Science Vs - Pet Food: How Fancy Should They Feast?
Episode Date: May 27, 2021There are soooo many options for what to feed your dog or cat, from the cheap stuff at the supermarket to fresh food delivered straight to your door. So what’s the best option? And just how fancy do... we need to get to be good pet parents? We ask Prof. Maja Louise Arendt, Dr. Paul Pion and Prof. Marion Nestle. UPDATE 6/1/21: We adjusted the episode to better reflect Paul's opinion about the link between grain-free food, taurine, and heart problems in dogs. Get the transcript here: https://bit.ly/3wEyFXM This is our last episode of the season!! We’ll be back in September. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Wendy Zukerman and Nick DelRose, as well as Michelle Dang, Taylor White and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell, with help from Alex Blumberg. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Prof. Leslie Lyons, Prof. Greg Aldrich, Prof. George Fahey, Prof. Andrew Knight, Dr. Tony Moore, Dr. Marge Chandler and Professor Gregory Okin. And special thanks to Peter Leonard for voicing our wildcat ad, as well as Michelle Zassinhaus, Christopher and Elise Suter and Oliver Flinck. And to all of our friends and families and pets — Mattie and Fred White and Taylor’s cat Yessica, Walter Rimler and Rose's cat Fiona, Jack Weinstein and Hunter, Liwen Hu, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet.
This is our last show of the season.
Can you believe it?
After this puppy, we're going to be back in September with more episodes.
And speaking of puppies, this is the show that pits facts against feeding Fido.
Today on the show, pet food.
What on earth should you be feeding your pets?
This simple question has turned into a headache for a lot of pet owners,
including two dog owners that I want you to meet. First up is Megan Begala. She got her dog Dutch
from a rescue four years ago. He's a Chiweenie, so that's part Chihuahua, part Dachshund.
They pulled him out of this van and put him in our arms
and he kissed us all over.
We were like, this is our dog.
That's him.
He kind of looks like Dobby the house elf.
That's what he looks like.
Our next dog owner is Chris Berube.
He's got a Jack Russell mix.
You're going to be in a podcast.
And believe it or not, his dog is called Ripley.
Okay, here she is.
Aww.
So this is Ripley.
She is a very sweet dog.
She has these big beautiful eyes and she has this adorable
little black nose and oh where you going she she is a perfect small dog but what to feed her has
actually vexed me the entire time and this is what we're chewing on today, because it's confusing. There's just so many options out there. For Chris and Megan, right off the bat, they were suspicious of cheap kibble. It's that poo-brown dry food that you get in those huge bags. And they'd both heard that it was basically just packed with garbage. Like, whenever I think about, like, oh, the really low-quality, you know,
generic brand kibble that you pick up,
the worry is that it's like,
oh, it has, like, pigeons and rats in it.
Like, all those rumors you hear as a kid about hot dogs,
I feel like I have also heard about low-quality dog food.
And for Megan, she was also turned off by the question of
what the devil is in this stuff?
I mean, I think it's, the, it comes down to the ingredients.
Some of those things are kind of like filler ingredients.
So things that like just kind of don't provide any nutritional value.
Just like the crap.
Yeah, just like the crap.
And a lot of companies are capitalizing on this feeling.
They're telling pet owners to fork out for much fancier stuff.
There are companies that do like freeze-dried
food. Raw food? I think it's like
human quality food.
The steak. Like you could share a meal
with your dog at the table and eat the same
thing if you wanted to.
Sweet potatoes are perfect for dogs, or turkey
is the thing you should be feeding your dog, or like whitefish
is the thing that's good for her coat.
Like we had friends who, for the first time, started cooking their dog meals.
There's like a hundred thousand claims out there. I don't know. I'm just,
I feel completely lost about what to feed her.
And one of the choices that's gotten particularly controversial.
Grain-free versus not grain-free.
Grain-free was not grain-free?
Grain-free was the biggest trend in pet food a couple of years ago.
At one point, nearly half the dog food sold in America was grain-free.
But recently, we've been hearing something scary about this kind of food,
that dogs have apparently died after going grain-free.
And this is a kind of nightmare scenario for pet owners.
You try to do the best thing and avoid the cheap crap, but then end up killing your pet?
And making the wrong choice here is what really worries Megan.
Well, I mean, dogs can't tell you when things don't feel good. And so my kind of biggest fear is that we're giving him something that he, his body doesn't
like, but that he's going to eat anyway, because he loves us and he trusts us. Like how much does
guilt play into it? And just like, you know, the marketing, because you, Facebook must be shooting
you messages every day. I am the recipient of so many targeted dog ads day in, day out. They're like, you have a dog. Don't you need to like
make his life wonderful? So they're saying like, you're not a good dog parent. Don't you want to
be a better dog parent? Then open up your wallet. And so I feel like I, like I would just love
like a voice from above to be like, this is the food you should give your dog. This is what they need.
A voice from above, you say.
Today on the show, we are wading into the surprisingly controversial science behind pet food.
We'll find out what's really in kibble.
We'll sniff out the science behind grain-free food.
And ultimately, we're going to cut through all the fads
and find out what should you feed your furry friend.
And while a lot of these pet food claims are directed at dogs,
we'll talk about America's second favourite pet too.
Gerbils.
No, cats.
When it comes to pet food, there's a lot of,
you're not a good dog parent. But then there's science.
Science versus pet food is coming up just after the break.
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It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions.
Like, what is this thing we call time?
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I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve
Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop
every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we're finding out,
are you a sucker for buying fancy pet food?
And the first thing we're going to tackle is grain-free food. That means no corn,
wheat or rice, which normally are major ingredients in dog food. But several years ago,
these grains pretty much got cancelled. Lots of people and pet food companies were saying that dogs were never
meant to be eating grains. After all, dogs came from...
Wolves. Intense. Relentless. The tireless hunters of the wild. And the wild ancestors of your dog.
Wolves and dogs share many traits, like a primitive desire for meat.
Yeah, these commercials and chatterboxes on the internet
say that when you're feeding a dog, you're feeding a carnivore.
They're not built to eat grains.
So is that true?
Well, to find out, we need to head to a place
that's kind of the opposite of a wild wolf den.
It's a big dog show in Sweden.
On stage, proud dog owners are trotting alongside
the best and brightest dogs around.
There's a top chihuahua, a beautiful bunch of black pugs,
and in the audience, a team of scientists,
including Dr. Maya Arendt, a vet at the University of Copenhagen.
So there's dogs that are getting shown,
and there's dogs that are doing sort of competitions in agility.
And there's also like a scene where you can can exit where people are performing with their dogs.
So they'll be performing to music.
Maya and her team are at this Swedish pooch parade for one thing, to collect dog spit.
They want to analyze the DNA from as many breeds of dogs as possible.
So what better place to do that than to visit an international dog show?
They ultimately got drool from more than 200 dogs.
So Labrador, German Shepherds, you know, Sharpay dogs, Pugs, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Melonid,
the Samoyed dog.
They took the samples back to the lab and started analysing what was up with one particular gene.
It codes for an enzyme that breaks down starch in food.
You see, scientists have noticed this interesting pattern.
Animals that eat a lot of starch
tend to have a lot of copies of this gene.
It's almost as if over
thousands of years their DNA was like, oh, this is a helpful gene. I want more of it. And so it
makes copies of it. And here's why that's important for us. Grains are packed with starch. And so
if dogs have lots of copies of this gene, it would suggest that they're good at digesting grains.
So Maya wanted to know, when you look at dogs, how many copies of this gene do they have?
And is it more than wolves?
And here's what she found.
Wolves only carried two copies of this gene.
Dogs carry up to 22 copies of this gene. Wolves' dogs could carry up to 22 copies of this gene.
So there was really a major difference between dogs and wolves.
And that was really clear.
That was a really cool moment where I could just see
there's really a difference here.
It turned out that wolves had just a few copies of this gene.
But for lots of different dog breeds,
German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Beagles, Whippets, Labradors,
it was like someone had taken a photocopier to this starch-munching gene.
And that suggests that these dogs, while they originally came from wolves,
have changed and are much better at digesting grains.
So it does suggest that dogs can eat grains and food that contains starch.
In fact, when you look at the DNA of dogs and wolves, there's not a lot of difference there.
But this change to their digestion, it's one of the biggies.
In other words, a dog's ability to eat grains is, in some ways, what made dogs dogs.
And Maya's like, this kind of makes sense,
because dogs have lived with us humans for thousands of years.
And in that time, we've been growing and eating crops made of starchy grains
and feeding it to our dogs.
It definitely showed that dogs have adapted to a different diet than wolves have.
So, dogs aren't wolves anymore.
Which for Chris Berube, with his little dog Ripley, was not a breakthrough.
My dog is so clearly not a wolf.
Like, she...
Here is a list of things she is afraid of so far.
A pile of leaves.
A stuffed animal Simba that she saw on the street.
Every other dog.
She was intimidated by a dog that was smaller than her that was blind and wearing a little pink fuzzy sweater a couple of months ago.
That is a complete disgrace to your lineage as something descended from a
wolf. So when it comes to feeding the natural beast within, the vast majority of dogs that
we have at home are perfectly capable of eating wheat, corn, or rice. Now, quick caveat on that,
some dogs can have bad reactions to eating grains, but this seems pretty rare.
A review paper actually found that it was more common for dogs to be allergic to meat
than to wheat. And this is true for cats as well. And while we're on cats, should they go grain-free?
Well, when it comes to that starch-munching gene gene cats actually look a lot like their wild ancestors
they have just one copy of that gene which suggests they're not particularly well suited
to eating starchy foods but they can digest it a little and this actually makes sense because we
know that cats are big time carnivores who cosied up to humans a lot more recently than dogs.
And pet food companies seem to know this.
The bog-standard cat food already has more protein and fat in it than dog food.
So, that means that if you want to make an over-the-top commercial
about a pet that's secretly a wild carnivore, you really
should be making an ad like this. Wild cats, kitty cats share many traits, like a primitive desire for meat.
So, going grain-free?
Well, most pups don't need to avoid grains.
It's written in their DNA.
But what has become quite concerning here is that this grain-free trend,
it might have totally backfired for some dogs.
Because now some people are saying that rather than being good for them,
grain-free diets might have actually killed them.
This all started back in 2018,
when the FDA announced that some dogs were getting this unusual heart disease
after eating foods packed with veggies that were often labelled grain-free.
New details in the FDA investigation into grain-free diets and heart disease in dogs.
At first, it was just a trickle.
But after the announcement, more and more people started reporting sick dogs to the FDA.
The FDA is warning these diets could cause deadly heart damage.
And by last count, more than 1,000 dogs were suspected of having damaged hearts after eating grain-free food.
And around 300 dogs have died.
More than a dozen dog food brands tied to hundreds of cases.
I thought that I was feeding really good food.
It was not cheap food.
So what is going on here?
It's one thing for grain-free food to be a waste of money.
But how on earth could veggies and meat kill a dog?
To dive into this mystery, we're going to talk to a veterinary cardiologist based in California.
His name is Paul Payon.
And years ago, he dug up this other killer that was taking out America's pets.
And it might just help us crack this case too.
It all started decades ago with one very special cat named El Blanco.
He talked about it with our producer Rose Rimler. El Blanco was a white cat. That makes sense.
And he had one red and one green eye. He sounds like a very handsome cat. Is that right? Oh, he was a good cat.
Paul first met El Blanco in October of 1986.
At the time, Paul was finishing up his training
at the University of California in Davis.
And he told us that El Blanco was a well-loved little cat,
but he had a big problem,
a blood clot that left his hind legs paralyzed.
Paul worked out that it was caused by this condition called...
Dilated cardiomyopathy.
So cardio is heart, myo is muscle, pathy is...
Bad. Pathy means bad.
Dilated cardiomyopathy is this very specific heart condition
where the muscles in one of the chambers of El Blanco's little heart
basically didn't work properly, and so his heart couldn't pump enough blood around his furry little
body. Paul gave the cat some medicine for his blood clot, but it didn't save El Blanco's life.
He died from heart failure the next day, yeah. El Blanco's owner was devastated,
and she wanted to understand what had happened
here. How did her cat go from pretty and purry to dead so quickly? And then she told something to
Paul that made him suspect something bigger might be going on here. She said that a different vet
had noticed a spot in the back of El Blanco's eye
and thought it might be a sign of a bad diet.
The vet then asked about El Blanco's food.
And he said, what food are you feeding?
And she said, Hill's CD.
And he said, well, that's a good food, so that can't be it.
A lot of cats were eating this food,
so Paul didn't think that could
be the problem. But then three more cats came into his clinic with the exact same problems as El
Blanco. The spot in the back of their eye and this very specific heart condition.
And they were all eating LCD. They're all eating the same food. They were all eating the same food.
They were all eating the same food.
That seemed like more than a coincidence.
Paul starts looking into this even more.
He checks the cat's blood and realizes that they're all low in this amino acid called taurine.
And he knew that if cats, or people, don't get enough taurine,
bad things can happen.
It can affect their eyes and their heart.
This was very suspicious.
And then another coincidence.
Get this.
Paul found out that at UC Davis,
there was another researcher keeping a bunch of cats
on a low taurine diet, basically to see what it did to them.
So Paul gets in touch and that researcher says,
If you want to look at a bunch of taurine deficient cats,
I have 11 of them in my cat colony, but you best go look at them now
because we're going to refeed them taurine tomorrow, the very next day.
What's the chances?
Paul quickly rented a truck to lug an ultrasound to the cat lab.
He wanted to see what was up with their hearts.
And he found that, yeah, a couple of the cats had those messed up hearts,
just like El Blanco.
The next day, the other researchers started feeding the cats taurine.
And soon after, their hearts got better.
Paul started giving taurine to cats with that heart problem in his clinic, and they got better too. It turned out that back in the
1980s, loads of pet food companies weren't putting enough taurine in their cat food.
Paul and his colleagues published all this. And eventually, cat food companies, including Hills,
changed their formula, adding more of this amino acid.
And this was huge,
because this disease was one of the most common heart problems for cats.
This incurable disease, sprinkling a little bit of white pixie dust,
which is what taurine looks like, would cure it.
Amazing. So like
today's veterinarians don't really see this? They do not. Well, we've pretty much eliminated
the number one heart disease in cats. Which brings us back to this grain-free fiasco in dogs
that we're seeing today. So after eating a grain-free diet, some dogs in the US are getting sick and even dying.
And it turns out that these dogs are getting that exact same heart condition that El Blanco had,
dilated cardiomyopathy.
So we're seeing a similar thing now in dogs,
and it's come about after pet food companies started marketing grain-free.
And some researchers are thinking back to Paul's discovery
and wondering, is this a taurine problem all over again?
Studies have found that when some dogs that are diagnosed with this heart condition
are shifted off their grain-free diets and given taurine supplements,
a bunch of them get better.
But it's not so cat and dry.
Because when the FDA tested a bunch of these grain-free pet foods,
the taurine levels in them looked just fine.
So it's a bit of a dog's breakfast.
Some researchers still think a lack of taurine could be to blame here.
For Paul's part, he thinks it's probably not of taurine could be to blame here. For Paul's part, he thinks it's
probably not the taurine. In fact, he's not even sure that grain-free food is the key problem here.
It could be something else. It's not as clear-cut an issue. We don't know what in the world it is.
There's a lot we don't know. Even though this mystery remains unsolved,
we do know one thing. It's super rare for this to happen to a dog. So far, only some thousand
cases have been reported to the FDA out of millions of dogs in the US eating grain-free food.
But you know what? Why risk it? Because the average dog doesn't need to eat fancy grain-free food anyway.
So, what would happen if we just went back to basics?
Cheap old dry food.
When we come back, we're ripping open the bag of kibble,
pouring ourselves a bowl and asking, is it really
that bad? Welcome back. Today, we're finding out what you should feed your pet.
We've basically put the kibosh on grain-free food.
Unless you have a dog who's actually allergic to grains,
don't bother with that stuff.
Now we're jumping into the bag of kibble
to see if it's really as bad as people think.
We're going to get to the bottom of this.
We're going to crack the kibble case wide open.
And we know just who to go to.
On a sunny afternoon in New York City,
Rose and I went to see Marion Nessel.
She's a professor of nutrition at NYU.
Hello.
Hi, I'm Rose.
Marion.
Hi, nice to meet you.
And we bought her a bag of kibble from a bodega down the street.
Brought the goods.
The goods, in case you needed inspiration.
Several years ago, Marion and a colleague wrote a book on big pet food.
And she had a lot of the same questions that we do,
wanting to know what's in stuff like kibble
and whether it's actually good for pets.
And Marion was very dedicated to finding
out answers, even taking a nibble of kibble herself. It's more umami than you would like.
Why did you eat pet food? Did someone dare you? No, I was doing the research for this book.
You have to know these things. And through her research, she managed to find out
how kibble gets from the factory to your dog's bowl. And yeah, it's not going to get you licking
your chops because kibble is highly processed mush. First up, companies get leftover meat
pieces and byproducts from the people food industry. Think guts and kidneys from cows,
ground up bones from chicken, broken bits of rice.
They cook it up and shove it through what's called an extruder.
That's a machine that squishes something out.
It goes into a big tube and comes out a little.
It has a small opening at the end,
so it's pushed through and into these shapes
and then dried. Kind of like a pasta maker? Yeah, it's actually not all that different
from a pasta machine. That's a very good analogy. Thanks. So a lot of pet owners are grossed out by
the idea of their pets eating this crap. But Marion says that we should be thinking about these byproducts
very differently.
And she doesn't turn her nose up at them at all.
I was once at a salmon packing plant where they had,
as they took fillets off the salmon,
and then they had this rack of bones that was just full of salmon meat.
And I asked, what do you do with that? And they said it goes to pet food.
And Marion's like, if we're not going to eat it, why not feed it to our pets?
It seems to me that feeding food waste to dogs and cats who don't have the same kind
of aesthetic standards that we do makes perfect sense. Otherwise, we'd be thrown away.
Feeding our pets the choicest cuts of meat
would put a pretty big burden on the food system,
which already has enough on its plate.
In fact, there are so many dogs and cats in the US
that one study estimates it's the equivalent
of feeding another 62 million people.
They can't all get filet mignon. And it turns out that the
byproducts we're putting in kibble, which might sound weird to you, can actually be really good
for them. Organ meats like liver and kidneys tend to have more vitamins in them than fancy steaks.
And I mean, eating guts. Talk about feeding your inner wolf.
As for so-called filler, like corn or rice,
well, that has some nutritional value too.
It's not like eating sawdust.
And on top of all this,
Marion told us that pet food makers typically add even more vitamins and minerals to their food,
which is why if you look at the ingredients on a packet of kibble,
there's often a lot of good stuff in there.
Where's the...
There's calcium, potassium, a bunch of minerals, amino acids.
So this kibble is like a multivitamin for a dog?
Oh, absolutely.
Sure, sure. This suggests that it might be a bit
risky to hop onto another trend that we're starting to see, cooking bespoke meals for your pet.
Because it's pretty easy to mess things up and not add the particular nutrients that your animal
needs. So that is why the experts that we spoke to for this episode told us that generally
speaking, kibble is just fine. In fact, they all fed it to their pets. But we know things can still
be tricky here because when you go to one of these big pet food stores and walk around, you'll find a huge range within kibble, from cheap to very
expensive. And if you're wondering, should I fork out for the priciest stuff? Is it going to be
better for my dog or cat? The answer is, we don't know. No one has compared the cheapest crap on the
market to the high-end stuff
to see which one is better over an animal's lifetime.
And that goes for the fancier pet food too,
like freeze-dried raw nuggets or freshly prepared meals.
No one knows if those fresh ingredients are actually better for your furry friend
compared to the ultra-processed stuff.
Would dogs be healthier and live longer being fed on something more expensive?
I'd really like to know that.
And that research does not exist.
So, where does this leave us?
Well, there's no evidence we know of that dogs or cats
who eat the cheapest kibble every day are doing worse than pets eating
the finest food available. Now, every now and then, a pet food factory will have an outbreak
of something like salmonella, but that is true for big pet food companies as well as fancy boutique
ones. Curiously though, while all eyes are on these artisanal pet food trends,
there's actually a very big and very different problem
with how many of us are feeding our pets.
And it's right under our snout.
This is a problem affecting millions of dogs and cats all around the world.
And here it is. They're too fat. They're eating too much. affecting millions of dogs and cats all around the world.
And here it is.
They're too fat. They're eating too much.
It's by far the biggest problem. It's rampant among pets.
Studies suggest that somewhere between 20 to 40% of dogs and cats worldwide are overweight.
And this is bad for their health.
Cats are way more likely to get diabetes if they're obese.
And this can also shorten their health. Cats are way more likely to get diabetes if they're obese, and this can also shorten their lifespan. Like, we found one amazing study that followed a colony of Labrador retrievers
over years, their whole lives, slightly overfeeding half the dogs and keeping the other half trim.
And it turned out that healthy weight dogs, on average, live two years longer than the chubby dogs.
So why are dogs and cats getting fatter?
Because they're being fed too much.
And it's just really because the animals like it so much.
It's just really easy to overfeed them.
Marion says that we tend to overfill their bowls and give them too many treats.
I can absolutely understand it.
I totally can understand it.
To have the dog wag tail every time I walk in,
I might think that dog deserved treats.
Rose and I took all of this back to our dog owners, Chris and Megan.
Oh, please.
Okay, here we go.
Okay, what we found out is that, like,
while there's so much marketing
and guff around all of these different like fads and food trends and like when you go to the pet
food store so many options it's so confusing there is one problem that we know in dogs and cats
and it is that they are too fat.
No, that, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
Chris said his little dog Ripley has put on a bit too much pudge since he first got her.
I've noticed that when I pick her up, it's a little more difficult to pick her up than it was before because, like, I can't, you know, I can't say no to her.
I just, I give her treats all the time.
As for Megan and her chawining?
Have you ever had a problem with Dutch so far
about him gaining too much weight?
Yes.
Yes.
He says I'm guilty.
Well, I feel guilty.
It really makes me think a lot about
just like reevaluating every like morsel of kibble
that goes into his bowl.
Dutch was putting on some weight when Megan first got him,
but she's since kept his paw
out of the treat jar.
And he slimmed right down.
But Chris reckons
he'll need a bigger plan.
Now I'm just thinking through
like a training regime
I could put her on.
Like if I could just get
like tiny little tires
and have her run through those.
Like a Rocky.
We did like a Rocky scene.
Do, do, do.
Yeah, like have her run up
some steps like Rocky.
Put her little paws in the air and triumph at the end.
I will try to be more judicious about the treats.
I swear by the end of this, I will have the healthiest dog, I think, after our conversation.
I am committed now to really putting her through her paces.
So, after lapping up the science, here's where we're at.
There are lots of different pet foods out there,
and most of the stuff that you get at the store is probably just fine for your pet.
Even the cheap stuff, as long as you don't give them too much of it.
And so, for Megan, now when she sees all these claims from pet food companies,
she's going to be like.
Yeah.
Show the receipts, dog food industry.
Yeah.
So I guess the next time you get like a targeted ad that says, you know, you could be doing better, Megan.
Yeah.
You can say, leave me alone.
Yeah.
I will.
I will tell them, not today, dog food industry.
Not today.
That's science verses
so because it's the end of the season we have a very special
citations with the whole gang hi everyone hi hi it's michelle here i'm here blight is here
it's meryl hi it's rose hi it's taylor nick here hey boomy here so how many
citations in this week's episode uh 147 147 and if people want to see these citations where should
they go they can look at the show notes. Perfect. What's on Instagram this week?
Everyone's pet, right?
Yeah, there's Dutch and Ripley.
You can see them for yourselves.
And also some cool stuff about Blanco.
He was on the cover of Science Magazine in 1987 when this story broke.
So he's a famous cat.
Cover cat.
Rose, what about the other famous cat that's going to
be on instagram fiona yeah fiona the cat this is rose's cat yeah she's there too all right so see
you guys next season yeah seamless Seamless. with help from Alex Bloomberg. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka.
Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala,
Emma Munger and Bobby Lord.
A huge thanks to all of the researchers
that we got in touch with for this episode,
including Professor Leslie Lyons,
Professor Greg Aldrich, Professor George Fahey,
Professor Andrew Knight, Dr Tony Moore,
Dr Marge Chandler and Professor Gregory Oaken.
A special thanks to Peter Leonard for voicing our wildcat ad,
as well as Michelle Zassenhaus and Oliver Flink.
And thanks to all of our friends and family and pets
who have helped us out this season, including Christopher Suter
and Elise, Maddie and Fred White, as well as Taylor's cat Jessica,
Walter Rimler and Rose's cat Fiona, Jack Weinstein and Hunter, Thank you so much, everyone.
I'm Wendy Zuckerman.
Back to you soon.