Marcia Munt was 47 when she adopted her first canine. It was 2020, the peak of the pandemic, and her home felt empty. Maisie was a nine-week-old bundle of cream-colored fur and lopsided ears. But Munt, a guide in Sacramento, quickly turned satisfied that the canine was not regular. Maisie howled at any stimulus. She paced all night time and pounced on anybody who got here to the home. Munt, who had solely ever owned cats, couldn’t perceive why anybody would select to have a canine. “I had been the best dog mother I could be,” she informed me. But she spent a lot of that first 12 months in tears.
Maisie’s vet prescribed fluoxetine, higher often known as Prozac, but it surely ruined the canine’s urge for food. Munt then turned to Melissa Bain, a veterinary behaviorist with a wider pharmaceutical arsenal. Maisie now takes venlafaxine, an antidepressant, and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant, with an possibility for the sedative clonidine in significantly fraught conditions. “It’s a bit of a cocktail that is always being adjusted,” Munt mentioned. She spends tons of of {dollars} every month on Maisie’s care and considers it nicely value it. Perhaps probably the most helpful remedy Bain supplied, nonetheless, was for the human, not the canine. “Honestly, it just felt cathartic in many ways,” Munt informed me. “She said, ‘It’s Maisie. It’s not you. You have done everything you need to do.’”
The rise in nervousness amongst American people has been exhaustively documented. With a lot much less fanfare, we additionally appear to have entered the age of the anxious canine. Last fall, a New York Times wellness column offered earnest recommendation on “How to Handle Your Pet’s Anxiety”; the writer, reporting that veterinarians have been observing an uptick in stressed-out animals, famous that two of her editors had cats on Prozac. In a 2016 study83 p.c of veterinary normal practitioners reported prescribing dogs anti-anxiety medicine. (In the Nineteen Nineties, some started prescribing Prozac off-label; the FDA approved a model for treating canine separation nervousness in 2007.) Although there aren’t any complete statistics on the share of dogs on prescription nervousness meds, greater than half of American canine homeowners mentioned that they purchase “calming” merchandise together with pheromone spray and Lycra jumpsuits, in keeping with the American Pet Products Association’s 2023–24 pet-owners survey. Google searches for canine nervousness have roughly tripled over the previous decade. Many of America’s 85 veterinary behaviorists are booked months upfront. The seven I spoke with mentioned that the variety of folks searching for pet mental-health care has exploded prior to now few years. But there isn’t a consensus as to why.
One principle is that dogs at this time actually are extra anxious. Rather than shopping for from a breeder, extra Americans are selecting to undertake. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, shelters are euthanizing almost two-thirds fewer animals than they have been a decade in the past. Adoption saves lives, but it surely typically leaves traumatized pets with inexperienced homeowners. Meanwhile, we’ve additionally altered the best way pets stay. Pet dogs (and cats) used to spend extra time exterior; now, specialists informed me, they’re more likely to remain indoors. When they do go exterior, they’re stored on leashes or underneath supervision. As Americans have fewer youngsters, they’ve begun to consider their pets as youngsters and to behave as “helicopter” fur-parents, the bioethicist Jessica Pierce informed me. Animals are inclined to stay longer underneath these situations, however they miss out on psychological stimulation and interplay with their very own species. That may make them anxious or aggressive towards folks and different dogs. The pandemic dog-buying spike heightened all of those dynamics, as hundreds of thousands of dogs spent their first years socially distancing.
Still, the proliferation of medicated dogs may say extra about their homeowners. Vet behaviorists are principally clustered in liberal areas; so are human nervousness diagnoses. Amy Pike began her profession training in rural Kentucky, the place her consumer checklist was brief. Now she serves pet homeowners in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and business is booming. In Pike’s view, that’s as a result of her new neighbors have a wholesome respect for the science round pet psychological well being and medicine. She and different vet behaviorists imagine that dogs have all the time been anxious, and that the welcome destigmatization of human mental-health points has allowed us to lastly acknowledge their struggling. But it may very well be that anxious adults are projecting their very own points onto their furry companions. Some canine homeowners have clearly begun to pathologize regular canine habits. A 2019 survey concluded that 85 p.c of dogs had behavioral issues; almost half of the homeowners reported that their pet had nervousness. The numbers appear unbelievable, till you take a look at the checklist of dangerous behaviors. Repetitive behaviors like digging within the yard or displaying a “tennis ball fetish” certified, as did extreme barking. What folks classify as a behavioral subject, mentioned Pierce, the bioethicist, displays human expectations as a lot as a canine’s nature.
So is the dog-anxiety disaster actual, or is it a product of homeowners’ anxiety-riddled psyches? Dogs can’t inform us how they’re feeling, so we’ll in all probability by no means know. But each explanations are miserable. Either people are stressing dogs out a lot that they really want prescription meds, or homeowners are placing their dogs on pointless psychoactive medication to deal with annoying however regular canine habits. It is perhaps time, in different phrases, to reevaluate the best way we strategy canine possession. Many Americans don’t have the time, vitality, or inexperienced area their pets must thrive. If the selection is to medicate our dogs or to make them, and ourselves, depressing, pet possession begins to appear ethically murky. “Ideally, a lot fewer people would own dogs and cats,” Pierce informed me.
That’s a tough message for pet lovers to listen to. When I used to be rising up, my household had a labradoodle named Trixie. For a lot of her life, she was a dog-park canine, happiest when chasing tennis balls and sniffing puppy butts. But about midway via her 15 years, she was bitten by one other canine. After the incident, Trixie snarled and snapped at different dogs she met. We spent much less time on the park.
My conversations with pet behaviorists made me surprise if I had failed her. It hadn’t occurred to me to slather Xanax in peanut butter and slip it into her kibble. Had I missed the indicators that my canine wanted remedy? I requested Bain, the veterinary behaviorist, about this. I may sense that she thought the reply was sure. But she was mild about it. “Were you a bad owner when your dog barked at other dogs?” she requested. I started fumbling out a response, however she interrupted me. “No. No. No. You weren’t,” she mentioned. “You didn’t know any better.”
It was form of her to reassure me. But I used to be nonetheless left to wonder if medicating dogs is of their finest curiosity—or ours.
