The snarly animals with sharp teeth did not want to sit still while Shope dripped flu-containing liquid into their noses. Shope decided to anesthetize the ferrets before inoculating them with swine flu. To his surprise, he discovered that when he did the experiments this way, the flu virus caused not just influenza but also a severe pneumonia, one that caused the lungs to swell with watery blood and that sometimes even killed the animals. It looked for all the world like a typical case of the 1918 flu.
