I'm aware of three definitions for a shaggy-dog story: an elaborate set-up leading to a deliberately disappointing punchline, a tale that leads to a particularly contrived or desperate play on words, and a story that features talking animals. There are no non-human talking creatures of any kind in this story.

It took Colin Thorpe, regional investigator for Her Majesty's environmental affairs bureau, more than an hour to get from his office to the building or buildings that he was looking for. The site was accessible from a small spur off a regular road, but it couldn't be seen from the roadway, and Thorpe actually drove past it on the main road and had to turn around.

The address seemed to belong to a small house of no particular distinction, the only one on the edge of a lake of no great size, almost a pond. The anonymous tip that had sent Thorpe there -- something about secret animal projects undertaken by a rogue scientist -- had seemed unlikely when he had set on his way. But forest shadows surrounded the place, and no laboratory could be seen from the front of the house, making him wonder whether there might be some truth to it after all.

The records that he'd found on file indicated that Herbert G. Morrow was a doctor twice over, with an advanced degree in biology from a small university in France and a D.V.M. acquired in Edinburgh. His small independent laboratory in the north of England was fully licensed for the experiments that he performed. There shouldn't have been any trouble.

And indeed there wasn't, as the dark-haired, slightly corpulent bureaucrat made his way to the front door, introduced himself to the man who answered, and was readily invited inside.

If Morrow actually was a mad scientist, Thorpe noted, one certainly couldn't tell by appearance: no beady eyes, deathly pallor, evil grin, stooped posture, or snarling voice; not even any sign of the contempt that certified intellectuals tended to show at times for mere public servants. Morrow seemed a pleasant enough man, about 175 cm tall -- five feet nine in the old money -- few if any extra kilos on his frame, brown hair with no sign of gray yet, a clear voice with no trace of a foreign accent.

The lack of a laboratory in view turned out to be easily explained. An islet in the center of the lake, cleared of vegetation, held a functional-looking building, accessible by a foot bridge between the upstairs level of Morrow's home and a door at a similar height in the building there. Morrow showed no hesitation about leading Thorpe across.

"As you'll see, Inspector, there's nothing here for you to be concerned about. Hybridization is a perfectly normal area of research now that DNA splicing is so common. Even if there were a problem, with our working area within the lake here and everything at this remote location, the rest of the country is doubly isolated from any risk of contamination. This bridge can be disconnected in seconds."

Inspector Thorpe passed by the room where the molecular slicing and dicing took place and proceeded directly to the one in which the animals were kept. There were more than a dozen cages of varying sizes, with animals, birds and fishes -- sometimes one, sometimes several -- clearly visible in each of them.

"You take care of this all by yourself?" Thorpe asked.

"I have someone come in and clean the place four days a week, but I do all the scientific and veterinary work. As you can see, there are cameras mounted all over this room, and there are remote alarms as well. So if anything untoward happens to an animal while I'm not here, I can observe it from the house and rush right over."

"I don't see any large animals here: horses, lions, elephants, jungle cats. Where do you keep them?"

"I don't have the facilities for them, so we don't grow anything larger than Princess here." Morrow pointed to a brown dog, about the size of a basset hound, with unusually long fur. "I've inserted genes from a sea otter to give her that heavy coat. It tamps down rather neatly when she has a bath."

"And here?"

"The larger animal is a fairly ordinary badger, save for the fluorescent green fur -- we spliced in some material from glowing bacteria and from a couple of lizard species. The smaller one is a skunk; we imported the genetic material from Canada. We've managed not only to neutralize its foul odor but to have it emit a pleasing pine scent. They share the cage, after all, and we don't need any stinking badgers."

Thorpe moved on to an aquarium.

"Most of what I do here is pure research, but very occasionally we get visitors who are looking for commercial applications," Morrow said. "Japanese koi, of course, are colorful in their own right without any help from me. But a representative of an American company asked me to look into creating one that incorporated its trademark, preferably in flashing neon. They called it a "swoosh". I'm not nearly there; the best I've done so far is that white, rather vague "U" shape over the gills of the dark orange one. But I'm going to work with a few more generations before I give up."

"Do you get much of that?" Thorpe inquired.

"Not really, and most of what I do get asked for isn't practical even for me. An agency was in about a year ago to show me an old American beer advert. They wanted three frog varieties that could each croak a syllable from the brand name. I told them no."

Morrow described the rest of the fauna as Thorpe wandered around the room. The fink -- a ferret-mink combination -- looked fairly normal, though its pelt looked surprisingly ratty, in both senses of the word. Two shredgehogs -- spiny treeshrews -- were chasing each other through some greenery; Thorpe mused that actually catching one might prove a bit uncomfortable.

Some small, silvery salt-water fishes could be seen in a tank near the center of the room. "Tiny tuna have lots of advantages over the giant ones," the scientist told Thorpe. "Less mercury poisoning, for one thing, since they're not at the top of the food chain. I'm trying to modify them to excrete what's left. Less waste, if you don't happen to be a giant food processing company packing each fish into hundreds of little tins. Best of all, no giant nets are needed to catch them, so no dolphins get trapped."

No matter how unusual the creatures were, every one that he saw seemed to be living in clean conditions and in remarkably good health. Thorpe speculated that the genetic modifications that Morrow had made included some that improved their resistance to harmful viruses and bacteria.

"That's true, to a limited extent," Morrow explained, "and I naturally choose the healthiest specimens I can find to work with initially. But you're only looking at the winners, so to speak, of our rigged genetic lottery. Most of the losers don't make it past birth, and the remains of the rest are disposed of under the established protocols so that everything remains safe."

Finally Thorpe came to a very large birdcage in a part of the room that had been partially screened by a freestanding shelf unit with food and equipment for the animals. In marked contrast to all the others, the animal inside, if it could even be categorized as such, seemed unrecognizable. Thorpe could discern the tail feathers and extendable wings of a raptor and the black-and-white head and sharp red beak of a seabird. But this creature moved on four legs, which seemed to be partially covered by ragged curly white fur or hair. The wings looked powerful, but the torso was too large and anything but aerodynamic; it was clear that the ungainly thing would never fly.

At the moment it looked as though it would even have trouble walking. It was lying on its side, and its diaphragm was moving so that one could tell that it was breathing, But it didn't take a specialist to see that it was in poor health -- Thorpe wondered what the chances were that it would see tomorrow. He looked at Morrow for an explanation.

"I've had good fortune, as you've seen, combining animals with animals -- even widely variant ones -- birds with birds, fish with fish. And moving a few extraneous genes into an intact fertilized egg, wherever they come from, won't interfere with a creature's lifestyle, if it can make it alive through the birth process.

"This one's different. I had combined two birds' egg tissue genetically, and then, totally unexpectedly, I received clone tissue from Dolly the Sheep herself -- or at least one of her "descendants", so to speak, a clone of a clone of a clone -- and tried to incorporate it here, since the bird egg was all I had to work with at that moment. To my great surprise, the result was viable.

"And the situation here is not as desperate as it looks. It's suffering from something like bird flu -- a strain that's not contagious to humans, I hasten to add. But it's a relatively mild case, probably because sheep are immune, and I don't expect the problem to last for more than another day or so."

Thorpe shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cite you after all."

Morrow looked at him sharply. "What for?"

Thorpe told him, "It's clear that you've made an ill eagle-ewe-tern."

(Not sure whether it's a mitigating factor or not, but I've had this punchline taking up space in my mind for around fifty years, since the days of Alexander the Grape -- the answer to the riddle "who's purple and conquered the world?" My thanks to Steph (Cyclist), who beta-read an earlier version of this five years ago.)