Don't like your cat making you sneeze? Buy a genetically modified one. Just plunk down $4,000 and help drive down Pharma profits. Seriously, why breed allergens out of cats instead of breeding orneriness out of them. Either way they won't be cats. Why, it's enough to give one pause.
"God in His wisdom made the fly, and then forgot to tell us why," coupleted Ogden Nash.
Whatever Wisdom you may choose to believe in also created cats - 30 million of them in the United States alone - and gave them the ability to make the people they own crazy-allergic.
But good old American ingenuity is going to preserve the human-cat relationship, such as it is, and at the same time pound the pharmaceutical industry into kitty litter.
The New York Times reports that for a mere $4,000 you will soon be able to buy a cat that has been bred without the gland that produces the protein that causes people to sneeze.
It is hard to know where to begin in assessing the dopiness of all this, but we could start with the use of science to keep cats from doing what Mother Nature intended them to do - annoying the hell out of humans.
Those who still prefer the company of cats to biotech company CEOs might also find appalling the corporate description of this new breed of cat as merely "a medical device that replaces shots and pills."
And one might wonder about the values of people who will plunk down that kind of money and wait 12 to 15 months for delivery of a lousy cat when they can just put out a can of tuna and get one free. Or, as they say in Washington, "If you want a friend, buy a dog."