Vets say that rising malpractice awards will hurt both sides. “They’ll just bring the insanity of the human side of the business into my profession,” Guy Pidgeon told me at the A.M.C. “And all those costs will be passed on to the client.” But pet owners have already begun to prepare for those costs. Nearly four hundred thousand pets are now covered by medical insurance policies in the United States, and that number is expected to grow to two and a half million in the next five years.
Not long ago, at an all-day symposium at Harvard Law School, Jane Goodall, Alan Dershowitz, and others tried to sort out the legal and ethical principles behind these issues. Should courts grant animals some human rights? If so, which animals and which rights? There was much talk of I.Q. and the theory of mind, of gorillas that can communicate in sign language and parrots that can do arithmetic. Steven Wise, an animal-rights attorney and the author of the book Drawing the Line, divided the animal world into four categories, based on ascending levels of intelligence. At the bottom were earthworms, bacteria, and other creatures that are notably lacking in self-knowledge or the power of deductive reasoning. At the top were the great apes, dolphins, and a few clever birds. Only this last group, Wise argued, could claim “legal personhood.” Dogs, cats, and most other pets hovered somewhere in category three: just a little too dim—or poorly understood—to earn our highest regard.
Wise knows that his categories won’t convince most people. An adult chimpanzee may be smarter than most two-year-old boys, but that won’t get it into day care. The rights we grant animals are, first and foremost, a function of empathy—and, on that count, no ape can compete with a pet. “The chimp is amazingly similar to us in brain structure, DNA, and behavior,” Jane Goodall told me during an intermission. “But a dog can be a better friend to you than anyone else.” Goodall has spent most of her life living with chimpanzees, but it was her childhood dog, Rusty, who first taught her that animals have personalities, intelligence, and feelings. If one research facility was being cruel to dogs and another was abusing primates, she said, she knew which one she would shut down first: “I’d choose the dogs.”
The missing voice in this debate, of course, is that of the animals. Is the agony of chemotherapy worth an extra six months of life to a dachshund? Does a parrot really want legal autonomy? Veterinarians like to talk about a pet’s quality of life, but no one really knows what they mean. Injured animals no doubt experience fear and pain: the parts of their brains that process those feelings (the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus) are similar to ours, and animals often have keener senses. Do they also feel enough pleasure—enough joy in the sheer fact of existence—to make surviving worthwhile?
Two weeks before Lady’s transplant, I saw a mastiff named Taberia in the intensive-care unit at the A.M.C. The dog was eleven years old—ancient for her breed—and barely able to stand. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and her skin draped over her bones like an old rug. She had a grapefruit-size growth hanging from her belly and a bleeding tumor on her spleen that seemed to have spread to her liver. “Surgery will probably just prolong the inevitable,” a resident said. “Dogs with this kind of cancer don’t respond well to chemo.” The doctor gently suggested putting the dog to sleep, but the owner seemed not to have heard him. She was a bartender at Red Rock West, in Manhattan, with a pale, defiant face and a voice gone smoky from years of screaming above crowds. She crouched inside the mastiff’s cage and cradled its head. “Taberia used to love hanging out at the bar,” she said. “I’ve always thought she must have been a drunken ballerina in her last life.”
Euthanasia is one of the last dividing lines between human and animal medicine, but it has been blurred in recent years. Although Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1997, and Jack Kevorkian and others have championed the practice for the terminally ill, veterinarians have grown more wary of the procedure. Less than twenty years ago, a pet owner could still have a healthy animal put down. Now most vets will euthanize only the very sick, and their standards continue to rise as their medicine improves. “Sometimes, in all the hoopla over what we can do, we lose sight of the fact that there are people who don’t want to go that far,” Pidgeon said. “And sometimes we think the pet is being forced to endure more than it should.” Owners can still weigh the costs and benefits of saving a pet’s life. But the more pets are treated like surrogate children, the more complicated the equation becomes.
In Taberia’s case, under the surgical lights the doctors found exactly what they had expected: the abdomen full of blood, the spleen and the liver so engorged with purplish cancer cells that they had burst open. Even then, the owner wanted the dog sewn back up and sent home. If Taberia could just live for a few more weeks, she thought, she might be able to cure her holistically.
The surgeons eventually persuaded Taberia’s owner to let them put the mastiff to sleep. When I asked her what she planned for the body, she said that she was going to buy Taberia a plot in Hartsdale, New York, in the country’s oldest and most prestigious pet cemetery. “When someone buries a dog there, you know they must have loved it to death,” she said.
It had been six hours since Lady’s first donor was cut open. For the past twenty minutes, a brittle silence had fallen over the room. Aronson shuttled from one side of the surgical table to the other, getting the best angle on her final stitches. The replacement kidney had been without blood for about forty-five minutes. Most organs can survive that long and still function, but Aronson could never be sure. She gave her assistants a weak smile. “Pray to the urine gods,” she said.
When the clamps came off, the renal artery and vein hung limply at first, like guy wires from a deflating zeppelin. Then, little by little, they began to stiffen. Their pale white walls stretched and expanded, until a delicate tremor ran down their length: the beating of Lady’s heart. “Unbelievable,” Aronson said. The sutures were holding, and the weakened artery showed no signs of collapse. Now she just had to attach the ureter: the vessel, even thinner than the artery, that carried urine from the kidney to the bladder.
Aronson sliced open the bladder, flipped it inside out, and cut a small hole in the side. She threaded the ureter through the hole and was preparing to attach it with a crown stitch when her hand suddenly froze. “Will you look at that?” she said. Her assistants crowded around, craning their necks. A thin stream of clear fluid was trickling from the ureter’s open end. “A new kidney making urine,” Aronson said, as everyone whooped and cheered around her. “There’s nothing better than that.”
Afterward, when the bladder had been stitched shut and injected with salt water to insure that it was watertight, and the kidney had been sewn to the side wall of her belly to prevent it from drifting, Aronson closed up Lady’s belly and rolled her to the intensive-care unit. She gave the nurse on duty the rundown: “She’s blind, she’s toothless, she has renal disease, and she’s really sweet.” Then she went out to get a Diet Coke—her first meal in more than twenty hours. Lady lay on the table, immobile. After a few minutes, she opened a single eye.
Americans now spend nineteen billion dollars a year on veterinary care, up from eleven billion just seven years ago. Add to that the cost of pet food and other supplies and the number rises to forty-seven billion, nearly three times as much as the federal government spends on welfare grants. The figures fill even some pet owners with dismay. If society could give up on goldfish alone, the sentiment suggests, it could fund a few dozen more Head Start programs. Cure the addiction to dogs and cats, and millions of families might be lifted out of poverty. Pets, as George Bernard Shaw wrote, “bear more than their natural burden of human love.”
“You needn’t feel guilty. You earned the fortune you inherited by giving her great happiness while she was alive.” (illustration credit 14.6)
But, of course, it’s not that simple. Our feelings for animals aren’t easily transferred, a fact best illustrated by our treatment of the pets we don’t own. When Lady was recovering from her transplant, a kitten was be
ing treated next door. His mother had died after giving birth, and his littermates, hungry for milk, had mistaken their brother’s penis for a nipple, eventually giving him a bladder infection. The kitten’s owners had driven in from western Pennsylvania and were paying hundreds of dollars for his treatment. Yet they could have got another kitten for free in any shelter. Every year, while pets like theirs are saved by the most elaborate means, some six million strays are put to sleep.
Americans are no more inconstant than other nationalities. The Chinese pamper their Pekingese and stir-fry other breeds. Polynesians used to slaughter some puppies and breastfeed others. The Inca kept hairy dogs as hunters, and hairless ones as bed warmers, shielding the latter from sunburn in rooms filled with orchids. Modern veterinary medicine is either the natural culmination of these ancient relationships or their crowning folly. Spending fifteen thousand dollars on a cat is an outrage, some say, yet they gladly spend four times more on a BMW.
The last time I saw the Leverings, Lady had been back from the hospital for a week and had a bedroom to herself. The first days of recovery are a dangerous time, Aronson says. One of her other clients tried to keep her cat from jumping down from the couch not long after its transplant. The cat shook itself free, ran downstairs, and fell over dead—its renal artery having torn free in the tussle. Even if Lady avoids such mishaps, she will have to take steroids and immunosuppressants for the rest of her life to keep her body from rejecting the new kidney. The drugs will cost about five hundred dollars a year, not counting veterinary fees for trimonthly visits, and will leave Lady prone to infections, cancers, and diabetes.
Karen showed me how she prepared the doses twice a day, injecting amber cyclosporine into clear-gel capsules. Two days earlier, she said, she had locked herself out of the house when it was time for the afternoon dose and had to use a rock to break in through the kitchen window. Otherwise, it had been a smooth transition. Jack, the failed kidney donor, was being adopted by a vet at the hospital. Jasper had developed a toe infection and an allergy to his plastic food bowl, but he had taken to the other cats immediately.
Halfway through the conversation, Shawn came back from church, propping up an elderly man with an enormous, lopsided grin. His name was Don and he worked at an auto-parts factory, and sometimes helped out in the garage on weekends. He and Shawn settled on the couch across from Karen and talked about streets rods for a while. Lady padded in from her room, picking her way around the furniture by memory, and joined Bogart and Jasper on the carpet. They were an oddly harmonious trio—one blind, one deaf, one allergic to plastic and missing a kidney—not unlike the people around them. Gathered there in the living room, they kept an eye on one another, the cats and the people. “It would have been hard not to have Lady around,” Shawn said. The cats, as always, didn’t say a word.
| 2003 |
* * *
From: Karen Smith-Levering
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 22:27:52 -0400
To: [email protected]
Subject: More than just a response … “Thank you, Burkhard Bilger”
We are writing in hopes that this letter will reach our friend, Burkhard Bilger. In September, 2003, he wrote an article including details concerning our cat, Lady: The Last Meow. We just were hoping to inform Mr. Bilger that Lady enjoyed 6 wonderful years within our family, post-transplant. We felt that Mr. Bilger’s article captured Lady’s “character” very well. We also felt that Mr. Bilger shared a significant experience with our family. We thought he may like to hear of the outcome, success of the transplant. We also want to thank him for contributing to the dignity of “our little girls” life.
Sincerely,
Shawn and Karen Levering
PROPINQUITY
is the province of cats. Living by accident,
lapping the food at hand, or sleeking down
in an adjacent lap when sleep occurs to them,
never aspiring to consistency
in homes or partners, unaware of property,
cats take their chances, love by need and nearness
as long as the need lasts, as long as the nearness
is near enough. The code of cats is simply
to take what comes. And those poor souls who claim
to own a cat, who long to recognize
in bland and narrowing eyes a look like love,
are bound to suffer should they expect
cats to come purring punctually home.
Home is only where the food and the fire are,
but might be anywhere. Cats fall on their feet,
nurse their own wounds, attend to their own laundry,
and purr at appropriate times. O folly, folly
to love a cat, and yet
we dress with love the distance that they keep,
the hair-raising way they have, and easily blame
all the abandoned litters and torn ears
on some marauding tiger. Well, no matter;
cats do not care.
Yet part of us is cat. Confess—
love turns on accident, and needs
nearness; and the various selves we have
all come from our cat-wanderings, our chance
crossings. Imagination prowls at night,
cat-like among odd possibilities.
Only our dog-sense brings us faithfully homeward,
makes meaning out of accident, keeps faith,
and, cat-and-dog, the arguments go at it.
But every night, outside, cat-voices call
us out to take a chance, to leave
the safety of our baskets, and to let
what happens, happen. “Live, live!” they catcall.
“Each moment is your next! Propinquity,
propinquity is all!”
—ALASTAIR REID | 1961 |
THE CATTERY
* * *
HENRY S. F. COOPER
According to Milan J. Greer, the burly proprietor of an establishment at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street that is known, all too alliteratively, as Fabulous Felines and can be summed up as the world’s largest pedigreed cattery, with a hundred and twenty-five aristocratic cats in residence and a couple of thousand graduate aristocrats scattered throughout the city and environs, this country is currently riding the crest of the greatest cat wave in history. Mr. Greer, who buys, sells, and breeds cats, told us, in the course of a visit we recently paid to F.F., that there are seven hundred thousand more cats than dogs in the United States and that the postmark of F.F.—“Dogs Are Passé”—is turning from prophecy into fact. “All this ‘man’s best friend’ stuff is garbage,” Mr. Greer growled. (If there is any feline that Mr. Greer resembles, it’s a grumpy lion.) “A dog is simply a very insecure animal. Loyalty and affection? Bosh! A dog has to ingratiate himself with people or he’d starve to death. If a dog has a personality, it’s the personality of a human being you wouldn’t want to know. Cats, on the other hand, make no pretense of affection. If you treat them right, they’ll respect you, but they won’t come a step closer than that.”
Mr. Greer grumpily went on to say that he had made Fabulous Felines a fairly formidable place to enter, because he was determined to keep his cats from being indiscriminately doted on. “If I spot somebody who wants a cat to lavish affection on, I hurry him straight out of here,” Greer said. “A pedigreed cat is nothing less than an animated objet d’art, and to consider it in any other light is crueler than tying a can to its tail. Cats have gained a bad reputation in some quarters because they’ve been pampered and have become neurotic. Cats like to be treated rough. That’s one reason men make better cat owners than women do.” Greer took a swipe at a red Persian, which skillfully eluded him. “My first duty to my cats is to find customers suited to them,” he continued. “The basic quality that I look for in a customer is a very strong ego. If a man’s ego is fragile, a smart cat will make him feel pretty silly. People who lack confidence are better off with dogs, or even with other people. Once I’m sat
isfied with the size of a customer’s ego, I face the next question, which is whether the customer is a Siamese type or a Persian type. A few weeks in the wrong sort of home will turn even the best-behaved cat into a J.D.”
Mr. Greer guarantees the health of his cats up to the age of eight and a half months. “This guarantee turns me into a sort of walking Blue Cross for cats,” he said. “Certain health problems for cats in a big city are easily predicted. One problem that you mightn’t predict is that cats have very poor depth perception and often fall off apartment balconies and other high places. A cat has a good chance to survive a fall of as much as ten stories.” He introduced us, in a gruff, offhand fashion, to three sleek blue cats with green eyes; one was named Serge, and the others—Serge’s kittens by a cat named Natasha—were Jarmilla and Maruska. “Serge and Natasha are the only Russian Archangel cats ever to leave the Soviet Union,” Greer said. “Archangels are the traditional cats of the Czars. The breed is at least a thousand years old. I recently sold Natasha for a thousand dollars—the highest price ever brought by a cat. I’m hoping to get four thousand for Serge.”
The most popular breed of cat sold at F.F. is the Siamese, a good specimen of which brings about sixty-five dollars. Curiously, the breed has fallen on hard times back in its homeland, and Mr. Greer has just arranged to ship a Siamese to the King of Siam—Thailand, that is—for the purpose of improving the stock out there. F.F. is the world’s biggest breeder of Burmese cats, which come in beautiful shades of brown and have golden eyes. “About the only important species we don’t carry is Manx,” Greer said. “I used to carry them, but a neighbor turned me in to the A.S.P.C.A., thinking that I was catching alley cats and cutting off their tails. I didn’t want to be bothered with that kind of thing. Next to Archangels, our most expensive cats are Abyssinians, which start at a hundred and seventy-five dollars. My partners—Miss Bobbi Thompson and my wife, Eileen—and I are trying to breed a variety of long-haired Burmese. It won’t be ready for another three years. We have developed the Golden Siamese, a cross between a Siamese and a Burmese. It’s a fearfully intelligent animal—it will bring you a leash when it wants to go out—but it isn’t pedigreed yet. We’ve bred it successfully for five generations, and we need seven before we can register it. We’re also working on a miniature Siamese, which will weigh a pound when fully grown. We’ve got it down to four pounds already, and all of our expected four-pounders are sold out until 1963. Cats never play and have no sense of humor. All their antics are premeditated. They’re always in training, and they are very serious about it. The only toy I approve of for a cat is a rabbit’s foot. No cat goes out of here without one. Sometimes I sell a cricket in a cage with a cat—a pet for a pet, as it were. Crickets give a cat the same kind of rapture that catnip does, or scratching. Purring doesn’t necessarily mean that a cat’s happy. A purring cat died in my arms once, and I know he wasn’t happy.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 26
