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?
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.
Big Pharma makes big money from pumping our bodies full of their drugs. Now it looks like they are cashing in more by doing the same to our pets.
Posted by: Don Davidson | June 16, 2009 at 05:46 PM
When my 8-year old dog was diagnosed with cancer and given 6-weeks to live w/o chemo, radiation & surgery, I INSTEAD, took a holistic approach:
confronting the CAUSE (toxin load on her immune system from commercial dog food and household products) rather than bombarding the symptoms.
She was soon cancer-free, and she thrived for an additional 11 years (til the age of 19).
I believe that for the most part, big pharma for pets is just one more industry focused on the bottom line more than health and well-being.
When pet parents start feeding pure, nutritional food instead of most commercial dog food- when they begin replacing all the household chemicals they are unconsciously exposing their pets to (eg: dryer sheets, air fresheners, cleaning products, flea poison) with natural, non chemical products, then they can eliminate the need for symptom-suppressing drugs. (Same regimen works on people, too :)
Nadine M. Rosin/author, speaker, holistic health care advocate
Posted by: Nadine M. Rosin | June 23, 2009 at 08:10 PM
doggies on Prozac is so common..what a shame.
Posted by: Poodle Information | August 14, 2009 at 06:01 PM