OK, OK, I know: it’s not nice to laugh at other people’s foibles, especially when you have your own foibles. But oh, it’s hard to resist.
The weather having cooled into the 80s at dawn, I settled into the backyard lawn chair with tea and the Times Sunday magazine, a cherished weekend ritual. My dog, having developed a limp, milked it for all it was worth while chasing after me to make sure I did not escape her eyesight. What should greet me but a cover story titled “Pet Pharm.” You think I overspend on my dogs? As nothing. Collectively, Americans are forking over millions of dollars on psychoactive drugs for their pets.
We make the animals nuts by forcing them into distinctly noncanine, nonfeline, nonavian living quarters and behaviors, and then we medicate them because they’re nuts.
Dog and Human Nuttiness
Here’s a guy whose German shepherd has developed a neurotic fixation on him: it has an “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.”
Sounds familiar. Little does Allan know that if he adopted Max out, Max would instantly develop a similar fixation on the next human, much as one Cassie the Corgi has done. Hm. Maybe Cassie needs a few doses of Eli Lilly’s chewable Prozac that tastes like beef. Max goes a little further than Cassie does, though: he throws a fit if Allan hugs his wife, and he chases his tail obsessively, hour after hour. To address these neuroses, Max is being put on a tricyclic antidepressant commonly used in human psychiatric care.
Some of the nonsense humans will put up with defies belief: “Doug noticed that his cat would attack if he smelled strange, so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his khaki pants lined with ballistic nylon.
Doug, Doug, Doug. Can you spell “put to sleep”?
Follow the Money Trail…
This amazing behavior—on the humans’ part, that is—redounds hugely to Big Pharma’s benefit. The rich get richer and the adoring pet owners get poorer. According to the Times, surveys by a pet products manufacturing group show that 77% of dog owners and 52% of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up about 25 percentage points from 2004—that’s a 25% jump in just two years! (My late Ger-shep may have accounted for most of that.) Eli Lilly has created a special “companion animal” division, and Pfizer’s Animal Health has seen its revenues grow 57% since 2003, to nearly a billion dollars. In 2005, according to marketing research firm Ipsos, in 2005 Americans spent at least $15 million on behavior modification drugs for their pets.
The trend thrives on a cast of mind dubbed “humanization,” whereby pet-lovers come to see their animals as little furry four-legged people. The cat becomes a member of the family for whom we would do no less than we would do for our children. The pet industry, of which Big Pharma owns a substantial portion, exploits this sentimentality to separate humans from cash.
Is this good for pets? Maybe. Some of them get to live a little longer than they might have, had their tendencies to rip up the furniture and bite passers-by gone unchecked. They may live on in a drug-induced stupor; they may live on in neurotic or even psychotic misery. I’m not sure that’s good for a dog or a cat.
Is it good for the humans? I doubt it. Forgive my lack of empathy, but I do not believe that calculated exploitation of your emotions is good for you. Au contraire.
My take
Cassie the Corgi does have a few bats in her doggy belfry, no question of that. She never lets the human out of her sight. She sticks to me like a burr in a hound dog’s coat. She will not eat unless I stay nearby. She will not go outside to do her doggy business unless I accompany her and stand there until she’s done.
This could be a problem, come rain and frost. Just now, it’s OK, but I’m not very interested in standing in the rain or freezing my toes on a 30-degree night while I wait for a dog to decide to pee.
Unlike many dogs with separation anxiety, she doesn’t chew or rip up the furniture. But she is afraid of loud noises—the sound of distant July 4th fireworks nearly put her into a frenzy, and a passing thunderstorm alarmed her significantly. The other night a violent monsoon firehosed the house; the sound of heavy rainfall made her nervous, too.
This is not normal dog behavior. Whether it’s inbred or the result of something her previous humans did is irrelevant: a healthy dog does not behave this way.
Am I going to give her doggy Prozac or canine clomipramine? Not a chance! If she can’t adjust to normal life, she can’t adjust. Since she’s not aggressive or destructive, she’ll just be a wacky little dog.
But I can tell you for certain: anyone who goes around in bullet-proof long johns to protect himself from his demented cat is crazier than the cat is! Anyone who puts a dog on psychoactive meds instead of putting it down after it delivered a serious bite to its owner over a cheese plate (as one couple interviewed for the Times piece did) has got more holes in his head than an entire wheel of Swiss cheese.
A dog that is dangerous is a dog that is dangerous. Same is true of cats: although cats are smaller, they can do some serious harm. Dogs and cats are carnivores. Predators. They are built to inflict terminal damage—videlicet, the French woman who had her face ripped off by her pet dog.
No amount of mind-altering drugs will change that basic truth.