Marcia Munt was 47 when she adopted her first dog. It was 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and her house seemed empty. Maisie was a nine-week-old little bundle with cream-colored fur and lopsided ears. But Munt, a consultant in Sacramento, soon became convinced that the dog was not normal. Maisie screamed at any stimulus. She paced around all night and lunged at anyone who came into the house. Munt, who had only ever owned cats, didn’t understand why anyone would choose to have a dog. “I had been the best dog mom I could be,” she told me. But she spent much of that first year in tears.
Maisie’s vet prescribed fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, but it ruined the dog’s appetite. Munt then turned to Melissa Bain, a veterinary behaviorist with a broader pharmaceutical arsenal. Maisie now takes venlafaxine, an antidepressant, and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant, with an option for clonidine, a sedative, in particularly tense situations. “It’s a bit of a cocktail that’s always being adjusted,” Munt said. She spends hundreds of dollars each month on Maisie’s care and believes it’s worth it. However, perhaps the most valuable treatment Bain offered was for humans, not dogs. “Honestly, it was cathartic in a lot of ways,” Munt told me. “She said, ‘It’s Maisie. It’s not you. You did everything you had to do.‘”
The rise in anxiety among Americans has been documented extensively. With much less noise, it also seems we have entered the age of the anxious dog. Last fall, a New York Times well-being chronicle Free serious advice on “How to Manage Your Pet’s Anxiety”; The author, reporting that veterinarians were seeing an increase in stressed animals, noted that two of his editors had cats on Prozac. In a 2016 study, 83 percent of general veterinary doctors reported prescribing anti-anxiety medications to dogs. (In the 1990s, some began prescribing Prozac off-label; the FDA approved a version to treat separation anxiety in dogs in 2007.) Although there are no comprehensive statistics on the share of dogs taking prescription anti-anxiety medications, more than half of U.S. dog owners reported purchasing “calming” products, including pheromone sprays and Lycra bodysuits, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2023-2024 Pet Owner Survey. Google search dog anxiety have almost tripled over the past decade. Many of America’s 85 veterinary behaviorists are booked months in advance. All seven people I spoke with said the number of people seeking pet mental health care has exploded in recent years. But there is no consensus on why.
One theory is that today’s dogs really are more anxious. Rather than purchasing from a breeder, more and more Americans are choosing to adopt. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, nearly two-thirds of people are euthanized in shelters. less animals than they were ten years ago. Adoption saves lives, but it sometimes leaves animals traumatized in the hands of inexperienced owners. At the same time, we have also changed the way pets live. Pet dogs (and cats) spent more time outside; now, experts told me, they are much more likely to stay indoors. When they go out, they are kept on a leash or under supervision. As Americans have fewer children, they have begun to view their pets as children and act like “helicopter” fur parents, bioethicist Jessica Pierce told me. Animals tend to live longer in these conditions, but they lack mental stimulation and interaction with their own species. This could make them anxious or aggressive towards people and other dogs. The pandemic peak in dog purchases increase all these dynamics, while millions of dogs spent their early years socially distancing.
Yet the proliferation of drug dogs could say more about their owners. Veterinary behaviorists are mostly grouped in liberal areas; so are human anxiety diagnoses. Amy Pike began her career practicing in rural Kentucky, where her client list was short. She now serves pet owners in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, and business is booming. According to Pike, this is because his new neighbors have a great respect for the science surrounding pet mental health and medications. She and other veterinary behaviorists believe that dogs have always been anxious, and that the welcome destigmatization of human mental health issues has allowed us to finally recognize their suffering. But it could be that anxious adults project their own problems onto their four-legged friends. Some dog owners have clearly begun to pathologize normal canine habits. A 2019 survey concluded that 85 percent of dogs had behavioral problems; Nearly half of owners said their pet suffered from anxiety. The numbers seem incredible, until you look at the list of bad behaviors. Repetitive behaviors like digging in the yard or displaying a “tennis ball fetish” qualify, as does excessive barking. What people consider a behavioral problem, said Pierce, the bioethicist, reflects human expectations as much as a dog’s nature.
So, is anxiety attack in dogs real or is it a product of the owners’ anxious psyche? Dogs can’t tell us what they’re feeling, so we’ll probably never know. But both explanations are depressing. Either humans stress dogs so much that they really need prescription medications, or owners are putting their dogs on unnecessary psychoactive medications to combat annoying but normal canine habits. In other words, it may be time to re-evaluate how we approach dog ownership. Many Americans don’t have the time, energy, or green space their pets need to thrive. If the choice is to medicate our dogs or make them, and ourselves, miserable, pet ownership begins to seem ethically murky. “Ideally, a lot fewer people would own dogs and cats,” Pierce told me.
This is a difficult message for animal lovers to hear. When I was a child, my family had a labradoodle named Trixie. For much of her life, she was a dog park dog, happiest when chasing tennis balls and sniffing puppies’ butts. But around the halfway point of her 15th birthday, she was bitten by another dog. After the incident, Trixie growled and lashed out at other dogs she encountered. We spent less time at the park.
My conversations with animal behaviorists left me wondering if I had let him down. It hadn’t occurred to me to slather Xanax with peanut butter and slip it into his kibble. Did I miss the signs that my dog needed treatment? I asked Bain, the veterinary behaviorist, about this. I could sense that she thought the answer was yes. But she was gentle about it. “Were you a bad owner when your dog barked at other dogs?” she asked. I started to search for an answer, but she interrupted me. “No. No, no. You weren’t,” she said. “You didn’t know any better.”
It was nice of him to reassure me. But I still wondered if treating the dogs was in their best interest – or ours.