Allerca Lifestyle Pets, the company which has been claiming for years that it was producing hypoallergenic cats, is getting out of the business. There is, however, more than a little doubt that it was ever really in the business in the first place.
The company's founder, Simon Brodie, has been accused of passing off Savannah cats he bought from a breeder as proprietary "Ashera" hypoallergenic cats. Several websites list other complaints, calling Allerca "a scam," a "fraud" and "a total rip-off."
Many cat allergies come from reactions to a single protein, called Fel-d1. (Not all: there are at least five suspects [pdf].) Therefore, if you could produce a cat that did not express this protein, you could dramatically reduce the allergic reactions. The cat might not really be hypoallergenic, but arguably close enough for marketing purposes.
Allerca, and various related companies such as ForeverPet and Geneticas Life Sciences, were not genetically modifying animals, though early publicity implied that they were. Instead, they claimed to have discovered a way of selecting cats that produced little or no Fel-d1 and then breeding them. Some cats do naturally provoke lower allergy responses, so this is not totally implausible, but Allerca has never published any peer-reviewed studies demonstrating this.
Brodie did once offer to invest $2.5 million in Transgenic Pets (later Felix Pets), which did intend to modify cats, but "when it came time for him to contribute his money, it turned out he didn't have any." Felix Pets is still trying, but has no such cats available and is not taking deposits. What Brodie wanted, it seems, was the shtick -- enough scientific terminology to sound impressively informed.
All this may be a surprise, and should be an embarrassment, to Time magazine, which credited the company with one of the "Best Inventions 2006" for its alleged ability to select cats that do not express that particular protein to which many people are allergic. And to the New York Times, which ran a puff piece about it. As did ABC, NBC, CBS and many other purveyors of infotainment under the guise of news.
There were, even then, honorable exceptions. The San Diego Union-Tribune investigated Brodie in 2006, and discovered that he was a convicted criminal who had defaulted on loans, that Allerca had once been evicted for non-payment of rent, and various other unsavory details. So did John Mattes of San Diego's Fox 6 News, who later described Brodie as "a carnival barker." And The Scientist (subscription required) has been on top of the real story all along.
Brodie's murky past is listed in detail here. It includes a jail term in England for false accounting concerned with Cloudhoppers, a balloon-flight company. He seems to have moved on to selling $19,000 skis under the name Carradan. Hot air and a slippery slope: You couldn't make this up.
Cloned or genetically modified pets are of course sometimes real. The harm they do to animals is definitely no laughing matter. Nor is the damage that credulous reporters do in passing on hucksters' myths. The worst possible result would be that people wrote off genuine abuses as mere frauds -- and the best antidote to that is proper journalism.
