Canine Normalcy in 2000

My family consists of five members: my parents, my sister and Sadie, our dog. Sadie is a nine-year-old beagle, very friendly and about seven pounds overweight. The beagle breed is known for its amazing capacity to eat, and Sadie is no exception. She will eat carrots, celery, salsa, glass, teabags, nearly anything that falls on the floor if there is even the possibility that it might be edible. So it goes without saying that Sadie loves Thanksgiving. In fact, one Thanksgiving, while the extended family was eating in our dining room, the dog managed to pull down the entire serving tray of turkey that was sitting in our kitchen and gorge herself on the then-desecrated bird (a la A Christmas Story). These are the kind of shenanigans that I have come to expect and even admire from our family dog during Thanksgiving. While normally Thanksgiving is the most languid of all the holidays, consisting of heroic acts of gluttony followed by digestion-induced catatonia, I could always trust Sadie to pull some sort of caper that would derail the otherwise smooth-running family affair.

But I came home to Thanksgiving this year to find a new dog. While the outward appearance of Sadie was the same as it had always been (with maybe a few more grey hairs), her outward behavior was markedly different. This year, instead of continually and incessantly begging for and attempting to steal food, Sadie walked around in a fog, her tail lazily wagging, with what I would swear was a stupid grin on her face. When I asked my parents about this strange, albeit more manageable behavior, they confided that they had placed our family dog on anti-anxiety medication, the equivalent, I would guess, of doggie-Prozac. They said she had grown unmanageable in the past few months, chewing up furniture and digging in the carpeting, and that our veterinarian had diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder for which there was a simple and economical cure: two pills a day.

So this year there were no canine-related disasters. Sadie was much better behaved, in keeping with the general spirit of the holiday. She loped around in a half-hearted attempt to wait for scraps under the Thanksgiving table. While before the mere smell of turkey cooking in the oven would drive her into a frenzy, the fires of her belly had been quenched by chemicals administered to her brain.

Treating dogs with anti-depressants is actually a booming business. Recently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has started approving psycho-tropic drugs for the treatment of a host of mental diseases in dogs, from separation anxiety to aggression. The market for dogs with separation anxiety (defined as going crazy and tearing up couches when master is away at work) is estimated at 14 percent (Sadie included) of the total dog population, or about seven million dogs.

But why be surprised at this? In a culture where Ritalin is passed out like candy in grade-school, attention deficit disorder is equated with normal third-grade behavior and a statistically significant number of toddlers are going on antidepressants, why shouldn't dogs too should join in the pharmacological bonanza?

The question is one of normalcy (to borrow a phrase from the Harding administration). I would hold that our concept of normalcy in behavior and emotional well-being is narrowing, making the once merely overly rambunctious dog (or child) now a victim of an unfortunate psychological disease. To bring these unfortunate souls into the envelope of normalcy again, all that is needed is a little green meanie. But this sort of socially constructed and varying conception of normalcy brings up legitimate ethical problems.

Medicating dogs or children, in fact anyone (or anything) who cannot, for one reason or another, give informed consent is the slipperiest of ethical slopes. While the benefits of medication are quite substantial to some, and would seem to be quite ethically justifiable, other cases are not nearly so cut and dry. It seems many children are being medicated for convenience sake and not out of a true sense of stewardship of their best interest.

What is the next step in this constant social push of parents and pet owners to keep the behavior of those whom they control as close as possible to a continually narrowing socially constructed definition of "normal?" Will children and their pets soon be engineered from birth not to experience sadness and never chew on the carpeting? Will they be house-trained from birth? Will we suppress their libidos until they turn 21 (in their respective age-counting regimes)? Where does the right of a guardian stop?

As I finish this column, I think I will grab some of the leftover turkey from the fridge and give it to Sadie. Not only because I feel a deep need to get rid of all the turkey in this house before it is served as leftovers for the fourth time, but also because I feel sorry that this year she did not have the chance to steal it from the table herself.

B.J. Greenleaf '01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.