CONVENTION CRASHING: WESTERN VETERINARY CONFERENCE

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007 | 6:58 a.m.

At the Western Veterinary Conference, there are 15,000 people, four dogs, one cat and, among other veterinary products, a spray to eliminate ferret B.O., dog wheelchairs, a no-chew head cone for mice and a $330 toilet for cats, which has the most persistent public relations people on Earth.

The cat toilet people were relentless.

The phone calls started before Christmas. With the New Year, came a press packet promising that, "Some Day Soon Cat Lovers Will Ask ... What Was a Litter Box?" On Valentine's Day, the public relations woman, who'd been calling about twice a week, called up and said she was my Valentine.

And so, when the Western Veterinary Conference finally rolled into the Mandalay Bay Convention Center this week, naturally I had to check out the revolution in feline excretion solutions: the Cat Genie.

It's basically a robotic toilet for your cat. The cat hops into this beige bowl full of biodegradable plastic litter, and does what cats do in litter boxes when they're not doing it in on piles of clean clothes. Then the toilet takes over, rotating, scooping, straining, spraying and drying the litter.

Most of the litter stays in the bowl, and since it is biodegradable, Petnovations President Rick Mellinger says, you don't have to feel guilty about strip mines and landfills like you do with regular cat litter.

On the downside, we're talking about a $329 cat box. Per cat, you'll spend another $140 bucks a year on cleaning cartridges and replacement litter. Plus, it's big enough that you'll notice it in your laundry room or bathroom, and you'll really notice it when it starts cleaning itself, which takes about 35 minutes of whirring and gurgling noises.

Getting back to the name, "Cat Genie" was the end result of a long hunt through a couple hundred names. First, they needed a name that hadn't already been claimed by a porno Web site. Also, it needed to be something the FCC wouldn't object to in an infomercial, which is coming soon.

The infomercial won't be as convincing a demonstration as Mellinger would like.

"They won't let you show feces on American TV," he says.

Burn, Kitty, Burn

If you want to talk about pet crematoriums, you have to know the difference between your batch-loading and random-feed crematoriums.

See, your random-feed crematorium, now that's good for your family vet who's doing individual cremations for people who would like Fluffy's remains back unmixed with Fido's, says Brian Gamage, director of animal crematorium sales for Crawford Industrial Group. You can open it up at any time, too, so you can scoop out a 5-pound cat after 15 minutes when it's done, instead of waiting for the whole burn cycle.

Now, but there's also a lot of business to be done in cremating a whole bunch of animals at once, or maybe you're running a shelter or disposing of horses or something. In that case, you want to do a lot at once and don't care about sorting them out afterward. You can do that with a random-feed crematorium, but you have to keep feeding the critters in. A batch crematory will do it all at once, up to 2,400 pounds, if you want to go that big and pay almost $100,000.

But if you are doing the individual cremations, the stuff that goes back in the urns or the box with a paw-print on it, you're definitely going to want a cremated remains processor, in case they shake the box. It's kind of like a big coffee grinder. Breaks up the, uh, bits.

"If people are getting ashes back," Gamage says, "the connotation is that they're getting some kind of powder."

Product: Heel, Liberty!

Meet Advanced Airway Jerry and Critical Care Fluffy. Jerry is a dog dummy that vets can practice their mouth-to-snout resuscitation and intubation skills on. Fluffy is much the same, only in the shape of a gray cat that looks like it should be driving a car off of a cliff in old "Saturday Night Live" episodes.

Jerry costs $1,649 and Fluffy is $989. There's also a model that's just the hindquarters of a female dog that vets can practice sticking urinary catheters in for $989 - it doesn't have a name.

From Rescue Critters LLC, www.rescuecritters.com.

Spotted: "Egg-citing News in the War Against Canine Gut Disturbances"

- sign for PRN Pharmaceutical featuring a queasy golden retriever wearing a combat helmet standing over a broken eggshell.

Overheard:

"Ha! They're for the nasty little ankle biters!"

"And also cats."

- Prospective customer talking to the salesman of ball-shaped, easy-on muzzles.