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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Girl’s pet experiment
leaves scientific world
droolingAlways trying to bring you the latest in scientific discovery, today's offering settles that long-debated question: Which animal has the nastiest drool, a cat or a dog?
What, you say you don't care to know the answer to that question? Or that you never even knew there was such a question?
Science isn't always pretty. Have you seen photographs of Louis Pasteur? He had a face only a mother microbe could love. Pasteur discovered germs when he should have been discovering a good bedtime face cream and a couple of neighborhood barber shops.
I don't bring up Pasteur lightly, as one never should. The man was a giant in his field, not to mention his waistline. And it was his pioneering work with germs and other nasty little living things that inspired Lacey Lafromboise.
Lafromboise is a fifth-grade student who set the Albuquerque scientific community on its ear (or at least eyebrows) by daring to go where no other fifth-grader from the greater New Mexico region has gone, comparing the grossness of saliva of dogs and cats.
Lucky for her she had two dogs and two cats at home to experiment on. Lucky for her she also did not possess a fish and a gerbil, because those creatures particularly dislike surrendering saliva to experimentation.
Without so much as a call for permission to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, little Lafromboise extracted saliva from her cats, Jasum and Daisy, and her dogs, Copper and Lady. She used a method of saliva retrieval that is inappropriate to describe either here or at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she subjected the samples to various forensic tests using an incubator and microscope from Minot State University.
IT WAS THE aforementioned "Lafromboise Luck" that won her the right to use the university lab equipment because, trust me, if you are a fifth-grader and you went up to University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle and said you wanted to use the university's science lab to test dog and cat spit, well, they don't call him "Evan the Terrible" for nothing.
I know you're dying to find out what Lafromboise's findings were, which is why I've been dragging it out for so long. It's called fermenting interest. It's also called aggravating the hell out of people. We will be disclosing the answer to the dog-cat spittle question right after this commercial.
Just kidding. The tests showed that dogs have more bacteria in their mouths than cats. While that might come as a relief to cat owners, you have to remember that saying dogs have more germs in their mouths than cats is like saying al-Qaida has more terrorists in its ranks than the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Nevertheless, dog owners who let their dogs lick their face might want to rethink that maneuver. And every cat owner who now may be thinking about giving their kitty a big smooch better forget that, too, unless they want to turn their face into epidermis confetti. Cats don't kiss. Period.
The elementary school science whiz is preparing to go to a big New Mexico science fair and display her findings. According to news reports, she's practicing answering questions the judges might ask her. Questions, we suppose, like, "You tested WHAT?" and, "Louis Pasteur, brilliant. But a curious-looking frog, oui?"
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
