On Anxiety Medication for Dogs...

Authors: John Stonestreet and Shane Morris

Each year, as fireworks light up the sky on the Fourth of July, social media lights up with angry pet owners pleading against them. On July 5, ABC 10 News in San Diego reported that the local Humane Society had already picked up over 100 stray animals, mostly dogs, that were frightened away from their homes by the loud explosions. One employee told reporters she anticipated that number to quadruple in the coming days.  

The increased concern over how pyrotechnics affect pets is partly due to Americans having way more pets than ever before. Since 2023, the number of dogs has increased by over three million, putting the nation’s total of domestic canines at over 68 million. At the same time, pet medication has become a lucrative medical industry. The pet supply website Chewy.com lists the ten most common medications for paranoid pups, and, according to a 2016 study, 83% of veterinarians prescribed anxiety meds for dogs as a standard part of their practice. 

This coincides, of course, with the explosion of mental health diagnoses and “therapy speak” among humans, as described, for instance, in Abigail Shrier’s book, Bad Therapy. Thus, it may be possible that some owners are projecting their own mental struggles onto their pets. For instance, liberal political beliefs show strong correlation with mental health diagnoses. Little surprise, then, as noted in The Atlantic, that “vet behaviorists are mostly clustered in liberal areas . . .” Many assume that since their psychiatrist helps them cope with medication, the same can be done for their dog.  

The press has pounced on this idea. In a 2022 New York Times piece entitled “Puppies on Prozac,” owners were told how to “spot the signs” of anxiety and other disorders in their pets. The article even described undesirable animal behaviors as “mental illness,” rather than a sign of insufficient training.  

The worldview assumption at work here is that, if human emotional and spiritual problems can be solved with a prescription, so can Fido’s. This results from a culture that both promotes animals to human-like status and demotes humans to highly evolved animal status. Anthropomorphizing animals causes owners to interpret their behavior as more than just instinct or conditioning. “Darwin-ising” humans justifies eliminating unwanted people as we would pesky animals. The result is a culture in which both dogs and humans are treated in remarkably similar and inappropriate ways.  

So, more people than ever refer to pets as children. Back in 2023 in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch proposed that may be what is driving them crazy: 

As Americans have fewer kids, they’ve begun to think of their pets as children and to act as “helicopter” fur-parents . . . Animals tend to live longer under these conditions, but they miss out on mental stimulation and interaction with their own species. That might make them anxious or aggressive toward people and other dogs.  

In short, cramming an animal into a crate in an apartment for hours a day may not be what’s best. More fundamentally, the emotional demands made by increasingly isolated people on their pets may be too much for them to handle. Ironically, all the increased American sentimentality about pets may not be good for them. Horowitch’s conclusion is that “[i]t might be time, in other words, to reevaluate the way we approach dog ownership.” 

She’s right, but much more important is what all this says about how we think about humans in our time and culture. Excessive mental health diagnoses, overmedication, epidemic loneliness and addictions, and looking for answers in all of the wrong places speaks of our deep spiritual confusion.  

Animals are wonderful. Our connections with them are real and deep. They cannot, however, fill the human need for human friendship, love, or solace. Certainly, the God-shaped hole in our hearts can never be filled by a pet. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelled backwards.” We would do well to remember this, and that we should not be giving pets medication for what is, in reality, our anxiety.