Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (16 page)

They enlisted the help of a chemical engineer, who tinkered with the recipe for a gel liner common in human prosthetics, trying to create a version more suitable for a dolphin. The first few prototypes he made were promising, but their performance was inconsistent, and there were several dramatic failures, including a fire that burned a warehouse to the ground. (“It was a small warehouse,” Strzempka assures me.) Finally, the engineer nailed it.

“It’s incredible material,” Carroll says, as we sit inside the trainers’ office at the aquarium. He hands me a sheath of the rubbery gel, which is white, jiggly, and slightly gummy to the touch. It resembles nothing so much as a supersized piece of calamari. Technically, the material is a thermoplastic elastomer—a mixture of plastics that begins as a liquid and can be molded into a variety of shapes when heated—but everyone just calls it the “dolphin gel.” Eager to show off its properties, Carroll takes a two-foot strip of the dolphin gel and hands the other end to Strzempka. He starts walking backwards. Two, five, ten feet—the material just keeps stretching. Finally, Carroll lets go. His end whips back across the room. Strzempka holds up the gel; it looks as good as new, neither distended nor deformed. The men beam, and I get the sense that this is a well-rehearsed stunt. The gel also provides serious cushioning, which Carroll demonstrates by wrapping his hand in the liner and beating it furiously with a heavy mallet, before breaking into a grin and pulling out his unharmed hand.

To make sure that Winter didn’t reject the strange material, the dolphin’s trainers introduced it slowly, giving her a piece of the gel to examine, then gently touching her body with it, and eventually wrapping it around her entire stump. They repeated the process with the prosthesis itself, starting by attaching a tiny, lightweight contraption to Winter’s peduncle, working up to larger and heavier devices.

Winter’s an old pro now, happily wearing a full-size, anatomically correct prosthetic tail. To put the device on, a trainer balances on a platform suspended in Winter’s tank. With one swift command, Winter gets into position, pointing her head down toward the bottom of the pool and sticking her peduncle up out of the surface of the water. A trainer rolls a sleeve made of the dolphin gel onto Winter’s stump. Then comes the prosthesis itself, which Carroll and Strzempka carefully constructed after taking a series of three-dimensional images and scans of Winter’s body. The prosthesis has a flexible, rubberized plastic “socket” that slips on over the gel liner, hugging what remains of the dolphin’s peduncle. The socket tapers into a thin carbon-fiber strip, which is bolted onto a pair of fake flukes. Suction keeps the entire apparatus on.

Though the device is modeled on a dolphin’s natural tail, it’s made of all sorts of unnatural materials, and Winter has to be supervised while she’s wearing it. Winter’s caretakers need to make sure that the tail doesn’t suddenly start to slip off, for instance, or catch on something in the pool, and that the metal pieces don’t accidentally injure one of her dolphin playmates. So Winter doesn’t wear the tail all the time. Instead, it’s reserved for her daily therapy sessions, when trainers lead the prosthesis-wearing dolphin through a series of drills designed to build up her muscles and reinforce proper swimming posture. (During these sessions, the trainers also use gentle pressure to stretch and straighten the muscles in Winter’s stump.) The artificial tail helps keep Winter’s spine in proper alignment, and with it on, Winter does, indeed, flick her tail up and down, rather than from side to side. “It’s just beautiful to see her swim with it,” Carroll says.
*
Winter’s scoliosis has improved since she started wearing the device, and Carroll hopes the prosthesis, combined with regular therapy, will help the dolphin lead a long, healthy life.

Despite the progress she’s made, Winter will spend the rest of that life in an aquarium; a dolphin without a tail, or with a human-fashioned one, is not a great candidate for survival in the wild. There’s no telling how her prosthesis would hold up to years of constant use, whether it might fall off or fall apart, and Winter will need continuing access to trainers to reinforce proper swimming posture and doctors to monitor her spinal alignment. She’ll need prosthetists on hand to repair damage to the tail, as well as to make other refinements. In fact, Carroll and Strzempka are still making several new tails a year for Winter, who has not yet reached her full adult size, tweaking the design as her body changes and her muscles develop. They also dream of making more dramatic improvements to the prosthesis. For instance, Strzempka says he would love to figure out how to incorporate a vacuum device that pumps air out of the tail whenever Winter moves it up and down. The result would be an even tighter seal and a constantly self-adjusting prosthesis.

Winter’s tail has earned her full-fledged celebrity status. There are books, video games, and documentaries about her, and in 2011, Warner Bros. released
Dolphin Tale
, a 3D movie based on her story. (The prosthetist, or “mad scientist character,” as Carroll calls him, is played by Morgan Freeman.) The aquarium’s website and gift shop is chock-a-block with Winter gear: T-shirts, postcards, magnets, and toy dolphins that are also missing their tails.

But Winter has become much more than a powerful marketing tool—she has also become an ambassador for prostheses. Children with artificial arms and legs regularly visit the aquarium, and many are invited into the tank with Winter. The encounter can do wonders for a kid’s psyche, Carroll tells me. “The psychological aspect of it is just incredible, for a child [who’s] lost a limb,” he says.

Winter has helped human amputees in more concrete ways, too; as word spread about the so-called dolphin gel, prosthetists began ordering it for their human patients. The material, which grips the skin better than the liners commonly used with people, has proven especially useful for amputee athletes, whose replacement limbs start to slide off when they sweat. Strzempka, an avid golfer, became a convert the first time he tried the gel in his own artificial leg. “The stickiness is a huge benefit, especially in Florida,” he says. “If you’re golfing thirty-six holes a day, your skin becomes like a dolphin’s—slippery.” It didn’t take long for Hanger to start selling “WintersGel” liners to everyone from seasoned triathletes to eleven-year-old girls. “Animals give back to us all so much,” Carroll says. “We learn so much from working with them.”

*   *   *

Injured animals easily capture our hearts, and it’s natural to want to heal their wounds. Bringing home a bird with a broken wing or an ailing, tick-covered stray is practically a childhood rite of passage. (My stray was a sickly, starving Doberman puppy, who I found wandering in the Virginia woods. His skin was so wrinkled and loose that we named him Raisin.) We naturally empathize with critters that are suffering; some neuroscience research has revealed that the brain regions that are active when we see fellow humans in distress also light up like pinball machines when we see an animal in pain.

Animals have all sorts of ways of communicating their distress—they may cease to eat or groom themselves, or may pace, whimper, cry, or obsessively lick or rub parts of their bodies. Sheep in pain curl their lips, horses sweat excessively, apes and monkeys roll their eyes. Mice make grimaces, and scientists have developed a “mouse grimace scale” so researchers can assess their rodents’ discomfort. But animals can also be incredibly “stoic,” and since they can’t talk to us, it’s not always obvious whether they need medical attention.

Not everyone thinks that prosthetists are doing the right thing when they intervene in the lives of injured animals. Though Carroll and his colleagues are driven entirely by the desire to
help
their patients, human-designed, factory-manufactured appendages still represent a radical refashioning of animal bodies. And Carroll often encounters naysayers, other prosthetists or members of the public who insist that his devices won’t work or that they’ll cause wild creatures undue distress.

Some of the critics’ concerns mirror those faced by the scientists who use electronic tags to track the movements of wild animals: Will this device cause physical or psychological discomfort? How will the animal adjust to having a foreign object attached to its body? Vets and doctors must weigh the answers to these questions against the potential medical consequences of
not
giving an animal a prosthesis. The Clearwater Aquarium could have spared Winter the medical scans, tail fittings, and training sessions that her prosthesis required, but the tradeoff might have been a lifetime of deformity and pain.

Not every case is so straightforward. When I visited Carroll at one of his clinics, he showed me photos and X-rays of a California sea lion missing part of its left flipper. The mammal’s caretaker had just called, wanting to know whether a prosthesis was an option. Carroll ultimately decided to pass on the project because he thought the sea lion was doing just fine and wasn’t sure a false flipper would improve her quality of life. But there’s no way of knowing, for sure, whether that was the right decision.

And then there’s even trickier territory: the use of prostheses to alleviate an animal’s
mental
anguish. Take the dog owner Gregg Miller, for example, who swears that his beloved bloodhound Buck was downright depressed after getting neutered. According to Miller’s recollection, Buck came out of surgery, went to clean himself, noticed his missing ’nads, and then looked up mournfully at his owner. “Good God, it was horrible,” Miller recalls. In those awful first days after the operation, a novel thought occurred to Miller: Maybe he could buy some fake balls and use them to make Buck look whole again. “Don’t they make artificial testicles so it can reduce my trauma in neutering Buck and Buck’s trauma at losing a body part?” he wondered.

When Miller discovered that no one made prosthetic dog testicles, he decided to create them himself. “People thought I was nuts,” he says. “No pun intended.” Working with veterinarians over the course of two years, Miller developed “Neuticles,” and launched the CTI (Canine Testicular Implantation) Corporation to sell them. The implants are shaped like oversized lima beans and are designed to perfectly replicate the “texture and firmness” of the genuine articles. (I’ll have to take Miller’s word for it.)

The first dog received his counterfeit gonads in 1995.
*
The Neuticles were popped in while the pooch was on the operating table having his real testicles removed, adding just a few extra minutes to the surgical procedure. When the dog came to, it looked as though he’d never even been neutered. (As CTI’s slogan asserts: “It’s like nothing ever changed.”) The prostheses come in an assortment of sizes and materials; prices range from $109 for a “petite” pair of the original Neuticles to $1,299 for a set of extra-extra-large, top of the line NeuticlesUltraPLUS. The company also sells models designed for cats, horses, and bulls, and more than 250,000 pets in forty-nine countries have now received fake balls.

That’s a lot of animals that have been spared the humiliation of emasculation. Perhaps. It’s hard to know what the dogs think of the implants, or whether they’d even notice if they suddenly vanished. That’s the challenge involved in outfitting animals with prostheses: Other species can’t weigh in on whether and how they want their bodies to be remade. Though brain imaging lets us witness animal minds in action, as one neural circuit or another lights up, we’ll never truly comprehend what life is like, on the level of subjective experience, for a member of another species.
*
(We have enough trouble imagining what life is like in another
person’s
shoes.)

In his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel expounded on this very problem. As he wrote:

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms … which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

Neutering may well be traumatic. Surgery is stressful and recovery can be painful. A dog’s gonads produce sex hormones, and removing them can cause behavioral changes, especially a reduction in mounting, marking, and aggression. But just because neutering alters sexual
behavior
doesn’t mean that it causes a crisis of sexual
identity
. As the Humane Society explains in an online guide to spaying and neutering, “Pets don’t have any concept of sexual identity or ego.” And behavioral changes don’t necessarily equal distress. Miller says that he finds neutering to be “a creepy, creepy thing. You’re modifying your dog, you’re kind of playing God.” But Neuticles don’t
unmodify
the animal—they merely add a second alteration on top of the first.

Though I have yet to find any peer-reviewed research on whether Neuticles can prevent neutering-related trauma in dogs, a study of monkeys provides a hint. Scientists studying the effects of monkey castration used Neuticles as a control—after removing the testicles of half the animals, they inserted silicon imposters. That way, all the male monkeys would continue to look identical to the other members of their social group. However, the prosthetic balls didn’t prevent the neutered primates from behaving more submissively than their intact counterparts. The finding suggests that it’s the absence of hormones, not some sexual identity crisis that results from looking like a eunuch, that causes behavioral changes in neutered animals. And Neuticles don’t restore a male dog’s normal hormone levels, nor do they spare him the trauma of the surgery itself.