One of the world centres for pet food innovation is located on the site of an old horse farm, deep in the rolling green fields of the British Midlands. The Waltham Petcare Science Institute in Melton Mowbray is the science arm of Mars Petcare, a leading company in the pet food industry. The research that takes place there determines the future products of dozens of pet food brands: Iams, Cesar, Whiskas, Sheba, James Wellbeloved, Pedigree, Eukanuba and more.
About a third of the staff at Waltham work in its research labs. The other two-thirds are dedicated to feeding, training, exercising and maintaining the living spaces of the real stars of the show: the 200 dogs and 200 cats that live at Waltham and test the products developed there. The 200 dogs belong to four different breeds, chosen to represent different canine sizes: labradors for big dogs, beagles for medium, and norfolk terriers and petit basset griffon vendéens for small dogs. Almost all the cats on site are domestic shorthairs, but the odd longhair can also be found.
When Akito Kawahara was 8 years old, his father took him on a members-only tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His father, the renowned conceptual artist On Kawara, had introduced him to butterfly collecting early, and Akito had already amassed about 500 of his own specimens. Seeing the enormous cabinets and extensive floor displays of butterflies and other insects on the museum’s fifth floor, Akito was thrilled, but what really captured his attention was an unassuming chart posted on the door of a curator’s office. It was a phylogeny of butterflies—an evolutionary family tree—and it contained many blank spaces.
“I was so surprised that scientists didn’t know everything about this, and it became my childhood dream to figure out where butterflies came from, how they evolved and how they’re related to each other,” says Kawahara, now a 45-year-old entomologist at the University of Florida.
There’s no established job description for climate communicator—what Swain calls himself—and no traditional source of funding. He’s not particularly a high-energy person, nor is he naturally gregarious; in fact, he has a chronic medical condition that often saps his energy. But his work is needed, he says. “Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today,” Swain says. “I connect the dots between the two. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how a warming climate affects day-to-day variations in weather, but my goal is to push public perception toward what the science actually says.” So when reporters call him, he does his best to call them back.
If The Vaster Wilds is primarily a page-turning survival yarn, it also very clearly offers Groff an opportunity to reflect on the place of women, not just in early 17th-century North America and Europe (in England she was “called many things, Girl, and Wench, and Fool, and Child, and Zed”), but in the general scheme of the patriarchy.
Someday, surely, probably someday soon, someone will write the book that More was marketed as: an upbeat, sassy, tale of a woman’s sexual awakening and how great opening her marriage was for her. In the meantime, we are left to wonder why people were so eager to see victory in a story with so much suffering, why the story of a woman’s relentless capitulation to male desire was sold as a feminist feat. And to note that, in a harsh irony, the media treatment of More was yet another time that Roden Winter finally got the nerve to say what she wanted from her marriage and her sex life—and nobody listened.