How science has just delivered the ultimate pet — the Dana of cats
It concerns a major advance in genetic engineering. Finally, they’ve done it. They’ve bred a cat without dander. The cat looks like a cat, prowls like a cat and mews like a cat, but has no dander.
The madly allergic portion of the human population, who already spend a fortune on hypoallergenic makeup, furniture and Dyson vacuum cleaners, can now buy a cat which is — according to its breeders, Los Angeles, firm Allerca Lifestyle Pets — completely hypoallergenic. It’s guaranteed not to bring its owners to the nearest accident and emergency ward with breathing difficulties or to the nearest pharmacy baying for anti-histamines.
The producers of this marvellous animal (available, they disconcertingly advertise, “in all coat colours and patterns”) sell each kitten for $4,000. And that’s not including the airfare across the Atlantic and the cost — not to mention the owner-trauma — of quarantine in this country for any imported specimen.
“While some breeds of cats have been promoted as having less allergen than others,” admits Allerca Lifestyle Pets’ press release. “Scientists that have tested this hypothesis have shown that all cats, regardless of breed, produce allergens. [Ours] are the only scientifically-proven cats that helps those individuals with feline allergies and was developed using proprietary methods under … pending patents.”
Whoever wrote that press release seems to have learned English off the instruction leaflets you get with gadgets made in Taiwan, but that’s a side issue. The important matter here is the cat.
The cat — allergenic or not — is the ultimate pet. It is undemanding (except for food and whatever newspaper you happen to be reading at any given time). It is low maintenance and self-cleaning in a way so-called self-cleaning ovens never are. It doesn’t do any of that emotional blackmail dogs do, wagging their tails and running to the door in an unsubtle hint that they’d like to be taken for a walk. And it serves as an unpaid pest-controller.
But by far the best cat attribute is its non-judgmentalism. This is not the kind of promiscuous groveling love a dog dedicates to its master or mistress. A cat doesn’t love you. It tolerates you if you serve its needs. Once you meet that basic requirement, it doesn’t especially care whether you’re well or badly dressed, fat or thin, drunk or sober.
The classic example of cat affection is the Anastasia saga. Anastasia, one of the daughters of the last Russian Czar, was shot to death, along with the rest of her family, in a remote village as the Russian revolution rolled on. The assassins of the royal family dragged them to a nearby mine shaft and turfed the bodies into its depths.
History recorded the destruction of the family, but communist Russia wasn’t forthcoming with the details of their burial, lest, perhaps, some white Russian loyalists try to make a cult around the dead ruler, his wife and their children. This secrecy contributed to the development of a myth around one of the daughters, Grand Duchess Anastasia. The myth held that she had been wounded but not killed in the shooting, and that a soldier who was part of the killing team took pity on her, concealed her and helped her to escape.
When a young woman of the age Anastasia would have been was subsequently fished out of the Danube suffering amnesia and muttering words in a language strange to the nursing staff in the hospital to which she was brought, a visitor, spotting the emaciated and withdrawn suicide-survivor, thought her the spitting image of the dead princess. The young patient didn’t fight the identification, and a campaign began which was to shape the rest of her life.
A group of impassioned believers gathered around the lonely girl, determined to prove her to be who they so desperately wanted her to be. They fastened on anything linking her to the dead Grand Duchess. A preference in food was a key indicator. A skill in embroidery was another. A habit of movement or speech was taken as proof.
Any discrepancy was explained away by amnesia and trauma. She didn’t speak the kind of Russian the real Anastasia would have spoken, but that was assumed to be the result of her wound, her attempted suicide and years of trying to pretend she was a different person of a different nationality. Her promoters not only interpreted her withdrawn coldness as proof positive of her royal origins, but managed, inadvertently, to feed her enough snippets of the information she should have had, were she really the Czar’s daughter, to permit her to impersonate the princess with growing plausibility as time went on.
When cousins of the royal family were brought to meet the young woman, some of them instantly dismissed her as an imposter. But enough of them believed her to be the real Anastasia to keep her show on the road and take her to America, where she became the contemporary equivalent of Kerry Katona, her every move, good or bad, scrutinised and back-loaded with unjustified significance.
In America, she was as successful, for her time, as Sarah Ferguson has been in our own times: Royalty for hire. They made a movie about her, starring Ingrid Bergman. She married a doctor who couldn’t believe his luck in landing a princess.
Of course, she was a fraud from start to finish, as DNA testing proved, after her death. She had not been born in Russia, had no royal blood and had leaped into the Danube to escape a grim poverty-stricken life. What was wonderfully instructive about her life was that the pseudo-Anastasia was not even a very enthusiastic fraud. She couldn’t be bothered keeping up pretences and was obnoxious and inconsistent to deal with. That’s royalty for you, said those who had bought into her.
The one thing that never changed was her love for cats. She died in an unmade bed, surrounded by dozens of cats adopted as strays. She was, by that time, a seriously disagreeable and batty old broad, whose personal hygiene was non-existent and who could get along with nobody — other than cats. As far as the cats were concerned, she was mighty. They snuggled up to her in the bed, purring her to sleep, drawing warmth from her withered body and giving it back. It’s an unthinkable death, these days, when the approved method of departure is one of clinical cleanliness, the purring is produced by life-support machines, and what touches the skin is elastoplast securing a myriad of tubes to the body.
The hypoallergenic cat will allow asthmatics like me to do an Anastasia. Its genetic mix apparently gives it a personality so warm and charming, it’s the Dana of cats. The only thing that has to be sorted before I save up the $4,000 is a doubt about its capacity as a mouser.
That would be a downer. No matter how dander-free and friendly is a cat, you don’t want it welcoming mice into your house.
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