Health Diaries > Animal Health
January 29, 2007
Prozac: Not Just For People Anymore
Filed under Cat Health
Pet owners of late have been turning to pharmaceuticals to control their animals' behavior. Cats that are spraying too much, dogs that become anxious when left home alone, cats scratching furniture - these are things that are being treated with Prozac.
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.
The ethical question here is: what exactly is "inappropriate" animal behavior? Cats like to scratch - it's normal behavior. Is it okay to medicate an animal to change its normal behavior just because that behavior doesn't fit into your lifestyle?
Melissa Bain, chief of behavior service at the teaching hospital at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, says:
“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.”
Indeed, what have we done and what are we doing to our animals?
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