After surviving three weeks at sea and a four-day train journey in a sealed shipping container, a stowaway cat from China is now thriving in a sunlit room filled with cat toys and fresh water at the Pet Haven animal rescue organization in St. Paul.

She’s even learning English.

Xiao Mao shortly after she was found June 4, 2025, by an employee at a distribution center in Oakdale. (Courtesy of Companion Animal Control)

Xiao Mao, which means “little cat” in Chinese, now weighs 8½ pounds, a huge increase from the 3.2 pounds she weighed when she was found in an Oakdale distribution center on June 4. When she arrived at Pet Haven just a few days later, she was emaciated, dehydrated and terrified of humans, said Kerry D’Amato, the organization’s executive director.

“She was bone thin, and she was starving,” D’Amato said. “We were actually surprised she was alive given the condition she was in. She was very, very dehydrated. She drank and drank and drank and drank. We couldn’t touch her at all. She would hiss and lunge at us.”

Staff at Pet Haven started Xiao Mao on a “slow refeeding program” so as not to stress her internal organs, D’Amato said. She’s now eating a steady diet of wet and dry cat food, she said.

“She’s doing great,” D’Amato said. “Her ears are forward, her eyes are bright. She’s playful. She eats Churu (a pureed cat treat) off my finger. She’s really come a long way.”

Xiao Mao now knows the English words “treat” and “come,” D’Amato said. “She knows ‘treat’ for sure, and she has learned ‘come, come.’ When you say that, she’ll come forward. She’s learning.”

Wallflowers program

Xiao Mao is believed to have survived by drinking condensation that pooled in the metal shipping container and perhaps eating spiders and a rodent or two.

Staff from Companion Animal Control, which serves Oakdale, used a live trap with canned tuna as bait to catch Xiao Mao the night after she was discovered. She was then brought to Northwoods Humane Society in Wyoming, Minn., where they hoped she could recover and be adopted.

But Xiao Mao needed more care and attention, so staff at Northwoods reached out to Pet Haven, in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, which has a program — called Wallflowers — “which gives shy, undersocialized cats and dogs a chance to bloom,” D’Amato said.

Kerry D’Amato holds a painting of Xiao Mao created by a frequent volunteer at Pet Haven. (Claudia Staut / Pioneer Press)

Now, Xiao Mao has a private room — a former office space — that features exterior and interior windows. She’s got four cat trees, two food bowls, a water fountain, a water bowl, a sheepskin bed and fuzzy blankets. A sign stating “Wallflowers Bloom Here” is posted outside, just below a small painting of Xiao Mao, along with her name written in Chinese characters.

“We just gave her the space — as much space as she needs,” D’Amato said. “Sometimes that can take a week, sometimes it takes a month. You know, honestly, sometimes it can take a year. And we give it to them. Once they enter our program, there is no time limit. They all graduate.

“We’ve had cats come in here that we couldn’t touch that are now snuggled on their adopters’ laps,” she said. “We had one, Fruitcake, that we didn’t think anyone was ever going to be able to touch. Now she snuggles on her adopter’s lap, so you just don’t know.”

Pet Haven, which was founded in 1952, started the Wallflowers program three years ago when the organization moved into its first physical location. Since then, more than 100 cats — who may have been euthanized at traditional shelters — have been rehabilitated and adopted out, D’Amato said.

Making friends

Xiao Mao likes to look through the windows in her room and wait for staff to come in. She especially loves chasing a wand toy, “which is basically a plastic stick with silver tinsel at the end of it,” D’Amato said.

Pet Haven’s executive director Kerry D’Amato holds two kittens. Staff at Pet Haven are working to pair Xiao Mao with a “special cat friend” to help her learn to socialize. (Claudia Staut / Pioneer Press)

Getting her to finally eat Churu from D’Amato’s finger is a big deal because “then they associate the smell of that person with something positive, which is the treat that they’re eating,” she said. “That’s the next step in socialization and building trust. It’s all about trust-building and letting them move at their own pace.”

Staff at Pet Haven are now working to pair Xiao Mao with a “special cat friend” to help her learn to socialize. They know that Xiao Mao prefers male cats to female cats, so they arranged over the weekend to have two neutered male cats brought down by Leech Lake Legacy, an animal-welfare organization, from the Pennington County Humane Society in Thief River Falls.

On Monday, Xiao Mao met both for the first time. Boo, a black domestic short hair, seemed hesitant and his tail puffed up a little bit.

Prince, however, was a different story. The gray-and-white tabby took an immediate interest in Xiao Mao, who was hiding on a blanket inside one of her cat trees.

“Hey Xiao Mao, come on out. Is this your new boyfriend? Is this your new boyfriend?” D’Amato called. “Come on out. Come on. He’s a pretty boy. He’ll be your man of the hour, or the moment, or the rest of your life.”

Prince meowed and pranced around trying to get Xiao Mao to come out and play. She emerged briefly, and the two circled around each other. She then returned to her lair.

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D’Amato declared the meeting a success.

“He’s got no puffing up,” she said. “His shackles — his shoulders — are flat, his tail is flat, his chirp is high-pitched. It’s a sound that is friendly and excited. He’s trying to call her out to play. See how he kind of jumps his step a little bit from side to side? That is play posturing. He really wants her to come out and play. See now how he’s arching his back and rubbing against that pole? That’s ‘Hey, look. I’m here. Come on out. Let’s play. Let’s get to know each other.’ He really likes her. He’s talking to her like crazy.”

Xiao Mao has shown signs of being ready to have a companion move into the room with her, D’Amato said.

“She’s ready to take that next step in her process and have a well-socialized companion,” she said. “She can bond with him. She can learn to trust him. And as she sees him trust us, then we’ll be able to make more progress with her.”

Staff at Pet Haven will let the cats spend time together and then remove Prince from the room, “so she’s kind of, like, ‘Well, where did he go? I’m missing him,’” D’Amato said.

That “slow introduction” will continue over a period of several days, she said. Given that they’re both cats that have been socialized with other cats, staff will be able “to move those introductions a little quicker than we would normally,” she said. “Normally we would take a little bit more time, but Xiao Mao is desperate for companionship. She has showed us that.”

Foster home next

D’Amato expects Xiao Mao and Prince to spend anywhere from two to six weeks together in Xiao Mao’s room at Pet Haven. Staying in the same space is key for Xiao Mao, she said.

“Everything stays the same in their room, but many different people come and go, so they get different smells, they get different experiences,” D’Amato said. “But every time someone comes into the room, they get something positive — whether it’s food, a new treat, a toy that is soaked in catnip, something new comes in their room with that new person that’s positive, and that’s how we start socializing them to people.”

The pair will then move into a foster home for anywhere from six weeks to three months, D’Amato said, and then be put up for adoption together.

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One option might be a foster-to-adopt situation, D’Amato said.

“My preference is to make sure that she gets in the right place so she can finish her journey and be a fully well balanced cat that enjoys her life,” D’Amato said. “It’s not living in fear, right? What we’re seeing now is a cat that is curious, that wants to experience the world around her, even though her world has been a small room at our headquarters, she feels safe there. So now she’s able to be more herself. She comes out, she plays, she sits at the window, she chirps at people.

“All of these things are wonderful signs that she is taking that next step into wanting to be a well-loved cat.”

Find more information about Pet Haven and how to donate or volunteer at pethavenmn.org.

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation that imposes a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, the immigration allocation set aside for highly skilled workers the U.S. economy needs. The new rules threaten the availability and deployment of human capital in the United States. This is misguided and will hurt U.S. growth and innovation, at a time when the global arms race for AI creates a vital need for the sharpest human talent and innovators.

We are professors who study and teach innovation-related topics at U.S. research universities. As immigrants to the United States from India and Panama respectively, we understand firsthand the sometimes painful discussions around H-1B immigration. Tensions around immigration routinely affect our academic institutions, our current students and former students now in industry. But there should be a lot of common ground on this polarizing topic.

STEM immigrants are creating substantial value in the United States. Immigrants play a significant role in entrepreneurial ventures in the United States and particularly startup innovation. Further, such immigrants are responsible for 23% of innovation output in the United States. This effect is in part based on policies that allow for foreign students to study and stay in the United States to work in startups.

H-1B immigration is like a natural selection process that benefits the U.S. immensely. Highly skilled immigrants in areas such as technology and medicine come hungry for hard work and full of ideas to better the world — to create new products, services and even markets as well as to cater to existing needs through more incremental improvement and optimization. Many of our best students are immigrants who are looking to stay in the United States and create work opportunities that would not be possible anywhere else in the world. In the United States, we recognize entrepreneurial success perhaps more than any other country. It is one of our greatest attributes as a society.

Nevertheless, we do have an immigration problem in the United States. The problem is that the distribution of benefits across the United States is highly skewed. Much of the wealth generated in terms of company creation and jobs has redounded to innovative clusters. But the idea to reduce the total number of H-1B immigrants by increasing the cost is exactly the wrong way to “solve” this problem — by dragging down the thriving parts of the economy rather than lifting up the rest.

To grow economic prosperity throughout the country, we need to offer more opportunities for more H-1B visa applicants. There are simply not enough trained U.S. nationals to take on the sort of labor required for the next wave of a tech-enabled industrial revolution.

Distributing the fruits of H-1B visa holders’ work more broadly requires a different approach than the U.S. has taken before. We should increase the total number of new H-1B visa recipients each year to 350,000 from around 85,000, with the additional visas apportioned across states so that locations like college towns — places like Lawrence, Kan., Gainesville, Fla., and Clemson, S.C., as well as cities such as Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Boise, receive sufficient numbers of H-1B workers. Visas could be allocated through a process akin to the resident-matching system for medical doctors, thereby sending workers to states where they would create greater value by filling economic and technological gaps. This infusion of labor would improve technological innovation in local economies and create local spillover effects in job creation and additional innovation.

Such immigration is necessary particularly now given a global push toward increased industrial policy, as China and others invest in AI and broader digital transformation. At a time when our national security is linked to technological innovation, it is shortsighted not to open ourselves to more immigration. If we do not, we will lose some of the best and brightest minds to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore and other countries.

Immigration is currently a volatile political issue in the U.S., as it has been at some other moments in the nation’s history. Although this is a country of immigrants, for people who feel insecure about pocketbook and cultural issues, continued immigration can feel threatening. As a percentage of people living in the United States, it has been more than 100 years since there were as many immigrants here as there are now. But as with past waves of immigration, productivity and transformation have followed.

This is particularly clear for H-1B visa holders, who create opportunities for people born in the U.S. and ensure the vitality of American innovation, security and democratic values. Increasing the costs of such visas would chill their use and reduce U.S. prosperity and innovation exactly at a time of great need.

Hemant Bhargava is a professor of business at UC Davis Graduate School of Management and director of the Center for Analytics and Technology in Society. D. Daniel Sokol is a professor of law and business at USC. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

And after months of blustery talk from President Donald Trump about lowering drug prices and cracking down on Big Pharma, his plans are finally starting to take shape, beginning with pacts with manufacturers.

But before we get too excited, consumers should demand more transparency about what they’re getting from his dealmaking — and ask who is truly benefiting from the sum of his health care actions.

Trump wisely put the issue of drug costs front and center, promising consumers a better deal than what his predecessors could extract from companies. His main strategy has been to threaten pharma companies with outlandishly high tariffs if they didn’t comply with his demands, which included reshoring manufacturing, bringing U.S. drug prices in line with those in Europe, and expanding direct-to-consumer sales.

The deal with Pfizer announced last week seemed to check all the president’s boxes by offering most-favored-nation prices to Medicaid, a commitment to invest in U.S. production, and an agreement to feature some of its branded drugs on a TrumpRx portal. In exchange, the company is exempt from tariffs for the next three years. Other companies appear to be negotiating their own deals, fueling a sense that months of uncertainty and anxiety may soon be in Big Pharma’s rear window.

All of that sounds promising — until you look at the details, which remain murky.

When weighing the merits of the deal for consumers, it’s worth noting the differences in language between Trump’s press conferences, the White House fact sheet, and Pfizer’s press release, says Stacie Dusetzina, who studies drug policy and prices at Vanderbilt University.

A few words in the Pfizer release stand out. “Voluntary,” for example, and “confidential.” The careful language and lack of real details about the arrangement suggest that, despite the fanfare, “Pfizer got a really good PR deal out of it,” Dusetzina says.

It’s far less clear if American health care consumers got a good deal.

For starters, few people are likely to benefit from Trump’s direct-to-consumer website. Yes, Pfizer has agreed to sell drugs there at discounts as high as 85%, and an average of about 50%, but people with insurance usually pay only a fraction of list prices or a small copay. That significantly narrows the site’s appeal mainly to people without insurance, or to those whose insurance no longer covers a brand-name drug they prefer.

But even that group might not find it helpful. Discounting a wildly expensive drug can still leave patients with a crushing bill. Take, for example, the 40% price cut for Pfizer’s arthritis treatment Xeljanz that the White House touted in its fact sheet. With a list price of more than $6,000 per month, patients would still be on the hook for about $3,600 per month. (That same drug, notably, can easily be found for a lower price through GoodRx.)

Many pharma companies were already setting up their own direct-to-consumer websites, and Trump’s demands seem to be simply accelerating that move. Amgen, for example, announced Monday it would sell its cholesterol-lowering treatment Repatha at a 60% discount on a newly established site and eventually offer it through TrumpRx. (Like Xeljanz, the drug can be found at the same discounted price on GoodRx.) And Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs offers a transparent pricing model, raising the question of whether TrumpRx will offer consumers anything new or better.

Meanwhile, Medicaid’s most-favored-nation pricing approach also sounds promising, but it’s nearly impossible to gauge savings. Dusetzina points out that it’s unclear how Medicaid’s current payments compare to international prices. And because legislation that went into effect last year discourages price hikes and incentivizes cuts, it’s possible that Medicaid may already pay less than other countries for older brand-name drugs.

“The details really matter, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get the details to be able to understand if this was a good deal or not for the American public,” Dusetzina says.

Amid all the bluster, it would be easy for the public to overlook the other, more substantive health policy changes the Trump administration is making — unfortunately, some to consumers’ detriment.

The biggest are deep cuts to Medicaid and the likely expiration of subsidies used by most people with Affordable Care Act health plans. Combined with smaller policy shifts, these changes will result in an estimated 15 million more uninsured Americans by 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. For them, drugs will be far more expensive without insurance coverage — and studies show that cost is a major factor in whether people stick to their medications.

And while health policy experts are relieved that the Trump administration isn’t completely scrapping Medicare’s new drug-price negotiation powers, the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill significantly watered them down.

In a gift to pharma, the bill broadened reprieves to drugs that treat rare conditions. Under the original law, a medication treating a so-called orphan disease was exempt from Medicare negotiations. Trump’s bill expanded the scope, allowing drugs treating multiple rare conditions to be excluded altogether, and delaying the negotiations for drugs that first came onto the market as rare treatments but later gained approval for common conditions.

That shift could potentially delay Medicare’s ability to negotiate key drug prices, eating into projected savings — and ultimately costing seniors more. The CBO initially projected the change would sacrifice some $5 billion in savings, but that calculation is  viewed as a gross underestimate because it excluded the impact of several blockbuster drugs.

Merck & Co. and Bristol Myers Squibb, which market lucrative cancer immunotherapies that are expected to get a year’s reprieve, are among the biggest winners. Medicare accounts for a substantial portion of Merck’s revenue from Keytruda, which is projected to top $31 billion this year. In 2023, the government program spent some $5.4 billion on the cancer treatment — about a fifth of its total sales.

Trump’s focus on lowering drug prices targets a critical issue for Americans. But without far greater transparency, it’s impossible to assess whether his wheeling and dealing benefits consumers as much as it does Big Pharma. Until then, it’s hard not to worry that he’s creating the illusion of big savings, while behind the scenes making consequential decisions that could cost patients and the government dearly.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

In a world that often seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos, what hope is there for defenseless fish?

The Atlantic cod off the eastern coast of Canada were once such an abundant resource that their dried flesh helped drive the colonization of the Americas, spawning local delicacies from Spanish bacalao to Jamaican ackee and saltfish. Industrialized harvesting caused a collapse in populations in the 1980s and 1990s, leading many diners to switch to monkfish instead — until that species, too, went into decline.

It can feel like an inevitable cycle. Humans seem incapable of carrying out the most basic measures to protect common resources from over-exploitation — whether it’s the carbon that we spew into the atmosphere, the plastics that we scatter through the environment, or wild animals that we’ve been hunting to extinction since the paleolithic era. And yet on the high seas, there are encouraging signs that concerted efforts can reverse the process.

Take tuna. Like cod and monkfish, the most prized species once seemed to be on the verge of disappearance, thanks largely to our insatiable hunger for sushi. The skipjack tuna that you’ll typically find in cans is super-abundant, but the three main species of bluefin tuna were in a much more precarious state. Bluefins are  rarer, slow-growing and can be as long as a small car. Diners, particularly in Japan, prize their flesh for its complex, buttery taste, and fish sometimes sell for millions of dollars apiece.

The global catch fell by half between 2005 and 2011 as years of overfishing left populations too small to rebuild themselves. In 2010, a proposal to ban commerce in Atlantic bluefin came close to passing at the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a move that would have given it similar levels of protection to the rhinoceros and elephant. The following year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that more than half of tuna species were facing extinction. There was “little hope of recovery” for the southern bluefin, one of the IUCN’s authors was quoted as saying.

That’s not what happened. The same year, the countries fishing the southern bluefin’s habitat in the Indian and Southern Oceans for the first time agreed to joint limits on how much they could catch. Monitoring of fish stocks could provide a decent estimate of how many animals were out there, and how fast they were reproducing. By keeping the catch within reasonable bounds, the fishery could gradually rebuild to the point where populations were sustainable and exploitation was profitable.

The policy, along with similar measures to preserve other tuna species, was a remarkable success.

A revision to the IUCN’s endangered list in 2021 took the Atlantic bluefin from “endangered” to “least concern;” albacore and yellowfin, both seen as “near threatened” in 2011, were also moved to “least concern.” Southern bluefin, which had been seen as “critically endangered” since the 1990s, was lifted to merely “endangered.” As populations recovered, catches of the southern species nearly doubled, from 9,400 tons in 2011 to 17,000 in 2021.

Right now, tuna is probably one of the most sustainable wild fish you can eat. Some 99.3% now comes from sustainable stocks, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization recently, with 87% of stocks now being fished sustainably. That’s far better than the average 64.5% of stocks across all fish species.

With the exception of Mediterranean albacore (a favorite of Spanish canneries) and bigeye in the Indian Ocean, every population is now being fished within sustainable levels. Compare that to Atlantic cod, where just 21.7% of stocks are being fished sustainably, and the difference is stark.

There’s a lesson in this: Capitalist self-interest, combined with intensive regulation, can work — even when it’s being driven by our obsession with particular high-value foods. On land, we think of monocultures — the dominance of major food groups such as corn, apples and chickens — as a bad thing. In the ocean, where it’s inherently difficult to get a handle on just how many fish are lurking in the depths, monocultures can be beneficial. The fish that are most caught are, by and large, the ones that are best understood, and the easiest to manage sustainably.

Intensive management and catch quotas, like the rules helping the southern bluefin to recover, are also spreading beyond the richest countries to the likes of Thailand and Indonesia.

There’s no cause for complacency, however. Even fish being sustainably harvested could be just a few years away from an unexpected population collapse, and a growing human population with rising incomes and improving capture technology is inevitably going to maintain pressure on wild stocks for centuries to come.

Still, there’s nothing foreordained about our despoliation of the environment. In the seas, as on land and in the atmosphere, our efforts to rein in our over-exploitative tendencies can still find success.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.