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Pill-Popping Pets
July 13, 2008
Pill-Popping Pets
By JAMES VLAHOS
Correction Appended
Max retrieves Frisbees. He gobbles jelly beans. He chases deer. He
is — and this should be remembered when discussions of cases
like his blunder into the thickets of cognitive ethology, normative
psychology and intraspecies solipsism — a good dog. A 3-year-old
German shepherd, all rangy limbs and skittering paws, he patrols
the hardwood floors and wall-to-wall carpets of a cul-de-sac
home in Lafayette, Calif., living with Michelle Spring, a nurse,
and her husband, Allan, a retired airline pilot. Max fields tennis
balls with his dexterous forelegs and can stand on his hindquarters
to open the front door. He loves car rides and will leap inside any
available auto, even ones belonging to strangers. Housebroken,
he did slip up once indoors, but everybody knows that the
Turducken Incident simply wasn’t his fault. “He’s agile,” Allan
says. “He’s healthy. He’s a good-looking animal.” Michelle adds,
“We love him to death.” That is why they had no choice, she says.
The dog simply had to go on psychoactive drugs.
I arrived the night Max was to receive his first pill. He picked at
the food in his chow bowl while the Springs sat at the kitchen
table discussing his problems. For starters, there was his
overpowering need to be near people, especially Allan. If they
put Max outside, he quickly relieved himself and then rushed back
indoors; he raced into rooms that Allan was about to occupy; he
rested his head against the bathroom door during his master’s
ablutions. “Watch this,” Allan said. He and Michelle stood up to
hug. The moment they touched, Max unleashed a string of high-
pitched barks. “He likes being close to us, but he doesn’t like us
being close to each other,” Allan said.
These behaviors, however, weren’t what prompted the psychiatric
intervention. The Springs led me downstairs to the family room —
Max, supper unfinished, bounded ahead. Downstairs, Allan
pointed to Max, who was lying on the floor and staring at his
tail. He looked angry at it, disturbed by it. “You can see the
pressure building in his psyche until he’s ready to explode,”
Michelle said. And then he did: Max jumped to his feet and
lunged. His jaws snapped, catching only air, and he spun
counterclockwise in place, an accelerating blur of fur and teeth
and frustration. Tail-chasing is normal — except that Max did it
daily, often for hours on end. “He’s like a junkie needing a fix,”
Allan said. “At times he can’t not do it. He goes berserk.”
Allan went upstairs and returned moments later with a bit of
ground turkey and a pill. He hid the pill in the meat and extended
his hand to Max, who had stopped spinning. The medicine was
chemically identical to clomipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant
used in human psychiatric care, but it came in a green-and-
white Novartis box brightened by the picture of a happy yellow
lab. This wasn’t Anafranil, the brand name for the human version
of the drug; it was Clomicalm, just for dogs. Approved by the
Food and Drug Administration for treating separation anxiety, a
problem that can occur when dogs are left home alone, the
medication is also commonly prescribed off-label for patients
with Max’s diagnosis: compulsive disorder. He was the canine
version of a person who washes his hands 20 times an hour.
Max leaned forward and gulped the pill down.
The practice of prescribing medications designed for humans
to animals has grown substantially over the past decade and a
half, and pharmaceutical companies have recently begun
experimenting with a more direct strategy: marketing behavior-
modification and “lifestyle” drugs specifically for pets. America’s
animals, it seems, have very American health problems. More
than 20 percent of our dogs are overweight; Pfizer’s Slentrol
was approved by the F.D.A. last year as the country’s first
canine anti-obesity medication. Dogs live 13 years on average,
considerably longer than they did in the past; Pfizer’s Anipryl
treats cognitive dysfunction so that absent-minded pets can
remember the location of the supper bowl or doggy door. For
lonely dogs with separation anxiety, Eli Lilly brought to market
its own drug Reconcile last year. The only difference between
it and Prozac is that Reconcile is chewable and tastes like beef.
Doggy diet pills may be plainly absurd, but scientists in an
expanding field known as behavioral pharmacology say that
the combination of new drug therapies and progressive training
techniques can solve problems that in the past almost always
resulted in euthanasia. The supposed effectiveness of psychiatric
medicines in treating mood and behavior issues is prompting
new questions in the centuries-old debate over what, exactly,
separates mankind from the beasts. If the strict Cartesian view
were true — that animals are essentially flesh-and-blood
automatons, lacking anything resembling human emotion,
memory and consciousness — then why do animals develop
mental illnesses that eerily resemble human ones and that
respond to the same medications? What can behavioral
pharmacology teach us about animal minds and, ultimately,
our own?
ON SEPT. 5, 1379, A TRIO OF French pigs, agitated by the
squealing of a piglet, bowled over their keeper’s son, who died
shortly thereafter of the injuries. As E. P. Evans recounts in his
1906 monograph, “The Criminal Prosecution and Capital
Punishment of Animals,” “the three sows, after due process
of law, were condemned to death” along with several other
pigs who had “hastened to the scene of the murder and by
their cries and aggressive actions showed that they approved
of the assault.” (The accomplices were later pardoned.) Fast-
forward to December 2007 to witness a curious animal
proceeding of the modern era: Mitzi-Bitzi, a lap dog, modeling
a $118,000 diamond bracelet at the opening of Chateau
Poochie, a pet hotel and spa near Miami. “She’s just so
special,” her owner, Marilyn Belkin, told me later, as if that
explained things. The sows and Mitzi got opposite treatment,
but the beliefs of Belkin and the pig prosecutors weren’t so
different. In medieval times and in the present, we often act
as if animals had thoughts, feelings and desires that resemble
those of people. How else could you justify the porcine death
penalty; why splurge on a blueberry facial when a simple roll
on the lawn would do?
Marketers have a new name for the age-old tendency to view
animals as furry versions of ourselves: “humanization,” a trend
that is fueling the explosive growth of the pet industry and the
rise of modern pet pharma. Americans forked over $49 billion
for pet products and services last year, up $11.5 billion from
2003; other than consumer electronics, pet products are the
fastest-growing retail segment. The market expansion is being
driven both by more pets and by more spending per pet,
especially by affluent baby boomers whose children have
graduated from college. A third of the total spending, and the
fastest-growing category, is health care, with treatments formerly
reserved for people — root canals, chemotherapy, liposuction,
mood pills — being administered to pets. “I get asked all the
time, ‘What is it with this humanization — do we suddenly love
our pets a whole lot more?’ ” says David Lummis, who analyzes
the pet industry for the market research firm Packaged Facts.
“My theory is that it’s always been there, but it’s been sanctioned
now. It’s not just the crazy cat lady. It’s marketers and all of
this consumer advertising that have made it O.K. to spend tons
of money on your pet.”
Humanization has pharmaceutical companies salivating like
Pavlov’s dogs. Surveys by the American Pet Products
Manufacturers Association found that 77 percent of dog
owners and 52 percent of cat owners gave their animals some
sort of medication in 2006, both up at least 25 percentage
points from 2004. Sales of drugs for pets recently surpassed
those for farm animals. Eli Lilly created its “companion animal”
division at the beginning of 2007 and over the next three years
hopes to release several other drugs. Pfizer, whose companion
animal revenues have grown 57 percent since 2003 to nearly
$1 billion, hopes to develop medications for pain, cancer and
behavioral issues. Most consumer spending is still on traditional
pet medications like antiparasitics, but Ipsos, a marketing research
firm, estimates that at least $15 million was spent on behavior-
modification drugs in the United States in 2005. “As people are
seeing more complex and sophisticated drugs for themselves,
they want that same quality for their pets,” Dr. Melanie Berson,
a veterinarian at the F.D.A.’s Center for Veterinary Medicine,
has said. People’s willingness to employ behavior-modifying
medications stems in part from a growing desire for more
convenient, obedient household animals. “Our expectations are
really going up,” Lummis says. “Owners want their pets to be
more like little well-behaved children.”
Potent as a marketing trend, humanization has long been
scorned as scientific practice by researchers working in the
behaviorist tradition of B. F. Skinner. In “Inside the Animal Mind,”
George Page summarizes the reasons: “Since we cannot get
inside the animal’s mind . . . and since the animal cannot report
what’s going on — not in a ‘language’ we can readily understand —
all we have left are guesses and speculation fatally tainted by
anthropomorphism.” Strict behaviorists focus instead on observable
stimulus-response conditioning: for example, a puppy learning to
sit to receive a treat. Actions that cannot be explained this way
are usually attributed to blind instinct. As such, hard-core
Skinnerian philosophy amounts to a perversion of cogito ergo
sum: I can’t prove that animals think, therefore they don’t. In
dealing with problem pets, veterinarians with a behaviorist bent
don’t concern themselves so much with what might be happening
inside the brain of the animal or try to correct neurochemical
imbalances with drugs. Instead, a compulsive or anxious animal
is seen as one that just needs to be better-trained.
The debate about animal minds is at least as old as Aristotle,
who posited that men alone possess reason. The 17th-century
French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche wrote that animals
“desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing,” while Voltaire
asked, “Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the
springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not
feel?” Darwin’s view was, Of course not. In “The Descent of
Man” he wrote, “We have seen that the senses and intuitions,
the various emotions and faculties . . . of which man boasts,
may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-
developed condition, in the lower animals.” The staggering
assertion of Darwin’s theory is that evolutionary continuity
applies not just to bodies but to brains. “The difference in
mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is,
certainly is one of degree and not of kind,” he wrote.
For much of the 20th century scientists willfully dismissed
this line of thinking, which has been rekindled only in the past
three decades with the rise of a field known as cognitive
ethology. The guiding belief is that while it is scientifically
baseless to assume that animals think and feel just as we do,
it is equally foolhardy to assume that they don’t think and
feel at all. In laboratory experiments and field observations,
practitioners have presented evidence of analogical reasoning
by apes, counting by rats and the capacity of pigeons to
distinguish the paintings of Picasso from those of Monet.
Researchers have demonstrated that animals can grasp basic
abstractions like “same” and “different” and use mental
flexibility to solve novel problems in the laboratory for
which hard-wired instinct couldn’t have prepared them. It is
impressive but perhaps unsurprising that a parrot was taught
to categorize colors or that dolphins learned the syntactic
distinction between “take the surfboard to the Frisbee” and
“take the Frisbee to the surfboard” — we already tend to
think of these animals as being smart. More eye-opening
are glimmers of cognition from way down the phylogenetic
chain. Research has shown that bumblebees can remember
which flowers they have already visited and that two-inch-
long cockroaches from Madagascar can tell the difference
between a familiar person and a stranger. (If the bug hisses
loudly at you, it’s time to introduce yourself.)
Cognitive ethologists have had more difficulty gathering
evidence for animal emotion. To any pet owner who has
stroked a purring cat or watched a dog cavort when his
chow hits the bowl, it seems intuitively obvious that
animals experience feelings. But intuition isn’t hard science —
it’s just more humanization. Enter behavioral pharmacology,
which has provided a tantalizing new window into the animal
mind. Dr. Nicholas Dodman, who pioneered the field and
founded the Tufts University Animal Behavior Clinic, says
that skeptics of the premise that animals have emotional
states used to ask him how he could say that a pacing,
hyperventilating dog was actually feeling anxious. “Well,
how about this?” Dodman would reply. “We’ll give him an
antianxiety drug and see what happens.”
THE GROUNDS OF THE CUMMINGS School of Veterinary
Medicine at Tufts sprawl over 640 acres of rolling greenery
in central Massachusetts. When I arrived to visit in March,
one of the first things Dodman told me was that the campus
used to be the site of a state mental hospital. Like other
facilities, it had been shuttered in the 1960s following the
revolutionary discovery of drugs that treated schizophrenia
and other disorders so effectively that many patients no
longer required institutionalization. “Ironically, this paved the
way for our school, our behavior program, and novel
pharmacological treatments for animal behavior problems,”
Dodman said. Or, as he later said, “we traded one group
of inmates for another.”
Dodman, an Englishman, began his career in the early 1970s
as a roving country vet in the tradition of James Herriot; he
went on to write a popular series of advice books for pet owners,
the latest of which is “The Well-Adjusted Dog.” In 1981 he
moved to the United States to become a professor of anesthesia
at Cummings. Drugs interested him greatly but comatose patients,
increasingly, did not, and he began to wonder: Could medications
transform veterinary behavioral medicine just as radically as they
had human psychiatric care? He says he quickly realized that
the field was “completely wide open, like virgin snow.” At a
veterinary conference in the late 1980s, he presented his
vision of the psychoactive frontier and “saw jaws drop around
the room. It was like, ‘Who is this strange masked man?’ ”
Three decades later, “it’s almost mainstream for behaviorists
to know something about pharmacology,” Dodman says.
Inside his small office, Dodman, wearing a tie-and-tasseled-
loafer ensemble topped by a white lab coat, received the day’s
first patient. A muzzled dog on a short lead towed Joe and
Mahala Richards, from Mendon, Mass., into the room. “So here
we have Zoey, who’s a yellow black-mouthed cur, 5 years old,
and you got her at 7 months,” Dodman said. “I’m already
picking up that she’s fearful and anxious, and that usually
stems from a disturbed childhood.”
“We know she was abused,” Mahala said.
“There you go,” Dodman replied.
Joe said Zoey’s problem was that she sometimes attacked when
food was around. The worst incident had happened a week ago
when Mahala was watching television and reached for a piece
of cheese. “She just came after me,” Mahala said. Joe added,
“Zoey had her on the couch — she’s screaming at the top of
her lungs— and Zoey just kept going at her hands.” Mahala
held up a scarred wrist. “My God, that’s nasty,” Dodman said.
He listened for 20 minutes and then issued a diagnosis:
something called “conflict aggression,” which meant that
occasionally Zoey forgot that she didn’t need to fight to get
her share of food. Zoey was to be kept from hot dogs, peanut-
butter bones and any other culinary provocations. High places
like beds were forbidden (elevated positions can make dogs
feel more confident), and exercise was essential. Outlining
what he called the “nothing in life is free” program, Dodman
said that Zoey should be made to sit before feeding and that
affection was to be rationed. The overall goal was to get Zoey
to respect the leadership of her owners, which would raise her
inhibition to attack. These behavior modifications alone might
be enough to cure Zoey, Dodman concluded.
“We don’t want to have to put her down,” Mahala replied quietly.
“No,” Dodman said. “A serious bite is a risk factor for euthanasia
for the dog, which is why another component of the program
might be some medicine. If we were to ask Zoey: ‘Look, if you
slip up in the future, and you bite someone like that again, the
chances are you’re not going to come out of it alive. But we
can make you feel better if we give you some medicine like,
for example, Prozac. Would you like to have the medicine that
might save your life?’ And she might go, ‘Grrr-rrr rrrup —
yeah, yeah, I’ll take the medicine.’ It’s a lifesaving thing.” Joe
and Mahala left a half-hour later with a scrip in hand.
Aggression is the leading issue that brings animals into clinics;
it and other behavior problems are the top reasons that pets
are surrendered to shelters. Half of them are euthanized, roughly
three to four million animals per year, and an equal number are
believed to be put down in private practices. Treatment with
psychoactive medications is then a very real alternative to
lethal injection. Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
(S.S.R.I.), prolongs the effects of that neurotransmitter to reduce
impulsivity, stabilize moods and lower anxiety, Dodman says.
He is friends with the noted Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey,
and they once compared the drugs they employ to treat violent
people and animals. “You superimpose my portfolio on top of
his, and it’s the same thing,” Dodman says. He has patented
his S.S.R.I. approach and is working with a pharmaceutical
company, Accura Animal Health, that plans to bring it to market
as the first F.D.A.-approved treatment for canine aggression.
(The current use of Prozac and similar drugs is prescribed off-label.)
Aggression is a feline problem too. A few weeks after visiting
Dodman, I went to the home of a man in West Los Angeles whose
pet was on Prozac. The owner, Doug, asked me not to use his last
name because he didn’t want business associates to know about
what he called his “cougar psycho little miniature stalker” —
Booboo the cat.
The first incident took place four years ago after Booboo ate
some decorative dried flowers. Booboo scaled his cat tree and
sat there with his eyes “a little dilated and cross-eyed,” Doug
said. He started “growling like a banshee,” released “a high,
shrill wail” and lunged. “He ripped my leg up and wouldn’t let
go.” Doug fled, and Booboo pursued. Finally he was able to
trap the cat in a bedroom. From then on Booboo was different.
He would periodically ambush Doug. Over time, Doug noticed
that attacks were more likely if he smelled at all abnormal —
for instance, if he had been near a woman wearing perfume —
so he would take a shower after coming home and then change
into his designated cat-wrangling outfit.
Doug consulted a behaviorist, Dr. Karen Sueda. One hypothesis
was that Booboo suffered from a feline version of schizophrenia —
there is evidence that animals experience auditory and visual
hallucinations and can temporarily enter deluded states in which
they attack. Sueda didn’t think that was likely with Booboo, nor
did she think his attacks were motivated by fear, as is often the
case with animal aggression. In Booboo she says she saw a
dominant, confident cat who “wanted to control his personal
territory.” One theory about such animals is that they suffer
from a neurochemical imbalance. As Dodman explained in his
book “The Cat Who Cried for Help,” “By engaging in and winning
aggressive encounters, dominant animals drive up serotonin
levels and gain in composure.” Sueda prescribed Prozac to boost
the effects of the neurotransmitter.
Doug led me up the stairs in his house to the second floor. He
donned a pair of khakis that he had lined with heavy-gauge
ballistic nylon and washed up because he had shaken hands
with me. He crept toward the master bedroom, where Booboo
was permanently quarantined behind a door that had been
remounted to swing outward to facilitate quick escapes by Doug.
“Just behind this door lurks the Tasmanian devil,” Doug said
before slipping inside. I squatted at ground level and watched
through a transparent doggy door. The 400-square-foot room
had a walk-in closet, a four-poster bed and a floor-to-ceiling
view of Beverly Hills mansions dotting a scenic canyon. The
suite belonged entirely to Booboo, though Doug said he was
now able to sleep over a few nights a week. Booboo slinked
past the window and gave me a steady gaze. He had a tuxedo
coat, mostly black but with patches of white on his feet,
underbelly and forehead. Doug scooped him up and they
nuzzled face to face. “He’s just warm, soft and fuzzy, and he
purrs, and he’s cuddly,” he murmured.
Separation anxiety, bane of modern home-alone dogs and target
of Lilly’s new Reconcile, is a problem millennia in the making.
Archaeologists and geneticists estimate that the domestication
of wolves (Canis lupus) into dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) began
at least 15,000 years ago. One hypothesis about how this
happened is that as humans settled down and established
villages, piles of discarded food scraps and plant matter
accumulated on the outskirts. Wolves that were genetically
predisposed to be slightly less fearful of humans would feed
off the free bounty, while the more skittish animals would steer
clear. “At this point, natural selection would take over,” Jake
Page explains in “Dogs: A Natural History.” “As the dump-loving
wolves reproduced with each other, their tameness would
probably become more and more pronounced.” The gentler
animals were increasingly favored and brought into our lives to
the point that many dogs (42 percent, according to a survey by
the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association) now sleep
in the same beds as their owners. Extreme attachment to people
is one of the defining traits of dogs.
Extreme attachment, unfortunately, also causes some dogs
extreme suffering when deprived of their owners’ company. Martha
and Phil Bridges live in Sacramento with a 2-year-old lab mix
named Rocco. The Bridges told me that when they left home and
went to work each day from 8 a.m to 5 p.m., they would lock Rocco
in a large cage in the dining room to keep the young dog from
running amok. One day last fall they returned to find the dog
loose with his nose bloodied from prying the cage door open.
They locked him in it again. The next evening Rocco was still
inside but had shredded his pillow bed and reared up so violently
that the cage was destroyed. Next the Bridges used a baby gate
to block off part of the house so that Rocco would have more room
to roam. He stripped five feet of carpeting from the floor. They
locked him in the bathroom. Shower curtain shredded, shampoo
swallowed, door frame torn. Realizing they needed help, the Bridges
took Rocco to see Dr. Rachel Malamed, a resident at the Behavior
Service at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of
California, Davis. She diagnosed separation anxiety, outlined a
retraining program and wrote a scrip. The happy outcome: Rocco
“has never had another problem since we put him on Reconcile,”
Martha says.
An estimated 14 percent or more of American dogs have separation
anxiety. The problem signs include home and self-destruction;
prolonged whining, barking or drooling; or simply standing by
the front door all day in a lonely, panting vigil. (“Nannycam”-type
video recorders have captured all of the above.) The terms for
Reconcile’s F.D.A. approval were that the drug had to be prescribed
with a course of behavior modification. In Rocco’s case, Malamed
taught the Bridges to stage mock departures — jingling the car
keys, opening the front door — while giving treats so that Rocco
would associate their leaving with a yummy reward. When the
Bridges left the house for real, they were to slip out with zero
fuss; frantic barking and jumping were to be ignored. “We brought
on this anxiety with him being so attached to us,” Martha says.
“Now we have to break that bond — without breaking it to the
point where he won’t know that we still love him.”
When it comes to retraining, however, some people are slackers.
Dodman estimates that 25 percent of the pet owners he sees
don’t take his advice. At U.C. Davis I observed one couple
impatiently shrugging off Malamed’s directives. I was watching
the appointment via closed-circuit television with another vet,
Dr. Jeannine Berger, and she sighed in exasperation. “They just
want the magic pill,” she said. “People always want the magic
pill.” The studies of Reconcile show why behavioral pharmacologists
prefer not to rely on the medicine bottle — or for that matter,
retraining — alone. Dr. Steve Connell, a veterinarian at Eli Lilly,
told me that “behavior modification by itself works. There’s not
any question about that. But if you use behavior modification
in conjunction with Reconcile, it works quicker and it works better.”
How do researchers know that? The patients, after all, can’t
describe the subtleties of their moods to therapists. Efficacy
studies instead rely upon people to record signs of animal
distress, like barks per hour and household objects destroyed.
The study Lilly submitted to the F.D.A. in support of Reconcile
involved 242 dogs scattered around the United States and Canada;
in the double-blind trial, neither the veterinarians nor the owners
involved knew which dogs were receiving Reconcile and which
ones got a placebo. All dogs received behavior retraining. The
results were strong enough to demonstrate efficacy but hardly
earthshaking: 72 percent of the dogs on Reconcile showed
improvement after eight weeks of treatment, while 50 percent
of those receiving the placebo did. The study also found that
more than half of the dogs on the drug experienced short-term
side effects, including lethargy, depression and loss of appetite.
One thought had haunted me as I listened to the Bridges’ story:
If I were locked inside the bathroom all day, I’d swallow the
shampoo, too. Although most animal-behavior problems are
believed to have genetic roots, their expressions are typically
triggered by the unnatural lives that people force their pets to
lead. “A dog that lived on a farm and ran around chasing rabbits
all day would be more prone to being stable than a dog living in
an apartment in Manhattan,” Dodman says. Undomesticated
canids, neither confined nor excessively attached to people,
don’t suffer from separation anxiety. Some captive horses
endlessly circle their stalls or corrals — a compulsive behavior
similar to Max’s tail chasing — but such purposeless repetitions
have never been observed in the wild.
Pharmacological treatments, furthermore, are sometimes more
for the convenience of owners than they are for the health of
pets. When the dog bites, when the cat pees — “a lot of the
‘behavior problems’ we see are actually normal behaviors for
the animal,” Dodman says. Cats aren’t mentally ill if they attack
a new feline in the household or claw furniture to mark their
domain. Food guarding and aggression toward strangers boost
a dog’s survival rate in the wild but don’t cut it in the living
room. And both cats and dogs demarcate territory with urine.
“If a dog goes to the bathroom on a bush outside, you don’t
mind as long as it’s not your bush,” Dodman says. “But when he
comes back to the house and lifts his leg on your chair, it’s like,
‘Is the dog mentally sick?’ ”
In many other situations, however, a medicated animal may be
a better-off one — for his own sake and not just for his master’s
peace of mind. Obsessive dogs like Max sometimes injure
themselves by spinning right into furniture or chewing their legs
or tails until they’re bloody. You could also argue that Max
would be happier not spinning and chasing squirrels instead —
an anthropomorphic judgment, perhaps, but one that is hard to
dispute after seeing the panting, possessed animal on the whirl.
Medicating dogs like Rocco, meanwhile, makes some people
queasy because separation anxiety is so clearly related to the
absentee lifestyles of owners. Dr. Jean Donaldson, director of
the San Francisco S.P.C.A. Academy for Dog Trainers, told me
that she has always insisted that people who don’t have enough
free time shouldn’t own dogs. But she recognizes that many ill-
equipped people will do so anyway and supports employing drugs.
In her view, our complicity in the problem’s creation doesn’t
absolve us of responsibility for finding solutions, even ones with
mild side effects.` “Can you imagine having separation anxiety?”
she asked. “We’re talking ‘Silence of the Lambs’ here, being in
the pit so that you rip off your own fingernails and break your
teeth because of the degree of panic attacks you’re having. Do
we really think that the problem here is a dry mouth from Reconcile?”
NOT EVERYBODY AGREES that America’s pets are facing a major
mental-health crisis — or that whatever their problems, that drugs
are necessarily part of the solution. One of the most passionate
voices in the just-say-no camp belongs to Dr. Ian Dunbar, a
veterinarian who has his doctorate in animal behavior and is
the founder of a highly regarded instructional empire called Sirius
Dog Training. “I have never in my life had to resort to using drugs
to resolve a behavior problem,” he says. The rush to the medicine
bottle for easily resolved problems like canine obesity — “Just
feed the dog less!” — shows a disturbing parallel to the human
approach to health care, he says. “We lead an unhealthy lifestyle
and then rely on drugs to correct it.”
Dunbar lives down a winding lane high in the Berkeley Hills. When
I arrived to visit, he led me into the living room, where we were
joined by his three bounding dogs, Claude, Hugo and Dune.
Claude had been a troubled S.P.C.A. shelter dog. He bit, was
often anxious and had a problem known as pica, meaning he
compulsively devoured nonfood items. When Dunbar rescued
him a few years ago, Claude was recovering from an operation
to remove a basketball from his intestines. “He would have been
the ideal candidate for a drug treatment, but to me that was
unnecessary if you know some of the simplest things about
dog training,” Dunbar said.
Pharmacological aids are helpful in extreme circumstances,
Dunbar acknowledged, but for the vast majority of cases,
behavior modification alone does the trick. For problem dogs
like Claude, he employs the simple, unswerving strategy of
a trainer: Ignore unwanted behaviors and reward desired ones.
The magic pill in Dunbar’s arsenal is a rubber chew toy stuffed
with food. As I took a seat on the couch, he tossed three of them
on the floor. The dogs ignored me completely — there was none
of the usual canine pouncing on the visitor — and set to work.
Absorbed, they gnawed and shook the toys, which slowly
released kibble. It would take 45 minutes before the supply
was exhausted. Claude, his attention refocused with the help of
chew toys, no longer bit people or gobbled indigestibles. He was
calm and the best-behaved of the household’s three canines.
“The dog is creating endorphins of his own, his own natural
drug therapy, while enjoying a totally acceptable activity,” Dunbar
said.
To critics like Dunbar, separation anxiety is the attention-deficit
disorder of the pet world, a problem that is overzealously
pathologized, carelessly diagnosed and liberally medicated. His
critique is unabashedly Skinnerian: “We’re confusing behavior
problems, which are observable and quantifiable, with terms
like ‘anxiety,’ which describe the dog’s internal mental state,
for which we have absolutely zero proof,” he says. On a personal
level, Dunbar suspects that animals do have thoughts and
feelings and can become genuinely anxious when their owners
are gone. But he is careful to not let assumptions cloud his
professional judgment, because not every situation that looks
like separation anxiety is in fact that condition. Lilly’s Web site
for Reconcile states that “separation anxiety is a clinical
condition in your dog’s brain.” Dunbar offers possible alternate
explanations: Some dogs that are physically punished have
inadvertently learned that they can get away with whatever
they want when the humans are gone. Others are just bored
and having fun. “What do we expect dogs to do when we go
to work — watch the telly, do the crosswords or read the paper?”
he asks. Hiding stuffed chew toys around the house is a good
way to keep dogs occupied. “In the wild, the dog’s major activity
is looking for food,” he says. “What most owners do is they feed
the dog in the bowl, and within two minutes you’ve stolen his
raison d’être. So now the dog is looking for activity, which we
label ‘trouble’ and diagnose as all sorts of things like
compulsion and separation anxiety.”
Dunbar is working with a pet-products manufacturer on an
electronic dog-sitter that combines the reward elements of a
classic Skinner box with the unblinking surveillance of Bentham’s
Panopticon. Employing a network of sensors, the device monitors
when the dog barks, how many steps it takes during the day,
how long it lies down in its bed and when it plays with chew toys.
Acting as a sort of robo-Dunbar, the gizmo automatically dispenses
small treats when the animal is calm and well behaved. “Rather
than the very general deadening of an anxiolytic or tranquilizing
drug, what I want is a very specific education effect to teach the
dog how he should act,” Dunbar says.
Modern owners are increasingly trying to “sterilize” pet ownership,
he adds, trying to pharmacologically control dogs so that they
don’t act like dogs. “What people want is a pet that is on par
with a TiVo, that its activity, play and affection are on demand,”
he says “Then, when they’re done, they want to turn it off.”
Back in the living room, we watched Claude and his housemates
work at the chew toys. “Training is basically about forming a
relationship, but for some people, that interactive process is
now giving the dog a pill.”
TWO YEARS AGO, on the Fourth of July, a dog named Dixie was
sitting in the backyard of her owners, Pat and Jen Morphy of
Martinez, Calif. Around dusk, the sky above her exploded with
the flashes and percussive booms of fireworks. Perhaps kids
detonated firecrackers on the street nearby as well. Whatever
happened, Dixie hasn’t been the same since.
Earlier this year the Morphys brought Dixie to see Rachel Malamed
at the U.C. Davis Behavior Service. The Morphys reported that they
take Dixie for a walk every day after work and then put her in the
backyard. As soon as the sun sets, Dixie bolts for the house and
cannot be dragged from it for the rest of the evening. She paces,
stares and scans the air overhead. “You can just tell she’s waiting
for something to happen,” Pat said. Dixie is eager for bedtime and
scootches under the couple’s bed to sleep. But in the middle of
the night, Dixie often jumps up on the bed and walks on Jen’s
head. When she turns the lights on, the dog looks terrible,
shivering and blank-eyed. It takes anywhere from 15 minutes to
four hours to calm her enough to go back to sleep. “I can’t live
with this dog any more how she is,” Jen said.
Malamed put a sound-effects CD into a boom box and set the
volume to low. Dixie sat serenely through a trumpet fanfare, a
toilet flush, a metal saw, ringing bells and raspy hinges. But at
the sound of fireworks, during the long whistle and well before
the climactic pop, Dixie tensed up; she tried to climb into Jen’s
lap and began trembling. Malamed hit stop. “I’m sorry I had to
do that,” she said. Noise phobias, especially those related to
thunderstorms, are fairly common in dogs, and Malamed
determined that Dixie had a phobia to fireworks.
So how did Dixie’s curious phobia develop? A Skinnerian would
explain her problems within the bounds of stimulus-response
conditioning, unthinking and automatic. On that first Fourth of
July, Dixie correctly learned that fireworks are painfully loud
but mistakenly linked the traumatic event with nightfall. Now
every dark sky scares her. Her odd after-hours activity was very
likely strengthened by more conditioned learning: every time she
jumps on the bed in the middle of the night, Pat or Jen give her
attention. Believing that they are soothing Dixie, they are
actually rewarding and enforcing her troubled behavior.
But is her problem more complex than that? Most scientists now
accept that animals experience basic emotions like pleasure,
excitement and fear. These primal feelings provide useful
motivation: to mate, kill prey or avoid danger. But whether
emotional states like anxiety, obsession and depression exist is
more controversial. The difference between fear and anxiety,
after all, is the difference between a gazelle spooking at the sight
of a lion and a gazelle worrying that a lion might appear. If you
believe that the latter is possible, consider that Dixie might have
some memory, however dim, of the original fireworks and that
when she sees the sun setting, she becomes tense at the thought
that they might percuss her eardrums again. In other words, her
cognition goes beyond in-the-moment processing of sensory
information; to paraphrase Eric Saidel, a professor of philosophy
at George Washington University, she is not responding to the
world but instead to the way she pictures the world. She thinks
and, critically, is aware of her own thoughts.
By most any definition, this amounts to consciousness, the trait
that people have traditionally been most loath to credit to animals.
Many thinkers are hesitant to make definitive statements about
any aspect of an animal’s internal life, much less to conclude that
they are self-aware. In an influential essay published in 1974,
the philosopher Thomas Nagel posed the question “What is it
like to be a bat?” What is it like, really, to wheel blindly through
the night sky hunting insects and navigating by echolocation?
The sum of a being’s unique sensory and cognitive worlds
constitute its Umwelt, and Nagel concluded that it was
impossible to know any Umwelt but that of our own species.
The words we use to describe animal mental states are hazy
approximations at best. Hank Davis, an evolutionary psychologist
at the University of Guelph in Canada who has studied cognition
in rats, rabbits and the aforementioned hissing cockroaches, told
me that “I am as big an animal lover as anybody I’ve ever met. I
can go on and on about how sweet and smart and emotional my
pet rat is. But we have to be careful about saying that when my
rat appears anxious or obsessive that she is experiencing the
identical set of neurological conditions that a human would.”
Prescribing drugs under those circumstances, he says, is
“questionable ‘Twilight Zone’-type medicine.”
The skeptics are correct that there’s no smoking gun proving
that human feelings and Dixie’s are similar, but on the flip side,
there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence. The limbic
system, critical for human emotional responses, is structurally
similar in all mammals. “People have a physiological response
to the thing they fear,” says Steven Hamilton, a psychiatric
geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. “They
get tremulous. Their heart rate goes up. They perspire. Their
respiration will go up. Dogs do the exact same thing.” The clinical
presentation of the problem is similar, too. Confronted by what
they fear, phobic people and dogs try to get as far away as they
can from the dreaded stimulus, be it spiders or fireworks. In both
populations, susceptibility appears to be heritable. And finally,
“humans respond to particular anxiolytic and antidepressant
medications, and we find similar responses in dogs to the same
drugs,” Hamilton says.
Dodman made the same points to me and concluded, somewhat
exasperatedly, “If it looks, waddles and quacks like a duck, then
maybe it is a duck.” He bristled at the charge that behavioral
pharmacologists practice “Twilight Zone” medicine. The primary
source of outrage for most critics is the thought of veterinary
kooks dosing helpless animals with human drugs. But that
misstates the matter. Long before Prozac, Paxil and the like
were taken by people, they were tested for safety and efficacy
in legions of laboratory creatures. You can plausibly argue —
and Dodman and others do — that humans are in fact using
animal drugs.
At the U.C. Davis clinic, Malamed told the Morphys that “we
need to change Dixie’s emotional response to the noise.” She
prescribed Clomicalm, to ease Dixie’s anxiety and make her
more receptive to training, and Xanax, which in the short term
would dull her panic attacks and help her sleep. She
recommended that they play the recorded sound of fireworks
very quietly while rewarding the animal for being calm. A few
weeks later, Jen reported that Dixie was sleeping through the
night.
THREE WEEKS AFTER MAX started Clomicalm, Allan and I took
him for a walk along a creek. He sniffed the grass on the banks;
he barked at a passing dog. We got back to the house, and as
we took turns tossing the Frisbee to Max on a lawn out front,
I asked how things were going with the tail chasing. “He still
does it,” Allan said. “But it’s not as bad as it was.” According to
the vet, the drug needed another couple of weeks before it
would be fully effective on Max’s neurochemistry, so Allan
was withholding judgment until then. A couple of months later,
Allan told me that he thought Max was only spinning half as
much as he had.
Dodman says that the serotonin-affecting drugs like Clomicalm
have the effect of “oil on troubled waters” — they may calm the
animal but don’t attack the underlying problem. To learn more
about why dogs chase their tails, and in hopes of developing
more precise drug treatments, Dodman and other researchers
at other universities are hunting for the genetic underpinnings
of the disorder.
Dogs are a geneticist’s dream. Lab rats can be artificially induced
to suffer certain problems — for example, electrically shocked to
create a fearful state — whereas dogs are natural models, exhibiting
anxiety, phobias and compulsions on their own. The canine genome,
whose sequencing was recently completed, is considerably easier
to analyze than the human one. The canine gene pool has been
highly restricted and segregated during the creation of distinct
dog breeds, much of which happened within the past 200 years.
Members within a breed are highly similar genetically, making
mutations that might cause behavior problems easier to spot.
Purebred dogs are also excellent for testing theories about
heritability. “There are fantastic genealogical resources that can
connect dogs within a century for dozens of generations,” Hamilton says.
In certain breeds, almost all of the dogs alive today are descendants
of a handful of popular sires that exemplified traits that breeders
liked — for instance, a snowy white coat or exceptional herding
ability. In selecting for these desired traits, however, the breeders
sometimes inadvertently selected for the sires’ undesirable genetic
mutations. This appears to be the case with canine compulsive
disorder. A half-dozen or so breeds are predisposed to get it
and in fact are susceptible to particular forms of the disorder —
for example, German shepherds tend to tail-chase, while Doberman
pinschers suck their flanks. Dodman and his colleagues are running
genetic analyses of 146 Dobermans, more than half of them afflicted
and the others not. His hunch is that a genetic glitch that leads to
overactive glutamate receptors may increase susceptibility for
developing compulsive behaviors. The same may be true for
people. If this is correct, then it would ratify an approach that
Dodman and a colleague have patented for treating both animal
and human compulsive disorders with drugs that inhibit the
glutamate receptors. Similar hunts are under way for the genetic
underpinnings of what looks like psychotic rage in cocker spaniels
and phobias in Australian shepherds, and those searches, too,
may yield drug treatments for the canine and human versions of
those problems.
Though certain dogs are probably genetically predisposed,
environmental factors are clearly involved as well. “All of the
animals I see that have O.C.D. are anxious individuals who’ve
been in a rock-and-a-hard-place conflict situation in their lives
which precipitates their condition,” Dodman says. Stressful
situations in which an animal is repeatedly prevented from doing
what it wants to do lead to anxiety, and anxiety can be relieved
by indulging in a repeated behavior that long outlasts the
original situation. That, it turned out, was exactly the case with
Max. Though he lived a perfect dog’s life in California — plenty
of love, company and exercise — Allan said that for most of
the first year of his life, when he belonged to another owner, he
was confined inside and all alone.
At end of the day that I visited Dodman, we sat watching video
clips of dogs repetitively pacing, chasing shadows and snapping
at nonexistent flies. Dodman, leaning back in his chair, launched
into a story about a human obsessive-compulsive-disorder
sufferer he had met — a man who repeatedly tugged at his
beard. Dodman asked him if he had ever stopped, and the man
said he did during a hitchhiking trip across Canada. Dodman
thought he knew why: “He went back to being a human being.
He was watching out for real dangers. He was trying to go to
real places. He was concerned about his next meal. He was
thinking about where he was going to sleep. And he wasn’t
concerned about the stupid beard pulling, because now he
had a real life. When did the problem start again? The minute
he sat back in front of a flickering computer screen.”
Dodman’s theory, essentially, is that the causes of mood disorders
and obsessions in humans and our pets aren’t so different — faulty
genetics, dreary environments. Whether cubicle- or cage-bound,
we get too little exercise; we don’t hunt, run or play enough to
produce naturally mood-elevating neurochemicals. Strangely
enough, I had already heard this theory — from a pharmaceutical
company executive who, for obvious business reasons, didn’t
want to be named. “All of the behavioral issues that we have
created in ourselves, we are now creating in our pets because
they live in the same unhealthy environments that we do,” he
said. “That’s why there is a market for these drugs.”
James Vlahos writes for National Geographic Adventure, Popular
Science and Popular Mechanics. This is his first article for the magazine.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 12, 2008
The cover article this weekend about the expanding market for
mood-altering drugs for cats and dogs misstates the revenues
Pfizer Animal Health has earned from animal medications. The
total for this division, which includes livestock, is $2.6 billion,
not “nearly $1 billion.” Its “companion animals,” or pet division,
contributed nearly $1 billion to this total.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Posted on SHARE Yahoo group - July 12, 2008