In the microwaved pet urban legend, a small pet, usually a toy dog breed or a cat, is put into a microwave oven to dry its fur. This quick-drying method of animal grooming goes awry when the pet explodes. The microwaved pet story emerged sometime during the mid to late 1970s.
The microwave oven was invented in the mid-1940s by engineer Percy LeBaron Spencer (1894–1970). Spencer was employed at Raytheon and was working on improvements to radar design. One day as he was standing near an active radar unit, Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket was melting. Driven by curiosity, Spencer experimented with various foods, including popcorn and eggs. He developed a crude oven by using a closed box design and fitting it with a radar cavity magnetron. Using this apparatus for experiments, Spencer carefully recorded his results. This discovery was a boon to Raytheon, which had a surplus of radar parts after the end of World War II.
In 1945, Raytheon filed a patent for the microwave cooking oven. During 1946 a prototype oven was tested at a Boston restaurant, and in 1947 the first commercially viable microwave oven was available for sale. These first microwave ovens were large freestanding units more than five feet tall and weighing in at 750 pounds. They also needed to be water cooled and thus required plumbing. These ovens were intended for commercial venues, such as restaurants and cruise ships, and carried a hefty price tag of several thousand dollars.
The commercial sector remained Raytheon’s primary target market until the early 1960s. Although several oven models that were aimed at the consumer market were produced during the 1950s, including Tappan’s 1955 wall-mounted model, these were still too large and far too expensive for the average household.
In the 1960s, a compact magnetron was invented that allowed the size of microwave ovens to be reduced. Several manufacturers made design changes that increased the appeal of microwaves to potential customers, and in 1967 the first countertop microwave oven, the Amana Radarange, was marketed at a price that put it within the reach of the average household. By the mid-1970s more than one million microwave ovens had been sold to American consumers.
While the early sales of consumer ovens were brisk, few people knew how to cook with microwave ovens, and even fewer understood how their microwave ovens worked. Initially, there was a widespread fear of radiation leaks from the new technology, and people assumed that the ovens could cause their food to become radioactive. While that was not true, the early microwave ovens did, in fact, leak microwaves.
In 1968, the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, which was intended to limit the amount of radiation emitted by televisions, was expanded to include microwave ovens. Then in January 1970, a report published by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare showed that microwave ovens sold prior to 1970 leaked enough microwave radiation to be considered harmful to human health. New standards were implemented for appliance manufacturers, who made necessary design changes to ensure that their products complied with government regulations.
However, concerns about radiation continued for some time, and microwave ovens only slowly gained public acceptance and did not become popular until the mid-1970s. It was during this decade that the microwaved pet myth first began to make the rounds. It built upon the fear of radiation and ignorance of the oven’s technology, and most likely developed from earlier urban myths in which various family members cooked a pet in a regular oven.
The microwaved pet myth surfaced just when microwave ovens were becoming ubiquitous in American households. The legend appeals to audiences of all ages. Younger children tend to take the story at face value and believe that it is based on a real event, but older children and adults are skeptical of the story’s pedigree.
In the most common version of the microwaved pet myth, an older woman gives her pet poodle a bath. In some versions of the story the woman is simply pressed for time because she has an appointment, while in others she is worried that her little dog will catch a cold and so she wants to dry its fur as quickly as possible.
The woman has a habit of bathing her dog and placing it in a cardboard box next to her regular oven, with the door open and the oven set to low heat, or else placing the box directly on the open oven door. She has just received a microwave as a gift and is ignorant of how the machine works, but she assumes that she can dry her pet just as well with the shiny new microwave oven as she could with the regular oven. So, the hapless animal owner pops her pooch into the microwave oven and turns it on.
But instead of drying the animal’s fur, the microwave oven cooks the animal from the inside out. In tamer versions of the story the pet is simply cooked to death, but in more gruesome versions of the story the pet explodes, destroying the microwave oven and sometimes even injuring the pet owner.
The microwaved pet myth cannot be traced to any definitive source, and the Internet has enabled the story to circulate more rapidly than it might otherwise have done via oral tradition. As with other urban legends, the details of the microwaved pet myth are usually changed to “localize” the story, even though there are never any names associated with it.
In some variations of the myth, children put the unlucky animal into the microwave rather than an older woman. The common thread that all these stories have is that they include a naive protagonist who does not understand how microwave technology works. The microwave pet myth thus may serve as a cautionary tale, reflecting the fears that people have about invisible energy sources.
Other variants of the story feature tech-savvy people who understand the risks associated with exposure to microwaves and yet nevertheless decide to bypass the safety features of their ovens so they can operate them with the doors open and dry their own hair. Instead of a microwaving a pet, they manage to cook themselves to death, either by “nuking” their kidneys or boiling their own blood.
Folklorists have collected microwaved pet stories that involve cats and dogs, and rarely, other small animals such as hamsters. The majority of stories are intentionally gross, but in many cases the myth has become more comedy than horror story, especially where it has become part of popular culture. For example, in 1979, the band Tina Peel released a humorous song, “Fifi Goes Pop,” that told the story of an exploding poodle. The band Feo Y Loco’s song “Microwaved Cat” had a kitty that “went kerplow.” The microwaved pet myth has become entrenched in popular films, such as the 1984 comedy Gremlins and the 1998 slasher movie Urban Legend.
In recent years several news stories have been published that report cases of animal abuse involving a microwave oven. In one case a cat was put into a microwave oven for five minutes. The cat was still alive when it was removed from the oven but died shortly thereafter, most likely from irreparable organ damage.
The microwaved pet story thus serves as a chilling reminder of the dangers of technology and provides a warning to those who use (or misuse) them.
Karen S. Garvin
See also Gremlins; Internet Hoaxes; Nuclear Lore; Storytelling; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 2003. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton.
Cunningham, Keith. 1979. “Hot Dog! Another Urban Belief Tale.” Southwest Folklore 3: 27–28.
Demerath, Loren. 2012. Explaining Culture: The Social Pursuit of Subjective Order. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.
de Vos, Gail. 1996. Tales, Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7–12. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
Smith, Andrew F. 2009. Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine. New York: Columbia University Press.