July 13, 2008

Pill-Popping Pets

By JAMES VLAHOS

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 Animal Health, whose 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.

Am I sounding like a bleeding heart “humaniac”.. ?

If you MUST have a de-clawed cat, get one that has been dumped at he pound.. maybe dumped because many de-claws poop on soft surfaces.

Why? When the weather changes or it’s cold, the amputated area can hurt.. like when you have broken a bone and you have pain in cold or wet weather.. many of you are saying “we never had a problem”.. you are lucky..

Take a little survey. When someone complains that their cat is not using the litter pan.. ask if it is urinating in the pan and deficating outside the pan.. and on a soft surface like a pillow…. then ask if the cat is a de-claw.. I figured this out the 7 years that I worked for a very large animal hospital in Los Angeles..

Cats claw (scratch) because they are marking.. with the claw marks and the glands on their pads.. So that in the wild they can mark their domain and maybe find their way home..

also:

• It sharpens their claws.
• It exercises their claw muscles.
• It helps to scrape off the old outside covering.
• Gets your cats own smells around the house. (we can’t smell it)

http://www.pawproject.com

de-clawing.. let's rip out your nails [ 2:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It is fine to use the human brand of prozac.. generic is cheap… Don’t be talked into using the new “vet version” that cost tons more.. a 20 mg. prozac (Rx from your vet) can be scored into 4.. find a dose for your pet.. listen for a podcast on this soon… speak to the vet and GOOGLE..

re-print from LA Times

Fido’s little helper

By Carla Hall, Times Staff Writer
January 10, 2007

Photo Gallery

Animal meds

WHAT could be wrong with Shadow? The green-eyed, long-haired cat had adapted well to his Santa Monica home. There was a carpeted cat tree in the living room for his climbing pleasure. He appeared to have reached an understanding about sharing the house with the other resident feline.

Then one day his owners saw wet spots around the house: Shadow was urine-spraying. The door was a favorite target. So was the side of the sofa. And a corner wall of the living room.

Not to be confused with eschewing the litter pan, spraying is a ritual of territorial marking that cats sometimes do whether they are spayed or neutered — as Shadow is — or not.

Shadow’s keepers, Fernanda Gray and Elliot Goldberg, were distressed. Pet ownership, they believe, is a trust not to be betrayed. “I don’t throw animals away,” said Gray, who with her husband now owns three cats.

But Shadow’s spraying had tested the couple’s resolve. They had to replace draperies, carpeting and the sofa. Their veterinarian was running out of ideas to discourage Shadow’s habit.

Then Gray saw a small newspaper ad in 2001: “Spraying Cats Needed for Study.” Shadow was accepted into a double-blind study of an undisclosed medication’s effect on the behavior.

Fourteen days later, the spraying abruptly stopped.

The drug was Prozac. Five years later, Shadow is still taking the medication — half a 10-milligram tablet once a day — in its generic form, fluoxetine, a $16 supply of which lasts about four months.

“He’s still active, he’s still his hyperactive self,” Gray said. “But it just takes that anxiety away.”

THEY are the new “Prozac Nation”: cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners’ furniture has been spared by the use of antidepressants. Over the last decade, Prozac, Buspar, Amitriptyline, Clomicalm — clomipromine that is marketed expressly for dogs — and other drugs have been used to treat inappropriate, destructive and self-injuring behavior in animals.

It’s not a big nation yet. But “over the past five years, use has gone up quite a bit,” said veterinarian Richard Martin of the Brentwood Pet Clinic in West Los Angeles. Half a decade ago, no more than 1% of his patients were on antidepressants. Now, Martin estimates that 5% of the 8,000 cats and dogs seen at the clinic are taking drugs for their behavior.

The use of antidepressants is another example of the growing sophistication of medical care available to animals and willingly financed by owners who see pets as cherished companions. For these owners, drug therapy is not just another indulgence like Louis Vuitton carriers and day spas for the pampered pet. In their eyes, medication is urgent. Indeed, the new Prozac Nation is not populated with the worried well of the animal kingdom; it’s filled with animals behaving so badly they’re in danger of being cast off to a shelter and, possibly, a death sentence.

“If you have a cat that sprays constantly, that’s not a cat you’re likely to keep,” said Elyse Kent, the veterinarian who owns the Westside Hospital for Cats. “We were compelled to try these behavioral modification drugs.”

Kent has been treating cats with psychoactive drugs, mostly for spraying or aggression, for 12 years. After a UC Davis study published in 2001 showed that fluoxetine reduced feline spraying — and following the success of Kent’s patient, Shadow, in a Prozac trial — Prozac became a frequent choice at her clinic.

“I’d say twice a week, someone comes in to get a prescription for Prozac or fluoxetine or clomipromine,” said Kent, who nonetheless estimates that at any one time only 1% of her practice’s 3,000 patients are taking a psychoactive drug. (“Six weeks to three months is the average” length of treatment, she said.)

Veterinarians who prescribe psychoactive drugs insist they are not Dr. Feelgoods for the animal set. They do medical work-ups on animals, they say, to rule out physical causes for destructive or neurotic actions and prefer to use behavior modification instead of — or, at least, along with — drug therapy. Sometimes they have to deflate the expectations of owners eager to place their pets on antidepressants.

“I tell people if I had a magic pill, I would give it to them,” said veterinary behaviorist Karen Sueda, who works at the VCA West Los Angeles Animal Hospital. “In most cases when we give medication, it is not going to be a quick fix.”

Said Curtis Eng, chief veterinarian of the Los Angeles Zoo: “My feeling is they are a useful tool — one of many — to decrease stress and anxiety on an animal. If you can relieve the stressors through a behavior management program, I would much rather do that. But sometimes you need a little extra help to get them over that hump.”

When the zoo was coaxing a male orangutan, Minyak, back to respiratory health and enough energy for mating, veterinarians consulted with a psychiatrist and put the primate on the antidepressant Remeron.

“He was put on it for depression,” said Eng, who noted a beneficial side effect: Miknyak hadn’t been eating well and the drug increased his appetite. The orangutan bred successfully, fathering a healthy baby in 2005, and he is being weaned off the antidepressant.

THE drugs administered to animals fall mainly into two classes of antidepressants commonly prescribed to humans: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and tricyclics.

Both groups control the levels in the brain of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is believed to affect mood, depression and anxiety. The tricyclics also work on other neurotransmitters, including norepinephrine, which is thought to affect attention and impulsiveness.

In most cases, the drugs are being administered off-label, meaning they have not been put through the trials required for FDA approval for use in specific animals. (The Food and Drug Administration regulates drugs for both animals and humans.)

Clomicalm, a tricyclic manufactured by Novartis, is the only antidepressant approved by the FDA for dogs as a treatment for separation anxiety.

Veterinarian Scott Huggins, manager of technical marketing for Novartis, maker of Clomicalm, said that dogs are not intended to stay on it for life. “We don’t have specific studies on long-term use,” said Huggins, adding, “I do know it happens.”

In general, vets prefer to taper their patients’ use of the drugs. “We try to use these medications short-term,” said Kent. “Because they are not without side-effects.”

Antidepressants are believed to work on animals’ brain chemistry the same way they do on humans’. The difference is that veterinarians will not say they are treating clinical depression; many don’t believe an animal can be clinically depressed.

“A lot of the outward manifestations — decrease in appetite, trouble sleeping, not taking joy in activities — are there in dogs and cats,” Sueda said. “But you can’t ask a dog or cat, ‘Are you despondent?’ “

But veterinarians will say that animals experience anxiety. Dogs with separation anxiety can bark endlessly, destroy household furniture, gnaw through fences or even fling themselves out of windows after owners leave. Birds have compulsively plucked themselves to partial baldness. Troubled cats maul their owners, hide for hours or refuse to use their litter boxes.

Bob Stewart, now the sole owner of a cat since his companion, Anne Marie Schmitt, died of cancer, recalls how his otherwise mellow feline would turn into a leopard-like creature. At one point, when Serendipity clawed Schmitt’s arm badly enough to send her to the hospital, Stewart says they considered drastic action. “If we could not have gotten her controlled, as much as we loved the cat, we probably would have had to find a way to get her adopted or send her to one of these shelters,” said Stewart, a retired game show producer who created the original “The Price is Right” and “Password.”

The owners refused to have the cat declawed. Instead, for the last several years, a daily dose of “triple fish-flavored” fluoxetine has, for the most part, quashed Serendipity’s desire to practice her hunting skills on humans.

“I thought it made sense,” said Stewart, sitting in his apartment with Serendipity resting nearby. “They feel pain as we feel pain. They feel happiness as we feel happiness. I didn’t question the idea that a drug could change the persona of an animal.”

As with humans, choosing the right drug and dosage for an animal is a process of trial-and-error. “A lot of behavior treatment is an art,” Sueda said.

No one knows that better than Amy Weber, who adopted Sam, a spayed female dog, 10 years ago. The Labrador/beagle mix appears sweet-natured and calm as she lies in the living room of the rambling Beechwood Canyon home Weber shares with her partner, Wendy Schwartz, and five pets. The couple’s other dog, Scout, busily scouts for affection. A hulking orange cat, Stripper, saunters by, pausing to swat Sam. The action elicits a gasp from the humans but only a quizzical look from Sam.

For several years, Sam was anything but calm when her owners left the house. She scratched doors, chewed through washing machine hoses and gnawed the wood trim on windows, sometimes cutting her mouth. If she was left outside, she either dug her way out of the yard or ripped through wire fences, scratching her head in the process.

Weber tried Clomicalm, tranquilizers, homeopathic remedies and Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer.” But Sam’s separation anxiety defied all drugs and therapy for a time.

Although Weber, who edits movie trailers, put together a nearly full-time schedule of sitters and walkers for Sam, that didn’t stop the dog from going into a frenzy if Weber and Schwartz went out for the evening.

Then Weber hired Sueda, who put Sam on a regimen of Amitriptyline during the day and recommended Xanax at night if the couple wanted to go out. And she started the dog and her owners on a behavior training program.

(There are only 42 board-certified veterinary behaviorists in the world, according to Melissa Bain, chief of behavior service at the teaching hospital at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Technically, Sueda is not one of them — she hasn’t taken her boards yet — but she is, practically speaking, L.A.’s veterinary behaviorist.)

“I never look at medication as a cure-all — just like with people,” said the veterinarian, who delves into the history of each animal’s situation.

Appointments with Sueda aren’t cheap. A package of two lengthy visits — the first is two hours — follow-up phone calls and e-mails is $550, not counting what Sueda charges if she travels to the owner’s house.

Brand-name Prozac can cost more than $100 a month, but most vets now prescribe fluoxetine, a monthly regimen of which can cost pet owners a few dollars a month to about $20, depending on the dosage.

Bain is wary of medications. “Drugs don’t work that easily,” she said. “And they don’t work without behavior modification.”

Much of what animals do, Bain said, is normal, just unacceptable — a result of owners incorporating their pets into close urban quarters. “Breeds of animals have not changed that much in 20 or 30 years, but human society has,” she said.

“What have we done to our animals? In the last 30 years, we’ve kept them inside, we’ve made multiple-cat households. A border collie, 20 years ago, was living on a ranch in Colorado, and now he’s living in downtown San Francisco. So he can’t do his typical behavior.”

Moustafa Seoud, a veterinarian for 17 years, sees drugs like Clomicalm or Prozac as “an easy way out.” Seoud, who practices at the Laurel Pet Hospital in West Hollywood, relies on massage, acupuncture and homeopathic treatments. “Homeopathic flower essence works well for cats with different problems — stress and anxiety and kidney problems.”

He dispenses different types of remedies for different problems: “Camomile is calming; Ignatia for grieving; Nux Vomica for nervousness.” One of Seoud’s clients said that one time, as he prescribed a homeopathic remedy for her withdrawn cat, he popped some of it into his own mouth and declared: “You can take it too.”

Conventional drugs seem to be working for Sam, the dog with the bad case of separation anxiety. Weber tells Sueda that Sam has been fine when she’s left the dog alone for a few hours during the day. And Sam has stopped following Weber around the house constantly. “She’s just calmer,” Weber said.

“That’s what we’re aiming for,” Sueda said. “A general, overall sense of calm.”

Borrowed from www.pethealthcare.net

Note: trying to fix this format!

Other techniques are often suggested for play biting.

Some involve harsh discipline, like slapping the puppy under the chin or forcefully holding the mouth closed.

Remember, pain can cause aggression and cause the puppy to become anxious, fearful or perhaps more excited.

These techniques also require that you grab an excited puppy; not an easy thing to do.  Some puppies may even

misinterpret the owner’s attempts at punishment as rough play, which in turn might lead to an increase in the behavior.  Physical methods are therefore not

recommended.  Owners who cannot inhibit the puppy with a yelp, could consider a shake can, electronic alarm, air horn, or ultrasonic device, as soon as the biting

becomes excessive.

The use of a head halter with a remote leash attached allows the puppy to play

and chew, but a quick pull on the leash can immediately and successfully close

the mouth and stop biting without any physical force.

By simultaneously saying “no biting”, most puppies will quickly learn the meaning of the command.  As soon as the puppy stops and calms down, the owner can allow play to resume, as long as biting does not begin again.

Remember that play biting is a component of play behavior in puppies.  Play is a form of social interaction.  Realize that your puppy is trying to play with you even

though the behavior is rough.  To ensure that you are in control, be certain that each play session is initiated by you and not the puppy, and that you can end each

session whenever you choose.

One effective strategy when the play gets too rough is to immediately end the play session and leave.  Social withdrawal can be a very powerful tool.  Leave the puppy alone long enough to calm down.

If upon your return the wild playing begins again, leave again.

Although it is tempting to pick the puppy up and take it out of the room, this interaction may be interpreted by your puppy as additional play and the biting may continue as you carry the puppy to a confinement location.

vomiting vs regurgitation

that is the question

Know the difference… Regurgitation is a favorite pass time for my cats.

Cats can have “non-specific vomiting and/or vomiting and diarrhea… Know you pet..

good article below:

Vomiting is a very common problem in dogs and cats. There are many causes of vomiting. Primary or gastric causes of vomiting are those that are due to diseases of the stomach and upper intestinal tract. Secondary or non-gastric causes of vomiting are caused by diseases of other organs that cause an accumulation  of  toxic substances in the blood. These toxic substances stimulate the vomiting center in the brain causing the animal to vomit.

A problem that can be confused with vomiting is regurgitation. Vomiting is the ejection of contents of the stomach and upper intestine; regurgitation is the ejection of contents of the esophagus. The esophagus is a narrow, muscular tube that food passes through on its way to the stomach. In health, food moves quickly through the esophagus to the stomach. If the muscle of the esophagus loses tone, the esophagus dilates, a condition called megaesophagus. A dilated esophagus does not effectively move food to the stomach and the animal will regurgitate food usually shortly after eating. The food may also be inhaled into the airways causing pneumonia and cough.

When you present your pet to the veterinarian because he or she is vomiting, the veterinarian will ask questions in attempt to differentiate between vomiting and regurgitation and to try to determine if your pet is vomiting due to gastric or non gastric disease. Vomiting is an active process. The pet is apprehensive and heaves and retches to vomit. If food is present in vomit, it is partially digested and a yellow fluid, bile may be present. Regurgitation is fairly passive. The animal  lowers its head and food is expelled without effort.  The food brought up by regurgitation is usually undigested, may have a tubular shape, and is often covered with a slimy mucus. The pet will often try to eat the regurgitated material. You may bring a fresh sample of “vomit” for the veterinarian  to examine. The pH of vomit containing food is acid, the pH of regurgitated materials is higher. Your ability to answer questions about your pet’s activity, habits and environment will help the veterinarian decide which causes of vomiting are most likely in your pet. A history of any drugs your pet is receiving is important. Over-the-counter pain medications such as aspirin and ibuprofen can cause severe stomach ulcers in dogs depending upon the dose and duration of treatment.  The veterinarian may ask you to describe the appearance of the vomit, as well as describe how your pet looks when it vomits and the relation ship of vomiting to eating. If the vomit contains blood it may be fresh, red blood or look like coffee grounds if the blood is digested. Blood is most often seen with stomach ulcers, stomach cancer or uremia (a collection of signs including vomiting seen in pets with kidney failure). Stomach ulcers can be caused by drugs or the presence of a mast cell cancer in the skin. Mast cell cancers release histamine that leads to stomach ulcers. Regurgitation often, but not always, happens right after eating and the pet will try to eat the regurgitated food.  Vomiting occurs a variable time after eating or may occur in a pet who is off food. Animals with a twisted stomach, gastric dilation-torsion, may make frequent attempts to vomit without producing anything. Pets with a hacking cough may retch and sometime vomit at the end of an episode of forceful coughing.  An accurate description in this case would lead to an investigation of the causes of coughing, rather than vomiting.

If your pet vomits just occasionally and has a specific series of actions associated with vomiting, you may consider video taping an episode of vomiting to help describe the episodes to the veterinarian.

The physical examination of the vomiting pet can also provide information to narrow the list of possible causes.  The presence of fever, abdominal pain, jaundice, anemia or abnormal masses in the abdomen will help the veterinarian make a more specific diagnosis. The mouth should be carefully examined as some foreign objects such as string can wind around the base of the tongue with the rest of the object extending into the stomach or small intestine. A nodule may be palpated in the neck of cats with hyperthyroidism.

The list of non-gastric causes of vomiting is long.

Pancreatitis in the dog causes vomiting that is sudden in onset and often severe. The dog may have a painful belly. Pets with pancreatitis often have a  history of eating garbage or fatty table scraps. Tumors of the pancreas can cause similar signs to pancreatitis. Pancreatitis occurs in the cat but the signs are subtle and non specific and often don’t  include vomiting

Kidney failure is a common cause of vomiting in dogs and cats. The kidneys can be acutely (suddenly) damaged by poisons such as antifreeze or by severe dehydration.   Waste products that the kidneys normally get rid of, rise to high levels in just a few days. The kidneys can also gradually lose their ability to remove waste products from the body as the pet ages. Early signs of kidney failure include drinking and urinating large amounts called polyuria and polydipsia or PU-PD. PU-PD may be present for months to years before the kidney failure is severe enough to lead to waste product accumulation and vomiting. Vomiting in chronic kidney failure may began as occasional episodes and progress to severe, frequent vomiting. The pet with chronic kidney failure will often lose body condition and may have pale gums due to anemia.

Non-spayed, middle aged female pets can develop a uterine infection called pyometra. Pyometra occurs within 2 months after a heat cycle and often results in discharge of pus from the vagina. The pet may frequently lick the vagina so discharge may not be seen. Dogs develop pyometra more often than cats. Other signs may include PU-PD and depression.

Liver failure causes vomiting as well as other signs depending on the type of liver disease. Other signs of liver disease may include seizures, jaundice (a yellow discoloration of the areas of skin not covered by fur), PU-PD and fluid accumulation in the belly or legs. Bladder obstruction or rupture will cause a sudden onset of vomiting. The urethra that leads from the bladder to the outside can get plugged by stones or tumors. The animal  will strain and pass just a free drops of urine or none at all. They will also have a painful belly. Bladder obstruction if not corrected, is fatal in just a few days. The bladder can be ruptured by blunt trauma such as being hit by a car or kicked.

A form of diabetes called ketoacidosis will cause vomiting along with depression and PU-PD.

Addison’s disease is a deficiency of hormones from the adrenal gland and causes vomiting, diarrhea and weakness. Addison’s disease occurs most commonly in young to middle aged dogs, most of which are female. Addison’s is rare in the cat.  The signs of Addison’s disease may be intermittent or may be very severe and constant.

Diseases of the inner ear can cause vomiting accompanied by incoordination, circling and tilting of the head to the side. Motion during car rides stimulates the inner ear and can cause vomiting.

A sudden onset of vomiting in young, poorly vaccinated pets may be caused by infectious agents including canine distemper, canine parvovirus and feline panleukopenia virus.

There are many toxins including lead, insecticides, antifreeze and other chemicals that can cause vomiting.

Cats with elevated thyroid function, hyperthyroidism, may vomit in addition to other signs including, increased appetite, weight loss, hyperactivity and a poorly kept coat. Heartworm disease in cats may cause vomiting in addition to coughing, respiratory distress, weight loss and depression.

Primary causes of vomiting include acute gastritis often due to eating garbage or other types of dietary indiscretions; the ingestion of large amounts of hair during grooming; ulcers of the stomach; stomach or upper intestinal cancer; parasites; food allergies; the presence of a foreign body stuck in the stomach or upper intestine; twisting and dilation of the stomach; and intussusception which is a telescoping of one part of the intestine into another piece of intestine.

The stomach is usually empty 6 to 8 hours after eating. Vomiting of  food when the stomach should be empty suggests an obstruction of the stomach or abnormal motion of the stomach muscles that normally grind food and push the ground food out of the stomach.

Tests to differentiate primary causes of vomiting include x-rays or ultrasound of the abdomen and endoscopy. Endoscopy is the technique of passing a flexible scope into the stomach and upper intestine to examine the inside of these structures. It may be possible to remove a foreign body with endoscopy and small biopsies of the lining of the stomach and intestine can be taken for microscopic evaluation. Endoscopy requires general anesthesia.

If the pet vomits sporadically, the results of all tests may be normal. Many healthy dogs and cats vomit occasionally without identifying a cause. Sometimes the cause of vomiting is as simple as the pet eating too fast.  The treatment for vomiting depends upon the cause. Nonspecific treatment for vomiting includes fasting, and fluids to correct or prevent dehydration.  In episodes of sudden onset of vomiting,  food is withheld for 24 – 48 hours and water for 24 hours. Water should never be withheld from an animal with known or suspected kidney disease without replacing fluids intravenously or subcutaneously (under the skin). If vomiting stops, small amounts of a bland low-fat food are fed 3 to 6 times daily for a few days, with a gradual increase in the amount fed and a gradual transition to the pet’s normal diet. Water is also reintroduced in small amounts on the second day. You may start with  ice cubes and then gradually increase the amount of water over the day if vomiting does not reoccur.

If the pet is bright and alert and has had no previous health problems, episodes of acute vomiting  may be managed at home, although veterinary consultation prior to home treatment is advised.  Consultation with a veterinarian in your region may reveal a recent outbreak of an infectious disease causing vomiting or identify  a cluster of recent poisonings. With this type of knowledge you will want to have your pet evaluated rather than waiting a few days. Dogs and cats who vomit for longer than a few days or are depressed or dehydrated should be presented for veterinary evaluation.

reprint from:www.preciouspets.org

Believe it or not, this is not a housetraining problem. It has to do with some normal canine behavior patterns that you can and should deal with in a positive way.

Dogs are instinctively programmed to accept the authority of creatures (animal and human) that they consider to be superior to them. They seek the approval of their superiors and are eager to please them. Many dog owners prefer a dog who is submissive to people and eager to please, and selective breeding has produced many domestic dogs with this characteristic.

Some dogs are more submissive than others. Very submissive dogs, shy dogs that lack self-confidence and often young pups will urinate when in the presence of more dominant dogs and humans. It’s their instinctive way of telling the superior “You are my Supreme Master. Your wish is my command. Please don’t hurt me!”

Puppies usually outgrow this behavior as they mature. Dogs who are naturally shy, insecure, extremely submissive, or who have been abused may continue to exhibit submission in this way even as adults. It is generally an involuntary, subconscious reflex. The dog isn’t deliberately trying to do it. As a matter of fact, he may not even be aware that he’s doing it at the time!

Many dog owners mistakenly believe that this type of urination is a housetraining problem, and try to correct it with discipline. To their dismay and frustration, rather than improving, the dog’s problem gets worse! Because the message he’s sending is misunderstood by the owner, the dog is caught in a vicious cycle – his instincts tell him to urinate to please his superior by showing submission. But when he does, he is punished. He then tries harder to please by urinating even more. This results in more punishment, and still more urination. After a time, the dog may become so confused and insecure that he urinates at the mere sight of a human being or another dog.

If discipline won’t solve the problem, what will? Your task is to take the excitement and stress out of the periods that previously triggered submissive urination. Get cooperation from all members of the family. When you first get home, you can anticipate that the dog will get excited and urinate so you need to minimize the excitement. Instead of an enthusiastic greeting to your dog, quietly walk in the door and go about your business. Let him outside to pee as usual, but without any fanfare. If you talk to him at all, just say “Hi Rover” in a calm, casual tone of voice. Don’t make eye contact with him or pet him. After he settles down, very gently crouch down to his level presenting to him sideways (this makes you very non-threatening), then calmly and quietly praise him and tell him he’s good. Be sure to tell your family and visitors to do the same.

Do everything you can to boost your dog’s confidence. As he becomes more confident, he may feel less of a need to display extreme submissive behavior:

* Positive reinforcement obedience training does wonders for a dog’s confidence! An untrained dog is doesn’t know how to communicate with humans or how to behave, but the trained dog understands what’s expected of him, and the words you say to him. He’s confident because he has the tools with which to please his superiors.
* Socialization at training classes, dog daycare, at the park, or just going with you on errands and to visit friends can do wonders for your dog’s confidence. Have guests over who are willing to help out with this problem.
* Agility training is another wonderfully fun way to boost your dog’s confidence using physical obstacles and mental stimulation as well as new human words to understand and obey.
* Incorporate basic obedience (Sit, Stay, Fetch, Come, etc.) into your daily life and when your dog obeys, he gains confidence through your praise. Just don’t overdo the praise (this can result in a puddle!). A simple “Good boy” and gentle pat is enough.
* Minimize the occasions your dog makes you want to scold him; think about what your dog does that causes you to scold him. For example, does he get into the trash, steal your children’s toys or chew on your sneakers? By simply putting a lid on the trash can or putting it into a closet and requiring your family to pick up after themselves, these situations can be eliminated. The easier you make it for your dog to do what you want, the quicker he’ll learn and his confidence will grown. On the other hand, discipline, scolding and physical punishment will simply reduce his confidence and worsen your submissive urination problem.
* Dogs, especially shy or submissive ones, are very sensitive to body language and tone of voice. Bending over a dog is a “dominant” posture that may provoke an accident. Instead, get down to your dog’s level by crouching or kneeling, preferably at his side rather than head-on.
* These dogs are often intimidated by direct eye contact as well. Look at your dog’s face without looking directly into his eyes, and only for very short periods.
* If you are expecting guests, take your dog for a walk and get his bladder emptied ahead of time, and restrict water consumption for an hour before your guests are to arrive.
* When speaking to your dog, use a calm, confident, moderate tone of voice. Avoid very high or low extremes in pitch. Don’t “coochy-coo” or babytalk to your dog either. These tones can create excitement that results in submissive urination.

Don’t scold or punish your dog for urinating submissively. It will only make things worse. He can’t be held responsible for something he doesn’t understand or even know he’s doing. Instead, use these methods to get to the root of the matter: His basic insecurity and lack of confidence. When he’s made progress in these areas, submissive urination often disappears on its own. How long will it take? Every dog is different and it’s impossible to say for sure. With most dogs, following our directions will show a noticeable difference within a short time. Solving the problem altogether depends on your hard work, patience, consistency and willingness to stick with it.

Can We Really Save Every Healthy/Treatable Shelter Pet in America?

February 25, 2011

Nathan Winograd has a post detailing why “pet overpopulation” is a myth:

1. How many dogs and cats enter shelters annually? 8 million. (Some put it as low as 6 million, but I am going to use a “worst case” scenario.)
2. Of those how many are savable? 90 percent or just over 7 million.
3. Of those how many will be saved? 4 million.
4. How many of the savable animals are killed? 3 million.
5. How many need to find new homes? If shelters are doing their jobs comprehensively, just over 2 million (3 million on the high end). The remainder should be increased reclaims or in the case of feral cats, TNR’d.
6. Other than those who will adopt from a shelter as a matter of course (those saved above), how many people in the U.S. are looking to bring a new dog or cat into their home next year but have not decided where they will get the animal and can be influenced to adopt from a shelter? 17 million. So, 17 million people for 2-3 million dogs and cats.

The Shelter Pet Project has a Powerpoint presentation here.  The first several pages explain how we can find homes for all the healthy/treatable pets in shelters in the U.S. and include a slide on the methodology behind the numbers:

To fully understand the problem and to strategize wisely on the solution, the Ad Council and Draftfcb:

•conducted in-depth research

•ran surveys and focus groups

•met with The HSUS and Maddie’sFund at length

•…and visited shelters

HSUS has a press release on the Shelter Pet Project on their website:

According to The Humane Society of the United States and Maddie’s Fund, eight million pets enter shelters and rescue groups every year, with three million of these healthy and treatable pets euthanized due to a lack of adoption.
[...]
“By reaching a subset of the population uncertain about where they’ll obtain their next dog or cat and convincing them that an animal shelter is the best source, we can end the euthanasia of homeless dogs and cats in this country,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.

Maddie’s Fund looks at the shelter numbers here:

There are around 3 million healthy or treatable dogs and cats put to death in shelters each year.

There are 14 million people who have adopted shelter pets already, and another 41 million who’ve indicated they’re considering doing so – we call those the “swing voters,” and of them, 17 million will bring a pet into their family in the next year.

We only need to convince 3 million of those 17 million to do what they are already considering doing, get their new pet from a shelter, and every treatable or healthy cat or dog in America will have found a home.

[...]

America’s approximately 4,000 animal shelters are currently adopting out more than 4 million pets per year – between 2 and 3 per shelter, per day. By simply increasing that by an additional 2 pets per shelter, per day, the 3 million healthy and treatable pets who currently lose their lives in shelters will be saved.

Does a no kill nation seem achievable to you?

I am reposting this blog. “Samantha” was adopted last night by a 13 year old girl and her family..  Hope this helps…

I love my cats because I love my home, and little by little they become its visible soul.’
~Jean Couteau

GIVE IT A FEW WEEKS.. they do come around.. keep cat in a small space like a bathroom so you will see them often and they can’t hide… of course there is always the adult cat that just takes over from day one.

good info below:
If you are adopting an adult cat, you should be aware that it will take time for him to feel secure in his new environment. Be patient as he will come around eventually and you can reap the rewards of having an adult cat, and you will have bypassed most of the training.

If you have acquired an adult cat, transport him home in a carrier, where he will be safe and secure. Do not be tempted to let him loose in the car. He will most likely be fearful and could scratch or bite you while he is trying to hide.

Once home, do not turn him loose in the house. Your primary concern in to ensure that he has a safe refuge away from people and other pets. Unlike a kitten, he will not cry for his siblings, but he will probably seek out a hiding place in his room.

Provide him with water and food dishes and a litter pan in his room. If he hides under a piece of furniture, place a cat bed or small blanket there for his comfort. He will not use a pillow or cat bed in the open until he feels secure.

Cats do not like changes. They especially dislike moving to a new house or being confronted with any new furniture in their old one. So your adult cat has a double burden to contend with because he has lost both his old home and his old furnishing.

There is no yardstick by which you can measure how long it will take for your cat to feel comfortable. Some will come around within a few days and others may take weeks or even months. Patience is the key to helping him adjust.

Avoid talking loudly and do not make sudden movements. Cats dislike noise and raised voices almost as much as they dislike a new house. Do not pick him up against his will and do not force him to come out of hiding. This will frighten him and he may not be able to trust you again.

As long as he is easting food, drinking water and using his litter pan, you have won half the battle. If he is too afraid to come to you, try sitting quietly on the floor and talking softly to him.

New York Playboy Bunnies.. now

http://afterthehutch.info

photos by Jan Reesman

Trap Neuter release feral