned eyes and a disarmingly sweet nature for someone who is so single-minded. She runs marathons regularly with her husband, and has wanted to be a vet almost from the time she could talk. When her oldest brother, a physicist, first heard about her transplanting a cat’s kidneys, his only comment was “Why not just perform a collar transplant instead?”
Aronson needed only a few minutes to open Lady’s belly, clamp the aorta and the vena cava, and bring over Jasper’s kidney. “This cat has issues,” she had warned me before the surgery. “With that asthma, I’m not sure how she’ll hold up under anesthesia.” So far, though, Lady’s breathing was deep and even, her blood pressure steady. Using a foot pedal, Aronson steered the motorized microscope into position. She grasped the cut end of Jasper’s renal artery with forceps and pressed it against a tiny hole that she had cut in Lady’s aorta, like a T-joint in a pipe. For the next ten minutes, she sutured the joint together. Then, just as she was putting in the final stitch, her needle caught the back wall of the artery. As she drew in the thread, it pinched the vessel partially shut. Blood could still flow through it, but there was the possibility of a blood clot.
“All you really need in life is the love of a good cat.”
Aronson glanced up at her assistants, her features thrown into shadow by the overhead lamp. “Can anything else go wrong today?” she said. She had no choice but to take out the thread and restitch the joint, but that could irritate the arterial wall, again increasing the chance of a clot. “Her potassium level is going up,” a technician called out beside her. Aronson shook her head. “I’m worried about that artery,” she said. “Very worried. I’m telling you right now this may not work.”
The dire choices that define a veterinarian’s day aren’t particularly well compensated. The average American vet makes around sixty thousand dollars a year—a hundred thousand less than the average physician, though veterinary training can be just as rigorous and costly as medical school. If vet schools still have to turn applicants away, it’s partly because people love to work with animals and partly because they’re put off by the tortured ethics of human medicine. Whatever dramas veterinarians have to face, they know that malpractice suits are rare and relatively inexpensive, and that euthanasia is always an option.
But that may be changing. The law has long treated pets as property, no different from a Teddy bear or a windup toy. If an owner sues for the wrongful death of his cat, the most he can demand is the cost of replacing the animal. Recently, though, lawyers have begun to demand more. Two years ago in Oregon, a retired football player named Stan Brock filed a lawsuit against a man who had shot his two Labrador retrievers with arrows. (The man claimed that the dogs had been threatening stray cats near his house.) Replacing the dogs would have cost, at most, a few hundred dollars, but Brock sued for three hundred thousand dollars. “Pets don’t depreciate; they appreciate,” his attorney, Geordie Duckler, argued in court. “That’s very different from what you can say about a purse or a car.”
The trial judge agreed.
“Before Prozac, she loathed company.” (illustration credit 14.5)
Brock eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, but Duckler expects a number of similar cases in coming years. In Tennessee, he says, a law that was recently passed allows owners to sue for up to four thousand dollars in emotional damages if their pet is killed by a negligent pet owner’s dog, and several other states have comparable bills on the docket. In New York, in 1999, a housing court forced a landlord to let a woman keep a puppy in her Queens apartment when she cited research on the health benefits of pets. Elsewhere, a group called In Defense of Animals has lobbied communities to define people as “guardians” rather than owners of their pets. Seven cities and the state of Rhode Island have adopted at least a variation of the ordinance.
“The more people spend on their pets, the more that cost is going to be reflected in the law,” Duckler says, which means that veterinarians could face million-dollar malpractice suits in the future. Each time they introduce an expensive new procedure—radiation therapy in the 1980s, MRIs in the 1990s, experimental cancer vaccines in the new millennium—they implicitly raise the value of their patients. Many vets, like doctors, are now on call at night and on weekends. When they sit at kitchen tables at four in the morning, listening patiently to owners describing their dogs’ stool consistency, they suggest that a pet is worth almost any effort, any cost.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 25
