King of the Cats

King of the Cats Kathryn Watterson My cat Blake spent most of his Ufe in a cage before he met my big brother John. At the time, I was a teenager, and John was in coUege at Arizona State, where he had a job müking scorpions in Stankey's Poisonous Animals Lab. John sat behind a glass table, put his arms through portholes, and, wearing thick rubber gloves, used tweezers wired to a voltage regulator to pick up scorpions by the last joint in their taüs. The current running through the handles ofthe tweezers caused the scorpion's tail to contract—and to shoot its venom into a capiUary tube. John would go through a whole tray ofscorpions —about twenty to thirty ofthem—to fiU one glass capiUary with scorpion venom. From the time we'd moved to Arizona, I'd known that little scorpions, the translucent ones you could hardly see, were the most dangerous. Their poison could kül you. Even if you were an adult, you were dead if you couldn't quickly get to a hospital that had scorpion antivenom. The big scorpions could kül young children, but usuaUy bigger kids, like my eightyear -old sister Alice, or someone like me, who weighed 110 pounds at the time, would only get very very sick from their sting. In Stankey's Animal Lab, John milked the big scorpions as weU as the smaU ones to make antitoxin. And around the room, about fifteen cats in cages watched what he did. These cats—Blake was one of them—were test cats. Each of them was given a series of scorpion venom injections, and when a cat had developed antibodies to the venom and was fuUy immunized , John and the other scientists took the cat out of its cage, injected it with Sodium Nembutal, shaved its breast area, swabbed it with alcohol, and then, with a big horse needle, punctured its chest and withdrew about 80 cc's of blood directly from its heart. My brother told me that this horrible "cardiac puncture" was the only way to withdraw such a large amount of 103 104Fourth Genre blood from such a smaU animal. Sometimes a cat lived through this procedure ; sometimes it didn't. After the scientists got the blood, they set it aside for a few days to let the blood serum separate naturaUy Then they partitioned the serum, which was scorpion antivenom/antitoxin, put it in a vacuum chamber, freeze-dried it, and sent it aU over the world. None ofthis stuffseemed yucky toJohn or anyone else in our famüy but me. From the time he'd been smaU, John had been exercising his scientific muscles. Whüe I was naming worms and speculating whether they could smeU with their Uttle pink noses, John—who mostly was in his basement laboratory tanning rabbit hides and mixing disgusting potions—advised me that if I cut the worms in half, they'd regenerate. He hunted and dissected frogs to understand their anatomy, while I stayed outside in my favorite tree, listening to birdcaUs and making up stories about me and my husband Tarzan swinging on vines through the jungle. One day whenJohn came home from work, he told us about a huge old tomcat. "This old guy—I caU him Blake—has been a test cat for years," John said. "This cat has gone through eight series ofimmunizations. That means he's lived through eight cardiac punctures. He's so big that they take 120 cc's ofblood from him each time, rather than the normal 80. For some reason, his tailbone has been broken in a number ofplaces, and he's totaUy emaciated. BasicaUy, he's a wreck."John, who talked even in those days like the scientist he would become, said that he had just done a cardiac puncture on Blake—the last one he'd ever do. He said he hated doing it and had apologized to Blake ahead of time. "I doubt that he can recover from it," he said, "but before I injected the Sodium Nembutal, I told him, 'I'm sorry to hurt you, kiddo, but if you survive...