“Big Cats Obsess Over Calvin Klein’s ‘Obsession for Men’: A Certain Animal Magnetism Makes the Fragrance a Hit With Zoos”, 2010-06-08 ():
To wine and dine Sasha, a 450-pound Siberian tiger at the Bronx Zoo, try serving beef and rabbit. To lure him for a snack, whip out the frozen treats his zookeepers call “bloodcicles.” But to really get his olfactory engines running, you need the secret weapon: Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men [cf. civetone].
Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious.
In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo in New York, decided to get scientific about it. Working with 24 fragrances and two cheetahs, he recorded how long it took the big cats to notice the scent and how much time they spent interacting with it.
The results left barely a whiff of a doubt. Estée Lauder’s Beautiful occupied the cheetahs on average for just two seconds. Revlon’s Charlie managed 15.5 seconds. Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps took it up to 10.4 minutes. But the musky Obsession for Men triumphed: 11.1 minutes. That’s longer than the cats usually take to savor a meal.
“Oh, yeah, he loves that scent”, Mr. Thomas said as Sasha blissfully cuddled up to a tree sprayed with Obsession for Men. “Just look at him.”
…Ann Gottlieb, the “nose” who helped create Obsession for Men, thinks there could be a number of factors in the fragrance that wild animals might find irresistible. “It’s a combination of this lickable vanilla heart married to this fresh green top note—it creates tension”, she says. The cologne also has synthetic “animal” notes like civet, a musky substance secreted by the cat of the same name, giving it particular sex appeal, she adds. “It sparks curiosity with humans and, apparently, animals.”
Mr. Thomas’s findings spread quickly through the Wildlife Conservation Society’s network of global operations. Now, Obsession is widely used not only in zoos, but in the field, where it has helped produce breakthroughs in wildlife biology and conservation.
…After hearing through a colleague of Mr. Thomas’s scent test, Mr. McNab’s field biologists began spraying Obsession for Men near their cameras. Researchers squirted the cologne onto a rag tied to a stake in the ground. The elusive jaguars, which scientists say can detect smells from up to a kilometer away, crept forth. 3× as many of the cats walked by camera stands spiked with the cologne than those without it. Camera footage showed curious cats sauntering up to the scented rag, sniffing it, then lingering nearby. That diversion gave researchers the chance to get clear, full shots of the jaguars and their spot patterns.
Beyond mere counting, the jaguar survey project has begun to capture rarely seen jaguar mating rituals, including a male’s coy nipping and days-long pursuit of a potential partner. “We’re just starting to get an idea of how jaguars behave in their habitat”, Mr. McNab says. “Before we used Obsession for Men we weren’t able to get these images at all.”
…The challenge for researchers is finding enough of the stuff, given the cologne’s price of about $85.57$602010 and scarcity in shops near the rainforest. Mr. McNab has made a habit of checking duty-free shops during his international trips just in case he can snag a good price. He asks friends and colleagues to bring along a bottle when they travel to the region. The Bronx Zoo relies on donations to keep up its supplies. Stella Miller, president of the Huntington-Oyster Bay chapter of the Audubon Society on Long Island, N.Y., says she has donated about 300 bottles of fragrance, collected from friends and acquaintances over the past 5 years. At the zoo, keeper Michelle Medina stores about a dozen fragrances in a large plastic pail amid her supplies for the large Tiger Mountain exhibit. During a recent visit, her sample-sized bottle of Obsession for Men was almost empty. To keep her cats content, “I’ll need to find more of this”, she says.