Dr. Michael W. Fox A variety of psychotropic drugs have proven to be beneficial for treating people with various emotional and behavioral problems, such as anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Veterinarians are discovering that these drugs can help in treating similar problems in dogs. These clinical findings support my contention that the inner world of dogs, their consciousness and emotionality, must be similar in many ways to ours, otherwise these psychotropic drugs would not result in similar clinical improvement in dogs as in human patients. Some have potentially harmful side effects. Turning a dog into a chemically-dependent zombie is ethically untenable.
Separation anxiety is one of the most common emotional disorders to afflict dogs today.
I find it ethically questionable to drug a dog who is suffering from boredom and loneliness and becomes a house-wrecker. Wherever possible, dogs basic needs should be met and their environments changed for their benefit rather than changing their brain chemistry to help them cope with and adapt to a relatively deprived existence. Many behavioral and emotional problems in dogs have a complex genesis, including the animal s genetic background and basic temperament, the dog s rearing history and experiences earlier in life, and current factors in the dog s immediate environment and family relations, including other animals as well as people in the home. The judicious use of psychotropic drugs, with careful monitoring and individual dose-adjustments is appropriate, I believe, but only as a last resort for those conditions when behavioral counseling and modification procedures have failed. Often the dogs can be slowly weaned off these drugs and, in the process, they seem to learn to cope better with the conditions or stimuli that caused their behavioral disturbance in the first place.