Life is no way to treat an animal.
Kurt Vonnegut
When the reality-TV star Anna Nicole Smith overdosed, in 2007, on a mix of prescription drugs that included Prozac, her dog Sugarpie was taking Prozac too. So was the former French president Jacques Chirac’s normally friendly Maltese and Bichon Frise mix, Sumo. The small, white dog accompanied him everywhere when he was in office and was often spotted on Chirac’s lap as they were chauffeured through Paris in the back of a shiny presidential Citroën. But after Chirac lost the presidency to Nicolas Sarkozy and the family was forced to leave the palace, Sumo lost his appetite. He was also lethargic and not acting like himself. Chirac’s wife, Bernadette, believed that Sumo, used to the large gardens of the Élysée, couldn’t adjust to their postpresidential life in a spacious apartment and seemed anxious and depressed. Their vet put the dog on Prozac, but he twice bit the ex-president, hard enough to send Chirac to the doctor. Finally, Sumo was sent away to live on a farm in the countryside with family friends; they say he hasn’t bitten anyone since.
Sugarpie and Sumo are not anomalies. Prozac Nation has been offering citizenship to nonhumans for decades. Fluoxetine, or generic Prozac, is available in a dizzying array of forms and flavors that call to mind a snow-cone stand at a carnival for animals. Pet owners and veterinarians can choose fluoxetine flavored like anchovy, apple and molasses, banana and marshmallow, beef, bubble gum, butterscotch, cherry-vanilla, chicken, chocolate mint, double beef, double chicken, double fish, double grape, double liver, double marshmallow, double molasses, orange, peanut butter, peppermint, piña colada, raspberry, strawberry, tutti frutti, watermelon, wintergreen, and—as if double fish isn’t enough—triple fish. It’s deliverable in equally bizarre forms, from chewable pills marketed as Gourmeds to injections, drops, and transdermal gels for animals who can’t or won’t swallow pills.
What is surprising about all of this is not that we are giving animals psychoactive compounds, it’s that we are doing it to help them cope with us, closing a loop of pharmaceutical development that began in nonhuman animals in the 1950s, transitioned to millions of people around the world, and has now returned to certain animal species. The dosing of other creatures with psychopharmaceuticals also serves as a sort of tacit acknowledgment of emotional (and neurochemical) parallels between humans and other animals. You could argue, and people like the behaviorist Nick Dodman have, that this is not the story of animals taking human drugs but of humans taking animal drugs. Almost all of the contemporary psychopharmaceuticals—from antipsychotics like Thorazine to minor tranquilizers like Valium to the antidepressants—were developed in the mid-twentieth century, and animals were test subjects from the very beginning.
Most small-animal doctoring was, until the turn of the twentieth century, performed by the owners of pet shops. People tended to give their pets over-the-counter medications and the same invalid folk remedies (rice gruels, beef stews) that they used to treat themselves. Milk of magnesia and castor oil, for example, were used for both canine and human constipation. Cough syrup and chamomile steam baths were used to treat respiratory infections in people and other creatures. By 1910 dog-specific medicines for mange or worms could be bought at feed stores and neighborhood drug stores. Cats simply received smaller amounts of the same compounds. Some pet owners concocted medicines at home with the help of recipe books that included things like asthma treatments for canaries.
It was not until the 1950s, when a new, transformative class of drugs became available, that nonhuman animals were ushered into the psychopharmaceutical age along with, and in some cases before, humans. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s experimental animals played integral roles in the making of the new psychopharmaceuticals. Monkeys, rats, mice, and cats were important human proxies in the search for nonsedative solutions to anxiety, psychosis, and other problems of the mind. The animals’ emotional and behavorial responses to the new drugs also helped to define the disorders themselves.
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In May 1950 Henry Hoyt and Frank Berger, researchers at a small pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, submitted a patent application for a substance called meprobamate. They were impressed with the way the drug relaxed muscles in mice and calmed their notoriously testy lab monkeys: “We had about twenty rhesus and java monkeys. They’re vicious, and you’ve got to wear thick gloves and a face guard when you handle them. After they were injected with meprobamate though, they became very nice monkeys—friendly and alert. Where they wouldn’t previously eat in the presence of human beings, they now took grapes from your bare hand. It was quite impressive.” The drug caused such relaxation in the monkeys that it prompted researchers to wonder if meprobamate might be a productive complement to psychoanalysis in people.
At the same time, another company was relaxing rats, too. In the late forties and fifties, pharmacists working for the French company Rhône-Poulenc were developing antihistamines. In 1951, a company pharmacist screened one of these new drugs, called chlorpromazine, for behavioral affects. (Previously compounds were screened for toxicity, not necessarily for how they made people or other animals behave.) Rats were given the antihistamine and put into a cage with a platform that had food on it. To reach the platform the rats simply had to climb a rope. If they didn’t climb the rope, they would receive a shock. The drugged rats didn’t climb the rope, even when they learned that the shock was coming. What was interesting to the Rhône-Poulenc researchers was that the rats seemed totally indifferent: they weren’t concerned with the shock or the food. And it wasn’t because they were sedated or uncoordinated; they were wide awake and physically unimpaired.
The rats’ indifference piqued the curiosity of other researchers in Switzerland, Canada, and the United States, and soon the new drug was being tested in cardiac surgery, on battlefields, and in psychiatric practices as a light sedative for humans. It was back in France, however, that the drug was poised to drastically change psychiatry. At Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in the early 1950s, doctors began giving chlorpromazine to patients with delirium, mania, confusion, and psychosis. The drug didn’t sedate these people or put them to sleep as other sedatives had done. Instead, patients on chlorpromazine were aware and, like the rats, indifferent to the outside world but could engage with it when needed. The drug also caused certain patients at Sainte-Anne, and soon many other mental hospitals, to awaken from catatonic states that they had been lost in for years.
A barber from Lyon, France, was a typical case. He had been hospitalized for psychosis for years, and was completely unresponsive to people and activity around him. After a few doses of chlorpromazine he woke from his stupor and told his doctor that he knew where he was, who he was, and that he wanted to go home. Then he asked for a straight razor, water, and towels and shaved himself perfectly. Another patient, who had been frozen in a series of odd postures for years, responded to the drug in a single day. He greeted the hospital staff and asked them for billiard balls, which he then juggled. It turned out that he had worked as a juggler before being institutionalized.
In 1954 Rhône-Poulenc sold the U.S. chlorpromazine license to Smith Kline, which named the drug Thorazine. It was marketed as an antinausea agent, but by then, everyone knew of its remarkable results with psychotic patients. The market for the new drug was mind-boggling, generating $75 million in sales in its first year. At many state asylums every single patient received it, and a slew of outpatient clinics were established to care for all of the newly released mental patients now able to live on their own.
Veterinarians and researchers soon began giving antipsychotics to a few of their animal patients. One 1968 journal article summed up the veterinary use of the new psychopharmacology as helpful for treating nervousness, anxiety, fear, fright, conflict, panic, viciousness, agitation, excitement, and also as a relaxation agent before the collection of semen for breeding purposes. “Litter-savaging” pigs—pigs who cannibalized piglets—also reportedly responded well to chlorpromazine. Soon other new antipsychotic drugs, such as reserpine, were being used to treat cannibalistic chickens and pheasants, along with view-restricting plastic spectacles (which ostensibly were to be strapped onto the chickens’ small heads to disorient them or make the rest of the flock look less appetizing).
A year after Smith Kline bought the chlorpromazine license, Hoyt and Berger made a film about their own new drug, now called Miltown. The film, The Effect of Meprobamate (Miltown) on Animal Behavior, featured rhesus monkeys in three different states: their vicious, sober selves; totally unconscious on barbiturates; and calm but awake on meprobamate. They screened it in April 1955 at a meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in San Francisco. It excited the audience as well as executives at Wyeth Laboratories, who offered to purchase the drug from Hoyt and Berger. They still wanted a name for this new class of compounds, and at dinner one evening Berger complained to two of his friends that he didn’t know what to call this new kind of drug. “The world doesn’t need sedatives,” one of his friends said. “The world needs tranquility. Why don’t you call this a tranquilizer?”
Meanwhile scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute’s Neuropsychiatric Division were conducting a second set of animal experiments that would truly usher in the tranquilizer era. Researchers restrained two monkeys on opposite sides of the same cage and shocked their feet every twenty seconds. One was deemed the “executive monkey” and could protect both monkeys from the shocks if he pressed a lever at his side every twenty seconds. The monkey with the responsibility to protect himself and his cage mate quickly learned that he was capable of saving them both from the shocks, but over the course of repeated experiments, he became more and more agitated and finally died. When the scientists gave the executive monkey tranquilizers, he pressed the lever more calmly and with more success. The researchers came to the conclusion that what worked for responsibility-laden monkeys might also work for responsibility-laden men (though they argued about who was more stressed: male newspaper reporters, for example, or businessmen). Drug companies jumped on their study results, and soon Roche Laboratories was even suggesting, via promotional films like The Relaxed Wife, that tranquilizers would help breadwinners and their families enjoy one another more after a long workday.
The 1950s was a key decade in the forging of new links between men, women, and the psychopharmaceutical industry, a circle that would eventually widen to include pets and zoo animals. Articles about pharmaceutical miracle cures dotted the pages of Newsweek, Time, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The authors suggested that women’s infidelity, frigidity, or uncertainty could be fixed by taking a pill. The historian Jonathan Metzl has argued that the popularity of psychoanalysis throughout the 1950s contributed to popular notions that women’s mental health directly affected men, particularly that psychiatric symptoms were the result of early life experiences people had with their mothers. Pills could help women be better to their sons and husbands. As a result, the people most often implicated as needing tranquilizers in the popular press were unmarried women, loose women, women who wished to keep their wartime jobs, and women who rejected their husbands’ sexual advances.
Pharmaceutical marketing pitches built on earlier notions that single women, lesbians, and inconveniently opinionated women were pathological. Hysteria had been the most common diagnosis, but by the 1940s, American single women, working women, and those who chose not to be mothers were pathologized in books like Modern Women: The Lost Sex, which argued that women who wanted to leave the home were deeply ill. When tranquilizers arrived, these dangerous states could be resolved with a pill. The drugs promised to be a new form of behavioral control, and would soon come to be prescribed back to the animals the drugs were first tested on.
Before the mid-1950s, talk therapy, not drugs, was the standard for helping emotionally distraught patients cope with anxiety. With the creation and rapid diffusion of meprobamate, this approach shifted slightly. Many psychoanalysts had already been trying to understand the possible biological causes of psychiatric problems (something that interested Freud as well). When Miltown proved to facilitate the talking cure instead of replacing it, the drug only spurred interest in the new biological psychiatry. Even the Physicians’ Desk Reference stated that the drug could make a patient alert and more amenable to psychotherapy. Miltown went to market in 1955 and became the fastest-selling drug in U.S. history. Physicians’ reference manuals published by pharmaceutical companies emphasized the risks of untreated anxiety among businessmen. Roche Laboratories’ manual Aspects of Anxiety gravely cautioned that male breadwinners suffered the effects of unchecked anxiety, arguing that workplace stressors were very hard to change: “The physician must attempt to change the patient’s outlook on life and attitudes to his worth through ‘pharmacotherapy.’ ”
A mere two years after Miltown was released, one survey of American executives found that a third of respondents were using tranquilizers. Half were habitual users and almost three-fourths claimed that the drugs helped their job performance. Americans in the 1950s greeted the pill with curiosity and excitement. Patients who heard about Miltown, now nicknamed “emotional aspirins” and “peace pills,” asked doctors for the drug directly. The sensation that began with monkeys and executives soon drifted to Hollywood. Lucille Ball took it in her coffee on the set after a fight with Desi Arnaz. Lauren Bacall was given a prescription after the death of her husband, Humphrey Bogart. Tennessee Williams took it while working on Night of the Iguana. Soon everyone else wanted it too. Even the military: between 1958 and 1960 the U.S. armed forces spent millions of dollars on the drug, and dosed everybody from air force pilots to patients at VA hospitals. Psychiatrists self-prescribed it. Athletes took it. President John F. Kennedy took it, too, for his anxiety and colitis. Children were given the drug for agitation. A few dogs were also given the drug to treat car sickness, hyperexcitability, viciousness, and shyness. By 1957 more than 36 million Miltown prescriptions had been filled and a billion tablets manufactured. Tranquilizers accounted for one-third of all prescriptions in the United States. As Metzl argues, the drug was active in redefining the very idea of what anxiety was and who could suffer from it.
Another interesting result of the Miltown craze was that, at least among scientists like Frank Berger who were developing the drugs, blame for mental distress was shifting away from Freudian theories of mother-child relationships, repressed subconscious conflicts, and flawed interpersonal relations toward biological explanations, such as problems with the limbic system. If a drug could cure anxiety, Berger later argued, it was more likely a result of physiological problems rather than past experiences someone had with their mother. The fact that these drugs seemed to also be effective in nonhuman animals may have only served to make the biological claims more valid.
By the mid-1960s, however, the addictive nature of Miltown came to light and fascination with the drug dwindled. In 1967 it was placed under abuse control amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Its impact on the pharmaceutical landscape, though, was long-lasting. The industry’s success with its first lifestyle drug paved the way for benzodiazepines like Librium, Valium, and Xanax, as well as the broad range of antidepressants. As the historian Andrea Tone has argued, the popularity of Miltown demonstrated that a drug could be fashionable, and the fact that, for a while anyway, seemingly everyone took it made certain kinds of drug taking socially acceptable.
Other psychopharmaceutical drugs were also in development in nonhuman animals at the same time. In 1957 a chemist working for Hoffmann–La Roche discovered a new compound, Ro 5–0690, that caused mice to behave in surprising ways in the “inclined screen test.” Mice were given an experimental drug and then placed on an angled screen with their heads facing down. Undrugged mice turned around and ran to the top of the screen; tranquilized mice tended to slide slowly to the bottom. The mice given Ro 5–0690 slid to the bottom of the screen with their muscles relaxed, but unlike tranquilized mice, they were alert and active the whole time. These mice also had no problem walking when they were prodded.
The new drug also passed the industry-wide “cat test,” which involved giving a group of cats a drug and then holding them by the scruff of the neck to see what they did. Cats given Ro 5–0690 hung limply without struggling, even those who’d been specially selected for their meanness. Remarkably, these extra-difficult cats were, according to the researchers, transformed into content, sociable, and playful felines after taking Ro 5–0690. Researchers compared the cats’ reactions to the same cats on Thorazine, Miltown, and phenobarbital. The new drug was comparable to Miltown, only it was even more potent. It was also less toxic and less sedating than anything else on the market. Clinical trials in people, including ethically problematic studies on prisoners, showed that Ro 5–0690 was good at reducing anxiety, agitation, and aggression. Roche named the drug Librium, from the word equilibrium, and released it in 1960.
This cat-mouse-human relaxant quickly became the top-selling drug in the United States, that is until Hoffman–La Roche released Valium, its second blockbuster benzodiazepine, in 1963. Valium went on to become the first $100 million pharmaceutical brand; between 1968 and 1981 it was the most widely prescribed medication in the Western world. Benzodiazepines like Valium and Librium, and the animals who first demonstrated their usefulness, made Hoffmann–La Roche into one of the most profitable businesses on earth.
One of the first nonhumans to be given psychopharmaceuticals not as a test subject but as a patient was a gorilla named Willie B. Like the midcentury women given tranquilizers to ease their anxiety and encourage their compliance with the status quo, Willie was given the drug to ensure his good behavior and to keep him from expressing his displeasure over the strict limitations placed on his daily life.
Willie B. was a western lowland gorilla, famous in Atlanta, Georgia. Sometime in the 1960s he was captured in Congo as an infant and sent to Zoo Atlanta, where he lived for thirty-nine years, twenty-seven of them alone in an indoor cage with a tire swing and a television. Named after the city’s mayor, William Berry Hartsfield, Willie was the subject of countless newspaper articles and television programs, and was the inspiration for the city’s soccer team, the Atlanta Silverbacks. When he died in February of 2000, eight thousand people attended his memorial service.
According to Mel Richardson, who was working as a veterinarian at Zoo Atlanta at the time, Willie broke a glass window in his enclosure in the winter of 1970–71 and had to be transferred to a much smaller cage for six months while the glass was replaced with heavy metal bars. “He weighed around four hundred pounds, and the cage was way too small for him,” said Mel. “If he stood up and stretched each arm all the way out he could almost touch both sides of the cage at once.” The vet staff decided to medicate him so that the six months would be more bearable. They put Thorazine in the Coca-Cola he drank in the morning. According to Mel, Willie responded to the drug as many institutionalized humans do: he shuffled back and forth across his cage with dulled eyes. “It was a little like watching the men in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Mel said, “except Willie was a gorilla.”
Since then, human antipsychotics like Haldol (haloperidol) have been given to animals in zoos and aquariums throughout the world. The drugs are used to overcome phobias in birds, such as one yellow-naped Amazon parrot’s fear of being held. Haldol was given to rednecked wallabies to ease their transition to captivity. A captive black bear cub was given Haldol to treat her separation anxiety after she was moved to a cage by herself. SeaWorld has dosed their performing California sea lions. Six Flags Marine World gave antipsychotics to a young female walrus who was compulsively regurgitating her food. At the Toledo Zoo Haldol was used to calm anxious Grant’s zebras, a group of wildebeests, a pair of ostriches, and a swamp monkey named Maxine. The keepers hoped Maxine would get along better with her daughter. She didn’t. According to the vet staff, antipsychotics did help Trouble and her sister, Double Trouble, two of the Toledo Zoo’s birds of paradise. They were serious feather pluckers, but after three days on Haldol, they stopped. The drugs are “definitely a wonderful management tool,” the mammal curator told a Toledo newspaper reporter. “And that’s how we look at them. To be able to just take the edge off puts us a little more at ease.”
The fact that these antipsychotics are often used to make captive animals more “manageable” is reminiscent of the debates about antipsychotic drugs given to the institutionalized, or the tranquilizers prescribed for 1950s housewives. When the antipsychiatry movement began to unfold in the 1960s, in the wake of newspaper exposés of abuse in insane asylums that positioned psychiatry as an exercise in “chemical straightjacketing,” antipsychotics began to be seen as the root of mental illness rather than its solution. Ken Kesey portrayed the psych ward as an oppressive place where inmates shuffled about, their minds dulled by antipsychotics.
From roughly 1965 to 1975 the discipline of psychiatry changed in response to the public’s growing concern about the treatment, and confinement of the mentally ill. As the historian David Healy points out, psychiatry saw many of its practices, such as electroshock therapy, demonized. Pharmaceutical companies, however, continued to advocate the use of drugs to eliminate unwanted behavior. In the 1970s and 1980s their doctor-focused ad campaigns urged the use of anti-psychotics as “behavioral control” in young men to limit antisocial and violent acts. More than thirty years later, psychopharmaceuticals are still being used to control the behavior of human prisoners, to manage patients held for compulsory psychiatric treatment, and by people who feel pressure to take their medications in order to limit their own outbursts.
Behavior control, perhaps a slightly less draconian term than chemical straitjacketing, is also alive and well in the care and treatment of nonhuman animals. This doesn’t mean that it’s not often helpful. Antipsychotics, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications have, for example, been used to treat macaques and other primates used in research, who cannot be released from their labs for one reason or another. These monkeys, distressed beyond measure, biting themselves and feeling despondent, are given antipsychotic or antianxiety drugs because it’s more compassionate than not drugging them. In another case, an easily agitated male gorilla in Ohio, who became upset when any gorilla in his troop was tranquilized for surgery or other medical treatment, was given Valium beforehand; it sedated him but didn’t stop his nervous diarrhea. These animals’ caretakers determined that prescribing rather than denying psychopharmaceuticals was their only option to alleviate the animals’ suffering.
At the Guadalajara Zoo in Mexico a sixteen-year-old female gorilla stopped eating, started vomiting, and developed a bad case of diarrhea. According to the veterinary staff, she also seemed depressed. After a fecal sample showed a salmonella infection, the keepers separated her from her baby and the troop so that she could be treated and not infect the others. For ten days she was kept by herself while the salmonella infection cleared up. On the tenth day she began biting her fingers and toes for hours at a time, until they bled. Even after she had been reunited with her troop and baby, she continued to gnaw on herself until she’d made deep wounds. The vet staff started her on Haldol. According to her keepers, the gorilla eventually stopped the biting, and the staff began to taper her antipsychotic dose. Six months later she was off Haldol entirely and still wasn’t hurting herself.
Sometimes apes are dosed so they can deal with the stress of travel. In 1996, a male Western lowland gorilla named Vip was being flown from Boston, where the females found him sexually unappealling, to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, part of an AZA program to manage genetic diversity in the captive gorilla population. Vip was tranquilized and his keepers began to load him into a crate. Vip wanted nothing to do with the crate and the process took a lot longer than the staff had anticipated. Eventually, he was loaded onto a passenger jet at Boston’s Logan Airport and his keeper, Shanna Abeles, took her seat in the cabin. A few hours later, somewhere above the Midwest, Vip’s sedatives wore off. He woke up in the cold dark of the cargo hold, terrified and confused, without any idea where he was. Abeles could hear him beating his chest and bellowing inside the cabin. The pilot could too and it terrified him. By the time the plane was over Utah, the pilot, nervous the gorilla may have gotten free, made an unscheduled landing in Salt Lake City. After a short layover to check on Vip, the plane taxied back out onto the runway, but when the pilot heard Vip’s loud banging in the cargo hold, yet again he brought the plane back to the terminal. He would fly no farther with Vip. The gorilla and his keeper were unloaded on the tarmac. To calm Vip down, Abeles fed him a banana laced with crushed Valium and they waited for a truck to take them the rest of the way to Seattle. Vip was the last gorilla to be allowed on a commercial airplane. Ever since, they are shipped by Fedex.
Dolphins, whales, sea lions, walruses, and other marine creatures in parks like SeaWorld have also been given psychotropic drugs for what their vets see as depression, anxiety, compulsive regurgitation, flank sucking, or other distressing behaviors. The drugs have been given to dolphins, too, so that they can be flown, like Vip, to new aquariums or amusement parks without becoming upset.
There are incentives at these facilities to keep such information quiet, particularly in the wake of tragedies like the 2010 killing of the trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld Orlando by Tilikum the orca. The whales’ motivation for the grisly attack has been attributed to the extreme stressors inherent in keeping such an immense and social predator in crushing confines, away from his family.
Giving animals psychotropic drugs to treat signs of mental illness, even if it has become common practice among humans, may invite unwanted criticism of the industry. Many marine mammal trainers and zookeepers have signed nondisclosure agreements with their employers, and a thicket of public relations protocols cocoon animal-care staff from the public. In many cases I wasn’t able to secure permission from public relations departments to talk about the use of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antianxiety and antiobsessional medications in their animal collections. Finding out that the gorillas, badgers, giraffes, belugas, or wallabies on the other side of the glass are taking Valium, Prozac, or antipsychotics to deal with their lives as display animals is not exactly heart-warming news for most people who go to zoos, theme parks, and aquariums. Two marine mammal veterinarians who have spent decades on staff or consulting for American animal-display facilities, the military’s marine mammal program, and doing research told me that antidepressants and antipsychotics are commonly used but that “no one was going to talk to [me] about it.” Even they wouldn’t speak about the subject on the record.
A few of the published cases include a four-year-old beluga whale at Shedd Aquarium who was given antidepressants to treat her compulsive regurgitation. She began to throw up whole fish after her training sessions, to the point that she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. The aquarium veterinarian prescribed an antidepressant that seemed to reduce the frequency of her regurgitation. The young whale was kept on a maintenance dose even after she gained weight.
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The word antidepressant was coined in 1952 by the psychologist Max Lurie, but both the term and the substances it referred to took time to catch on. From roughly 1900 through 1980, depression was considered a rare disorder, as opposed to nervousness or anxiety. In Europe before the 1950s depressive disorders were understood as melancholias. People with severe depressive personality disorders were admitted to hospitals at a rate of 50 to 100 cases per million people. In 2002 depressive disorders affected 100,000 per million people; 250,000 more reported depressive symptoms. The historian Edward Shorter has argued that the cause of the thousandfold increase in cases are the antidepressant drugs themselves. That is, the idea of depression didn’t become common until there were antidepressant drugs that seemed to treat it.
Antidepressants, particularly Prozac, appeared in 1990s popular culture and were often positioned as making those who took them better-than-well. Suddenly serotonin was a conversation topic and the benefits of the new drugs were debated in books like Listening to Prozac. Other animals were part of the conversations about the new drugs too and, as it happened with antipsychotics and antianxiety meds, many of the creatures frequently given antidepressants were primates. A human psychiatrist prescribed Remeron for Minyak, a male orangutan at the Los Angeles Zoo, in the wake of a respiratory infection that made him too listless and lethargic to mate. The chief veterinarian at the zoo thought Minyak was depressed. The drug stimulated his appetite for both sex and food. Two years after Minyak fathered a baby, however, he was still being weaned off the drug.
Johari, a female gorilla at the Toledo Zoo, was prescribed fluoxetine, or generic Prozac, for what keepers understood as her premenstrual symptoms. Her keepers tracked the number of injuries Johari inflicted on other troop members against her menstrual cycle and found that she was most likely to be aggressive the week before her period. After a month on antidepressants her violent episodes ceased. When Johari later became pregnant the zoo staff hoped that the hormonal changes associated with pregnancy and nursing would reduce her PMS. They took her off Prozac, and according to her keeper, “She got kind of psychotic on us.” So she was put back on the meds.
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When tabloids broke the story in the mid-1990s that Gus, one of the polar bears in the Central Park Zoo, was compulsively swimming figure eights in his pool for up to twelve hours a day, every day, for months, and the zoo had paid a behaviorist $25,000 to help him, something of a Gus moment took hold of the city. The bear was on the cover of Newsday, Letterman cracked jokes about him, the New York Times ran an editorial, political cartoons featuring “bipolar” bears appeared in American papers, and the Canadian band The Tragically Hip wrote a song called “What’s Troubling Gus?” While much of this was tongue-in-cheek, Gus was also a symbol of his times. Bipolar disorder came into vogue in the 1990s. The frequency of cases went up, and the threshold for presumed age of onset dropped to such an extent that one- and two-year-old children were suddenly being diagnosed with bipolar disorders and treated with mood stabilizing drugs.
The zoo’s public affairs manager said that Gus’s story was so captivating because “it’s like Woody Allen always being in therapy—the idea that all New Yorkers are neurotic.” In the wake of the news coverage, people called in from around the country to ask how the bear was doing. The answer was complicated. Gus lived in a 5,000-square-foot enclosure—less than .00009 percent of what his range in the Arctic would be. He was also a major predator who, despite being born in captivity, no doubt still felt predatory impulses. In fact when Gus first arrived from an Ohio zoo in 1988, his favorite game was stalking children from the underwater window in his pool. “He liked to see them scream and run in terror—it was a game,” the zoo’s animal supervisor told a reporter. But the zoo staff didn’t want Gus to scare children or their parents, so they put up barriers to keep visitors farther away from the window. Gus soon started to swim in endless figure eights.
Hoping to curb the neurotic behavior, the zoo hired Tim Desmond, an animal trainer who had trained the orca who played Willy in the film Free Willy. Desmond was able to reduce Gus’s compulsions by giving him new things to do, such as bear food puzzles or snacks that took him longer to eat: mackerel frozen in blocks of ice or chicken wrapped in rawhide. The zoo redesigned his exhibit and installed a play area stocked with rubber trash cans and traffic cones that Gus could pretend-maul. They also put him on Prozac. I do not know how long he was on the drug, or even if it was as effective as his new exhibit and entertainment schedule, but eventually Gus’s compulsive swimming tapered off, though it never went away entirely.
In August 2013, Gus was euthanized. At twenty-seven years old, he was an old bear with an inoperable tumor. On my last visit to see him, he hadn’t been neurotically swimming. Instead he was tearing open a brown paper bag of meat as if it were bear takeout.
Because it’s impossible to replicate even a slim fraction of the kind of life polar bears have in the wild, the animals may be among the most common zoo dwellers to be given antidepressants. Other bears, though, have taken them too.
Abdi is a male brown bear (Ursus arctos) who was born in the Kure Mountains of Turkey in the middle of winter in 1992. Hunters shot his mother when he was a small cub at her side and kept Abdi as a pet. For two years he was left outside on a short chain, with no shelter from the sun, rain, or cold of winter. Eventually Abdi was moved to a concrete-floored cage inside a hut where, for the next eight years, he saw light only through cracks in the roof. Villagers threw food to him from a dark hole but never cleaned his cage or let him out; Abdi was thin and infected with parasites, and his coat was dull and balding in patches. After spending more than a decade under these conditions, the Karacabey Bear Sanctuary rescued Abdi and moved him to an indoor-outdoor area at their facility. When he’d lived at the sanctuary for a month, the staff began to urge him to spend time with the other bears in an attempt to socialize him, but the sight of them terrified Abdi so much that he wouldn’t even leave his den. The staff moved Abdi to a smaller enclosure where he could see the other bears but have no physical contact with them. After six months he had gained weight and his coat was thick and bearlike again, but Abdi was still desperately frightened of other bears. Even more worrisome to his keepers, he paced incessantly. From time to time the staff would bring another bear over to Abdi to introduce them, but he wouldn’t stop his pacing, not even to acknowledge the other creature. Over time Abdi’s pacing slackened a bit, but he was still spending most of his day walking in tight circles. The staff decided to give him fluoxetine, hoping that the antidepressant would lighten his spirits and help him adjust to his new life. Every morning for six months he was given the drug hidden inside his favorite food, raisin nut bread. Slowly, over many months, his pacing stopped entirely. It took a few weeks to wean him off the drug, and then the sanctuary staff released Abdi into the large enclosure with twenty-eight other bears, something that would have scared him to death less than a year earlier.
Today, more than a decade later, Abdi is doing very well. As cliché as it sounds, he’s a curious bear. A recent photo shows him at the edge of a pond intently investigating a fallen log. The sanctuary staff wrote me to say, “Getting over such great trauma was not easy for Abdi, of course. He couldn’t look at others for a long time. Maybe he didn’t want to, maybe he was afraid. He chose loneliness. Only after a long and successful socialization process could he understand that he was one of the others. He is now a part of the group, although we can never totally erase the memories of the past.”
Gigi, a thirty-six-year-old female gorilla at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, likes to watch black-and-white films, especially those with choreographed dance numbers. She also likes to be tickled by men with gray hair and beards. And she loves the Dixie Cups her morning oatmeal comes in. She grunts with joy, a sound like heavy, breathy purring, when she sees either gray-haired men or Dixie Cups. Sometimes she eats the cups. She also has a psychiatrist.
In 1998 a twelve-year-old male gorilla named Kitombe arrived at the zoo. He had been living with his mother and the rest of their troop at the Cleveland Zoo, where he was getting into increasingly violent fights with his father. Because the keepers feared these fights might get worse as Kit became an adult, he was transferred to the Boston troop. The first week there, introductions between Kit and the other gorillas went smoothly. But soon Kit became violent. He also quickly impregnated one of the female gorillas, Kiki. Kit was deeply agitated about the pregnant Kiki and wouldn’t let any of the other gorillas in the exhibit near her. His ire was focused on Gigi in particular.
Gigi was the oldest gorilla in the troop and also, perhaps, the oddest. She was born at the Cincinnati Zoo when Ann Southcombe was a brand-new keeper there. Gigi, as was common practice then, was taken from her mother at birth to be raised by the human keepers. Ann was in charge of the “zoo baby nursery,” where she cared for Gigi and the zoo’s other young gorillas during the day. At night, all of the infant gorillas were shut into lidded boxes, where they stayed, alone and in total darkness, until Ann returned in the morning and let them out. At nineteen years old, Ann had no previous experience with gorillas, let alone a handful of infant ones. She was doing her best.
To make matters worse, the zoo leadership wasn’t always supportive of her efforts to give the baby gorillas blankets, toys, and other things for them to use to comfort themselves. Ann was frustrated, and since she followed Dian Fossey’s work in Congo closely, she decided to write to her for advice. To Ann’s surprise, Fossey wrote back and told her about Penny Patterson’s work at Stanford teaching Koko to sign. Ann decided that she’d teach Gigi and the other gorillas a bit of American Sign Language. Gigi picked it up quickly. A few years later, Gigi was transferred from the only home she knew to Stone Zoo in Massachusetts, where she lived in a barren cement cage with a male she didn’t particularly like. There Gigi gave birth to two babies. The first she left on the cement floor after giving birth, seemingly ignoring him. The keepers took the baby from her within twenty-four hours. Her response to her second baby, a male named Kubie, was completely different. She picked him up immediately and caressed him.
Paul Luther is one of Gigi’s keepers and he’s known her since she arrived at Stone Zoo more than thirty years ago. He believes that she learned how to be a mother to Kubie by watching a pair of orangutans, Betty and Stanley, who lived in the exhibit across from her own. “They were really good parents,” Paul told me as we walked past the pygmy hippo exhibit at the Franklin Park Zoo. “And the orangs had a baby in those years between Gigi’s first and second pregnancies. All she really had to do all day was sit there and watch Betty and Stanley raise their own little orang. Before that, I don’t think Gigi had ever seen a mother ape take care of a baby.” She certainly hadn’t experienced it herself.
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As Kit chased Gigi around the exhibit, she screamed and shook. He bit her, tried to drown her in the exhibit’s moat, and tore open her scalp from ear to ear. Her injuries required stitches more than once, and Gigi, an already anxiety-prone gorilla given to repeatedly regurgitating and reingesting her food, eating her own feces, and sometimes slamming it on the glass of the exhibit in front of visitors, became a nervous wreck. She barely ate, and anytime she saw Kit she seemed to shut down, rocking and trembling. She also screamed and shook and refused to go back into her off-exhibit holding area at the end of the day with the other gorillas, choosing instead to sleep by herself in the sawdust in the public viewing area.
The keepers were worried and set up cots alongside the exhibit so they could keep her company overnight. After two months of this, Dr. Hayley Murphy, the head veterinarian at the time, reached the limit of her expertise. “It occurred to me that what I was seeing in Gigi was a lot like anxiety and mood disorders in human beings,” Murphy said. “I decided to find a human psychiatrist to see if one could help.”
This being Boston, she called Harvard Medical School and eventually found her way to Michael Mufson. An assistant professor at Harvard and a staff psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Mufson also has a private practice a few miles from the zoo. “On my first visit,” Mufson told me as we watched through the glass as the gorillas shared stalks of celery with one another, “I could see that they were suffering just like people. You don’t have to talk to someone to see they’re suffering. You see it in their eyes, their physiognomy, their posture.”
It wasn’t just Gigi’s fear and anxiety, or Kit’s aggression, that Mufson noticed. He quickly determined that he was seeing mood disorders, probably brought on by anxiety, in the midlevel troop members, like the young male named Okie.
A sweet and slightly dopey five-year-old, Okie hadn’t been physically injured by Kit but he was withdrawn, no longer playing with the other gorillas or the keepers like he had before the mayhem started. Mufson prescribed Prozac, and soon Okie seemed calmer, more playful, and “more like himself,” according to the zoo staff.
Kit was proving to be a much more difficult patient. Mufson prescribed Prozac and increasing dosages of the antipsychotic Haldol. The drugs gave him diarrhea and slowed him down a bit, but they didn’t make Kit less aggressive. The keepers weaned him off the Haldol and Prozac and started him on Zoloft, which didn’t work either. They tried one last antipsychotic, risperidone, but after a few months with no change in the frequency of his attacks on Gigi, Kit was separated from the troop and put in a cement and steel holding area by himself. At the end of the day, when the other gorillas returned from the main exhibit, they could see each other through a steel mesh wall. He would often keep a bit of his dinner aside so he could eat with the rest of his troop. Sadly, this isolation period would last more than ten years.
“I tried, but I felt from the beginning that nothing was really going to help Kit,” said Mufson. “His aggression came from the fact that he knew Kiki was pregnant and he wanted to protect her. This is a primary biological force. He was upset about anyone else getting close to her. You could sedate him, but the aggression was natural. You can’t get rid of that.”
Mufson was more hopeful about his ability to help the other troop members. For Gigi, he prescribed a beta-blocker, the same drug that concert pianists and other performers take for nerves. She was on it for three months without much of an effect. Mufson then decided to try a combination of Xanax and Paxil. Gigi soon seemed slightly less anxious, but Kit still intimidated and bullied her. Without a change in Gigi’s environment and an escape from her tormentor, he worried that the drugs would only ever be a Band-Aid.
“In general, the Xanax helped relax Gigi, and the Prozac helped Okie get over his depression,” Mufson told me, “but the drugs don’t stop aggression.”
What actually worked was removing the violent gorilla from the rest of the troop, even if that didn’t help him. In the wake of Kit’s exile, Gigi was weaned off the drugs.
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After their experiences at the zoo in Boston, Murphy and Mufson were curious about the use of psychopharmaceuticals in other captive gorillas, so they surveyed all U.S. and Canadian zoos with gorillas in their collections. Nearly half of the thirty-one institutions that responded had given psychopharmaceutical drugs to their gorillas. The most frequently prescribed were Haldol (haloperidol) and Valium (diazepam), though Klonopin, Zoloft, Paxil, Xanax, Buspar, Prozac, Ativan, Versed, and Mellaril had all been tried.
Mufson keeps photos of the Boston gorilla troop on his desk alongside pictures of his wife and children and, every year, he brings medical students on psychiatry rotations to the zoo to see the apes. Since he first began working with Gigi, Mufson has treated a number of gorillas in other American zoos for problems like trichotillomania and coprophagia (feces eating). For the plucking he prescribes Luvox or Celexa, as he does for his human patients, and at the same dosage, milligram for kilogram.
The biggest animal consumers of psychotropic drugs are not zoo animals but the ones that live with us most intimately: our pets. Just like the shared rice-gruel remedies of the early twentieth century, we are now giving our cats, dogs, and canaries the same medications we take ourselves. A survey of prescription drug trends among 2.5 million insured Americans from 2001 to 2010, found that one in five adults is currently taking at least one psychiatric drug. Americans spent more than $16 billion on antipsychotics, $11 billion on antidepressants and $7 billion on drugs to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2010. And according to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control, 87 percent of people who visit a psychiatrist’s office leave with a prescription.
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The Prozac prescriptions for Anna Nicole Smith’s Sugarpie, Jacques Chirac’s Sumo, and most recently, Lena Dunham’s rescue dog, Lamby, are indicative of a thriving marketplace for animal pharmaceuticals—psychopharm and otherwise. The U.S. market for pet pharmaceuticals is large and growing, from $6.68 billion in 2011 to a projected $9.25 billion by 2015. Zoetis Inc. is the world’s largest maker of animal medicines. Once a subsidiary of Pfizer, it went public in January of 2013 and raised $2.2 billion in its initial public offering, the largest IPO deal for an American company since Facebook. Elanco, a pet pharma company owned by Eli Lilly, has $1.4 billion in annual sales and is the fourth-largest animal health business in the world. Growth in Lilly’s animal division recently outpaced its general pharmaceutical division for humans. Yearly sales of Pfizer’s animal pharmaceuticals are worth roughly $3.9 billion, with companion animal meds representing 40 percent of the total.
Total sales of pet behavioral medications like fluoxetine are difficult to quantify because many pet owners buy their animals generic human versions from pharmacies like CVS or Walgreens. The Prozac, Valium, Xanax, and other drugstore sales for dogs, cats, and parrots are therefore lumped in with the sale of the same drugs for humans.
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The pet pharmaceutical industry is also touted as being recession-proof. Americans may even spend more on their pets during tough economic times. One market research firm recently claimed that people’s love for their pets was an “excellent insulator against recessionary cutbacks.” The same firm reported that many pet owners, both affluent and middle class, were less likely to limit spending on their animals than on their human family members during crises. This has proven to be true not only during the most recent economic downturns but also during the Great Depression, when, as the historian Susan Jones has suggested, families made great sacrifices in order to secure food for their pet dogs and cats.
Psychopharmaceuticals are particularly profitable. The most lucrative human drugs in 2012, after cancer treatments, were antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and other mental health drugs. People spent more on psychopharmaceuticals than on drugs to treat pain, and the market has steadily increased, 10 to 20 percent per year globally, even during the most recent financial crisis. The markup on these drugs is more than several thousand percent, and as David Healy has argued, they’re worth more than their weight in gold.
The scale of investment in the development and marketing of these psychotropic blockbuster drugs, for both humans and other animals, is tied to popular ideas about the illnesses they’re used to treat. The industry that produces these drugs works hard to guarantee their financial success and this means encouraging more people to use them, for themselves and their pets. Two key historical decisions in particular helped ensure the current popularity of pharmaceutical use in the United States. The first took place in 1951, when the FDA (via the Humphrey-Durham amendments to the Food and Drug Act) declared that new medications would be available by prescription only. Before this, people largely medicated themselves, buying what they needed over the counter. Critics of the FDA’s decision argued that it harmed regular citizens by making them completely beholden to a small group of people with the power to prescribe, who themselves were now dependent upon the pharmaceutical industry. A second FDA decision, in 1997, relaxed regulations limiting direct-to-consumer advertising and opened the floodgates to the pharmaceutical marketing machine that would quickly begin to publicize signs and symptoms of disorders that were easily treatable with compounds like the new Prozac.
One of the most vocal proponents of the use of psychopharmaceutical drugs for other animals is the veterinary behaviorist Nicholas Dodman, of the Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic. “One of the things that people called me was the Timothy Leary of the veterinary profession,” Dodman said. Like Leary, Dodman acted as a sort of pied piper, drawing other veterinarians and pet owners to his methods via textbooks and peer-reviewed articles and workshops like “The Well-Adjusted Cat.”
Dodman argues that studies he has overseen, some of which are supported by drug companies like Eli Lilly, prove that Prozac eases separation anxiety and compulsive disorders in animals and also reduces aggression and other “problem” behaviors. He has published research on the use of antidepressants and psychotropic meds to treat everything from compulsive Doberman Pinschers and tail-chasing Terriers to corral-biting (or cribbing) horses and cats who pull out their fur.
In his book The Well-Adjusted Dog, Dodman argues that psychopharmaceuticals treat a dog’s problems “from the inside out,” though he believes that drugs are more successful if they are used in conjunction with behavior-modification training. The goal, he has said, should be to taper off the medication as soon as possible. In some cases, those in which withdrawing the meds causes the animal’s anxiety, depression, fear, or aggression to return, he suggests an indefinite drug regime.
Dodman prescribes a wide variety of psychopharmaceuticals, as do the many vets who have incorporated his ideas into their own practices. He uses tricyclic antidepressants (Elavil and Tofranil) for depression, phobias, and in some cases of aggression in dogs. But he calls SSRIs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and Luvox the closest thing there is to a silver bullet for treating behavioral problems in animals. He used to believe Valium was helpful for treating anxiety, but he’s now convinced that, like alcohol, the drug can reduce inhibitions, and in dogs prone to aggression, this can make them vicious. It is also addictive. But Dodman still finds it useful for treating acute fear—in cases like Oliver’s thunderstorm panic.
Dodman didn’t always work as a Merry Prankster to the dog legions. An Englishman, he spent the 1970s working as a roving country vet in the United Kingdom, a sort of contemporary James Herriot, the fictional alter ego of James Wight, the British veterinarian. Dodman moved to the United States in 1981 to be a professor of anesthesia at Tufts’ veterinary school. There he began to wonder if psychotropic medicines could change veterinary practice in the same ways they were transforming human psychiatry. Dodman shared his ideas for the first time at a veterinary conference in the late 1980s and later told a journalist for the New York Times that “he saw jaws drop around the room. It was like, ‘Who is this strange masked man?’ ” Thirty years later, largely through his many publicized success stories, the animal psychopharmaceutical industry is thriving in the United States.
Dodman remembers hearing the former dean of the Tufts vet school call Prozac the behavioral equivalent of the popular wide-spectrum deworming medication ivermectin. “Before ivermectin,” he said, “vets had to carefully choose which dewormer to use to treat intestinal and other worm infestations in dogs, cats, and farm animals. After ivermectin, vets could reach for this one medication to deal with practically all of these problems. All I can say is thank heavens for Prozac and other SSRIs.”
Dodman’s colleague Nicole Cottam says that 50 to 60 percent of the people who come to the Tufts clinic want drugs for their dog, cat, or bird. “Most of our clients don’t call or come back after the initial appointment. Unless it’s to get refills. When people leave with a prescription and behavioral exercises, they tend to only use the pills.”
The idea of a pill for pet problems is simply too seductive and, frankly, it’s often useful. I know this from experience.
Oliver received his first Valium prescription after his jump, at the vet hospital. The second one came from his behaviorist. As I mentioned, we were supposed to give Oliver the Valium thirty minutes before a storm hit so that by the time the thunder and lightning descended he would be too blissed out to notice. We were also supposed to play him recorded sounds of thunder and rain. While we did this we were to pet him, but only when he reacted calmly. The duration of the faux-storm training was supposed to increase in single-minute increments until Oliver could listen to the CD peacefully for hours. The behaviorist also prescribed Prozac for his separation anxiety, telling us that it would take a few weeks to take effect and to let her know if there was any change in his behavior. We watched him, anxious now ourselves, but Oliver didn’t seem to be happier or calmer.
The Valium, however, helped. It dulled his thunderstorm anxiety. The only problem was that Jude and I both worked outside of the house, and in D.C. summer thunderstorms tend to happen in the afternoon. Neither of us could return home thirty minutes before a storm hit in order to drug the dog. Five days a week Oliver was on his own when it came to afternoon weather anxiety. We tried playing the recorded sounds of storms to desensitize him, but the CD was less helpful than the drugs. Oliver simply wasn’t bothered by the fake thunder. He endured the listening sessions with benign disinterest.
The behaviorist also suggested we use Valium to treat Oliver’s separation anxiety, telling us to dose him thirty minutes before Jude and I left the house. And she urged us to retrain him around our leave-taking behavior.
The behavioral therapy or training process the vet outlined was supposed to start by Jude and I approaching the front door but not leaving, not even touching the knob. We were to do this repeatedly, until Oliver stopped acting anxious. The next stage was going up to the front door and touching the door knob. When this bored Oliver into not reacting, we were supposed to turn the handle and open the door but not walk through it. This was meant to happen in stages so that in the end, she promised us, we would be able to leave the house without Oliver caring at all. The problem was that this sort of training took weeks, if not months—and we still had to go through the door in the meantime.
We tried to do the exercises. We gave it our best shot. Or to be honest, we gave it our best shot for a while. But it was exhausting, for us and for Oliver. He was so finely attuned to the various stages Jude and I had for getting ready to leave that as soon as we tried to decouple one cue from his “they are leaving me” anxiety, picking up our keys, for example, Oliver would figure out another, such as making our lunches or putting on our work clothes. He may have been dysfunctional and disturbed, but he wasn’t stupid.
Sometimes I stored my computer bag in our building’s shared hallway because even the sight of it would make Oliver start vigilantly watching for our departure, panting heavily and pacing. He also reacted to the sight of suitcases. And the putting on of shoes. And the opening of the coat closet. Possibly, if Jude and I had left for work naked, through a window, with no lunches, no keys, no bags, no shoes, and at odd hours, we could have avoided triggering Oliver’s anxiety.
Like me, a lot of people simply can’t spend the kind of time it takes to retrain themselves and their pet. Or it doesn’t work. Sometimes, as with Oliver’s Prozac, the drugs don’t help either, or the effects aren’t dramatic enough. This unfortunately tends to be the end of the line for most animals. They are given up or forced into what the veterinary behaviorist E’lise Christensen calls “the big sleep” and David Sedaris has referred to as visiting the “Youth-in-Asia.” Behavioral drugs, if they work, can help stave off such mortal consequences.
Dodman argues that most dogs and cats are taken to shelters or put down for “being difficult.” Indeed, 6 to 8 million dogs and cats are given up every year. According to the ASPCA, 3.7 million of them were euthanized in 2008. Aggressive and insecure dogs who menace visitors, or cats that won’t stop spraying on the bedspread are the kinds of creatures most often left at shelters. Dodman argues that the great salvation of these ill-behaving dogs and cats is medication. Though I’m doubtful that medication-only therapeutic regimes are as effective as behavior therapy or at least behavior therapy and medication, psychopharm for pets can be a useful way station on the road to recovery, or a stopgap measure on the way to the gas chamber.
The veterinary behaviorist E’lise Christensen is a proponent of psychopharmaceuticals because, she says, “Unlike in human medicine, we don’t have inpatient treatment facilities for our patients. If you have a dog that’s jumping out windows into traffic, for example, you have to heavily dose them so they don’t hurt themselves.”
Heavy doses for dogs are not quite the same as heavy doses for humans; dogs’ livers can handle a lot more medication. This is why many dogs end up on dosages of antianxiety drugs that could kill a person. “I have a golden retriever patient right now,” Christensen said, “that’s taking 80 milligrams of Valium every four hours.” This would make a human limp, verging on catatonia, but it’s keeping the retriever from full-blown panic attacks.
Despite the fact that many of her clients are on the same drugs as their pets, Christensen hasn’t seen too many people borrow from their pets’ stash. She believes this is because she’s very clear with her clients about how much higher dog dosages are and the fact that they’ve come to her because they want to help their animal. “What’s much more common,” she said, “is people sharing their own psych medications with their pets.” Thankfully it doesn’t usually harm or help because the human doses are so much lower. Her physician clients use their own prescription pads to prescribe for their pets. “Not my psychiatrist clients, interestingly enough. They tend to wait for me to prescribe.”
And yet for long-term improvements in her patients’ well-being, Christensen doesn’t think the drugs are enough. The gold standard of care, she’s convinced, is medication combined with behavioral training. This means keeping the animal from whatever triggers their fear and anxiety, whether it’s being left alone or hearing a vacuum cleaner, while therapy is taking place. “If the animal isn’t being exposed to their triggers,” she said, “you can work with them to make whatever scares them less scary.” I told her about my experience trying to retrain Oliver about the front door and she admitted that all of this is easier said than done.
Recently she treated a nervous dog who lived in Brooklyn. He was prone to biting strangers out of fear and anxiety. The dog became stressed simply walking down the sidewalk and his owner, a young woman, had a hard time keeping people at a safe distance. “She would tell passersby that the dog would bite and to keep walking but people actually got mad at her for not letting them pet the dog.” As a solution, the woman moved to a house with a yard in White Plains and now commutes to work in the city. Her dog is much more relaxed. Christensen realizes this is too much to ask of most dog owners. “If I could change one thing about New York City,” she said, “it would be that people would treat a dog on the sidewalk just like anyone else they didn’t know. If you were walking down the street with a human family member, for example, only the creepiest strangers would think it’s okay to come up and stroke them.”
This made me think of self-identified “dog people.” Many men and women who describe themselves this way will bend down into the personal space of dogs they don’t know and extend an overconfident hand within muzzle reach, or aggressively ruffle fur on heads or hindquarters. These people are a bit like self-described ladies’ men. That is, if you have to say you’re a dog person, it probably isn’t true.
Christensen counsels many of her clients to act as buffers for their nervous animals on city sidewalks, stepping between the dogs and would-be strokers. The humans become, in essence, therapy animals for their own pets.
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When she was a veterinary student and resident at Cornell University in rural upstate New York, it was easier for Christensen to ask her clients to keep their pets away from their triggers during behavioral training. A dog who couldn’t be left alone without panicking, for example, could accompany their human more places. In New York City, her clients can’t keep their dogs with them all the time. Like many urban veterinarians, she is then more reliant on behavioral drugs to blunt the animals’ fear and anxiety while they’re still in therapy, a process that can take a very long time. “By the time many dog owners get to my office,” she said, “they are verging on emotional bankruptcy. These people are desperate and exhausted. They’re trying hard.”
She has learned that most are capable of no more than four or five minutes of behavioral training per day. Ideally she would have people do fifteen minutes twice a day, but most of them can’t do that. I told her about my disappointing results trying to retrain Oliver and what my failsafe method was when I reached my wit’s end. I used the car. Oliver always calmed when I left him in our Suburu. I even daydreamed about opening a boarding kennel for anxious dogs that consisted of a parking lot staffed with nice people to deliver food and water to the cars and take the dogs on walks.
To my surprise, she didn’t think I was crazy. “Many behaviorists actually encourage their clients to use cars to keep their dogs calm when they have to leave them alone,” she said. “If you live in a temperate climate, are really careful, and it’s not illegal in your city or state, this can be a good solution.” The reason, she told me, that Oliver and so many other nervous dogs feel better in cars is because we trained them to be comfortable there without knowing it. Few people leave their dogs alone in the car for long, at least at first. So the dog learns, incrementally, to stay in the car for longer periods of time and no matter what, his or her humans always come back.
Dogs exist as they do, emotionally and physiologically, because they tend to like being around us. The dogs we have fed, treasured, and bred over the past fifteen thousand years are precisely the kinds of creatures that are more likely to suffer when separated from their human companions for most of the day. Contemporary canine anxiety disorders like Oliver’s are the result of a trait we prize highly and have selected for in dogs: they enjoy being around people, particularly their own people, and are glad to spend time with us.
Today’s pet dogs are a bit like Ham the chimpanzee, sent into space in 1961 to find out if humans could do it too. That is, many dogs living in contemporary urban and suburban households are occupying alien lands. They simply haven’t had enough time to evolve into creatures who do well left alone all day with little exercise, social time, and ability to express their doggishness—something the Germans refer to as Funktionslust, taking pleasure in what one does best: a cheetah sprinting at full speed or a bat pinging his sonar through the night. Dogs are built to run and sniff and chase and hump indiscriminately. Most of them are happiest rolling in dead fish, pulling tampons out of the trash, and licking their genitals or someone else’s.
Many dog owners are content to meet a dog on human terms but are unwilling to do so on the dog’s terms. That is, we are thrilled when dogs are excited to see us at the end of the workday, but we don’t want them to be running and jumping in circles, tails wagging explosively, paws everywhere, when we’re at work. Instead we hope they’re sleeping soundly, calmly grooming themselves, or perhaps taking a gander through the living-room window, not in longing but just to see what’s there. This expectation isn’t fair. It reminds me of times I’ve fallen for men whose idiosyncrasies intrigued and captivated me at first, but as time wore on, those same traits began to drive me nuts. The fault was mine. You can’t blame a man for being the kind of man you fell in love with. And you can’t blame a dog for being a dog.
Most urban and suburban dogs are only encouraged to be themselves for a small fraction of the day. In my neighborhood just outside of San Francisco, the early evening, right before sunset, is that fraction. You can feel the collective wags of thousands of tails, the expectant panting at the door, the anticipation of the click of the leash on the collar, and then the overwhelming joy of going out. Out! They flood the sidewalks around my house with their pent-up frustrations, pissing and smelling and dragging their people along behind them like water-skiers. At the park the humans stand around tossing balls or chatting idly or calling their dog off another’s rump. A half hour or an hour later, it’s back to the house for dinner, some petting, maybe some television with the humans, and then bed. But this is not enough time for dogs to do dog things, even if they get to do it in the morning too.
The alternative for many people is simply not having a dog. For most of us, if you live and work in a city, you can’t move to a farm just because your dog would like it better. If your dog hates being alone, you can’t simply quit your job to stay home with her. There are other options, of course, but none is simple. You could hire a dog walker to visit one or more times a day, but they’re expensive. You could move to an apartment near a park where the dog could be off leash every day, but perhaps the market’s bad and you can’t sell your condo. You could get another dog to keep your first dog company, but maybe your landlord allows only one pet. You could spend a lot of money on dog toys to stuff with peanut butter or marrow bones to freeze and then leave hidden around your house like a macabre Easter egg hunt, but you forget. This is life. We love our dogs, we try our best, but we often fail them. The truth is that all the squeaky plush toys in the world can’t compare to a leashless life of daily stimulation and plenty of time with dogs, humans, and other animals. That is the kind of life dogs had before most people went to work in offices, factories, shops, and other places canines aren’t welcome. And it is precisely the kind of life that keeps most of them from licking their paws into oozy messes or tearing up the sofa.
When dogs spend long hours doing nothing, they have too much energy to curl up into happy, satisfied rounds at the end of the bed. Their energy has to go somewhere, and for the less sturdy, or simply the more prone to anxiety or compulsion, that somewhere is Crazytown. This town has myriad diagnoses and one of the more common is separation anxiety. Pharmaceutical companies have taken note and even helped to shape ideas of the disorder.
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The humans who own the more than 78 million pet dogs in the United States are a large market for companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly. In 2007 Lilly launched Reconcile, chemically identical to Prozac (which went off patent in 2001), but unlike Prozac, it is beef-flavored, chewable, and FDA-approved for treating separation anxiety in dogs. Simultaneously the company released results from a Lilly-funded study arguing that 17 percent of U.S. dogs suffer from separation anxiety. A 2008 study estimated that 14 percent of American dogs have some degree of the disorder.
Lilly’s Reconcile website is the virtual equivalent of getting licked by a puppy, one that is good at making her owners feel guilty. Phrases like “I wonder if he tears things up to get even with me. I wonder if it’s my fault” appear in flash animation at the top of the screen. A video clip of a veterinarian with a southern drawl runs through a list of separation anxiety symptoms: drooling, destructive chewing, pacing, depression, anorexia, excessive barking, and “licking of coat.” As the vet speaks, a young Golden Retriever mauls what looks like an expensive high-heeled shoe.
An older version of the site had a large banner that read “Separation is inevitable. Now anxiety isn’t” and offered dog-bark ringtones and a glum-looking Beagle screensaver. It also linked to a study on the effects of Reconcile, used along with behavioral training, on separation anxiety. The study, on 242 dogs, was published in Veterinary Therapeutics in 2007 and paid for by Lilly. The dogs were split into two groups: one received a beef-flavored placebo pill and the other received the drug. Both groups also went through behavioral training. By the end of the study, anxiety symptoms in all of the dogs had diminished—by 72 percent in the Reconcile group and 50 percent in the placebo group. While the study does suggest some drug efficacy, it demonstrates the importance of behavioral training far more effectively.
There is also Clomicalm, introduced by Novartis in 1998. The active ingredient in the drug, clomipramine, is identical to the main ingredient in the company’s antidepressant/OCD drug for humans, Anafranil, but this version was FDA-approved just for animals. Novartis describes Clomicalm as a medication for treating separation anxiety in dogs, but, as is the case with the human version, clomipramine is also frequently used to treat other signs of distress. In one strange experiment twenty-four Beagles were sent traveling in a truck for an hour, on three different occasions, to see if the drug helped ease travel anxiety. The results were inconclusive, but the Beagles drooled less than they normally did. The drug has been more successful in lessening tail-chasing in dogs and feather picking in cockatoos.
Depending on the dosage, the Clomicalm box features a Yellow Labrador, a Golden Retriever, or a Jack Russell Terrier. The dogs seem happy and alert, tongues lolling. Medicating a small dog costs roughly $600 per year. Larger dogs need larger doses, which cost more. The website allays consumer fears, and perhaps owner guilt, by assuring visitors that Clomicalm tablets are not tranquilizers or sedatives and won’t affect your dog’s personality or memory. Instead, the drugs helps animals “return to a normal life.”
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One of the most outspoken critics of psychopharm for pets is the veterinarian and behaviorist Ian Dunbar, who runs a canine-training empire called Sirius Dog Training and has written a number of books, among them How to Teach a New Dog Old Tricks. He leads training classes and workshops around the world and hosted a series on British television called Dogs with Dunbar. He says that he has never had to resort to drugs to treat a behavioral problem: “Drugs are simply unnecessary. They’re touted as a quick fix, a panacea for all problems, but it’s not true.”
He believes that medicating dogs with psychotropic drugs mirrors an irresponsible approach to human health care. Instead, Dunbar argues that pet owners should use behavioral modification training and alter their own behavior so as not to reward their animal’s disturbed or disturbing activities. “When people have problems with their dog,” Dunbar told an interviewer, “I usually tell them ‘The problem is your friend. You are going to learn so much from this.’ ”
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Some problems, however, are no one’s friend. When it came time to fill Oliver’s Prozac and Valium prescriptions, I didn’t give him any of the FDA-approved drugs for dogs, even if Reconcile was beef-flavored and chewable. My local drugstore carried the generic versions and could make up the appropriate dosage in fifteen minutes. I knew Oliver didn’t care what flavor they were and would eat the pills if I stuck them into chunks of cheese. I took the veterinary prescription to the drop-off window at Walgreens. When the pharmacist called “Oliver Braitman” to the pickup window to pay for his prescription, I laughed. She handed me an unmarked bag (for patient privacy) and wanted to know if I had any questions about the medication.
“It’s for my dog,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said. “That happens a lot.”
Debating whether dosing other animals with psychopharmaceuticals is a good or bad idea may increasingly be beside the point. In a way, we may not have much of a choice. These drugs now suffuse our environment and parts of our food supply. More than 200 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in the United States in 2010. Many of the active ingredients in these drugs are excreted in people’s urine or flushed down the toilet in the form of extra pills. Wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to filter out pharmaceuticals, so the meds end up where our treated water does: in oceans, rivers, lakes, and our water supply. A recent study in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry demonstrated the presence of a range of antidepressants and their metabolites in drinking water, river water, and in the bodies of minnows. A few researchers are attempting to understand what this means for aquatic life.
In one experiment, bass exposed to Prozac stopped eating and eventually began to float vertically inside their tank. Another study looked at the effects of Prozac on shrimp. Wastewater concentrates in river estuaries and coastal areas where shrimp like to live, meaning that they and other creatures who live there are floating in the excreted drugs of whole towns and cities. Shrimp exposed to antidepressants were five times likelier to swim toward light than away from it, making them far more susceptible to predation by fish or birds.
Another recent study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, found an array of psychopharmaceuticals in the feathers of farmed chickens. Feather meal is a dietary supplement made of ground chicken feathers that is fed to pigs, cattle, fish, and even chickens themselves. In 2012, meal samples tested positive for antibiotics like Cipro, banned from animal feed in 2005. Just as disturbingly, one-third of the feather meal samples also contained fluoxetine (Prozac), acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol), and antihistamines (the active ingredient in Benadryl). Many poultry farmers feed their birds Benadryl, Tylenol, and/or Prozac to calm them down and reduce anxiety. Harried, stressed chickens don’t grow as fast or produce meat as tender as content ones. Caffeine, in the form of green tea powder or coffee pulp, is also fed to chickens so that they’ll feel more energized and stay awake longer to eat and lay. It’s possible that these birds need anxiety-reducing drugs to counteract the stimulants.
According to the journalist Nicholas Kristof, poultry farmers don’t always know what they feed their birds. The large agribusinesses require the poultry farmers who supply them with chickens to use proprietary food mixes, and the farmers may not know what the mixes contain. As with the shrimp, the effect that all of this has on the birds, and ultimately those of us who eat them, is unknown and unsettling.