Helping Man's Best Friend

I was playing doubles with my tennis buddies earlier this week, courtesy of some free indoor court time via a Parks and Rec program that has at least temporarily restored my faith in government of, by, and for the people. In the friendly post-match chat we got to talking about our dogs and one of my buddies mentioned that his dog was so anxious and whiny that his vet had put the dog on Prozac, which prescription my friend, without any apparent hesitation, has dutifully filled and refilled at ten bucks a pop for a several-month supply of the ubiquitous selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

After wondering whether there was a pill that could make my otherwise perfect pooch Sy stop taking dumps in the children’s play room, I got to thinking about the notion of administering antidepressants to dogs. My thinking was problematized by James Davies’ excellent Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry, in which Davies reports that meta analyses of both published and, crucially, unpublished (as in withheld by the pharmaceutical companies because the outcomes didn’t suit their purposes) clinical trials demonstrate that antidepressants, but for the most severely depressed patients, do not result in statistically significant better outcomes than placebo.

My initial question might well have been why we should presume that a medicine which is efficacious for the human mind would be similarly so for the canine “mind,” when it is not at all clear that words like “mind” and “mental illness” can even be used meaningfully with dogs. But having read Davies I find myself instead asking whether dogs themselves are benefitting from their own form of placebo effect, which I find rather unlikely (the placebo effect being bound up with beliefs, and while I would agree that a dog may very well believe that the ground its master walks on is holy, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a dog might have a set of beliefs, either conscious or unconscious, about western medicine and, more particularly, psychopharmacology), or, if not, whether the placebo effect is so powerful that it can not only cure human depression by way of the patient’s belief in a pill and all it represents, but also cure a dog’s emotional anguish by way of the dog owner’s belief in the pill his or her dog is taking. If the latter suggestion is true, then we can only conclude (while temporarily tabling our confusion as to whether we can refer to a dog’s consciousness as a “mind”) that the placebo effect can “jump” between minds, even if the barrier between those minds is that between species.

This barrier is not insignificant, and is best captured by one of Wittgenstein’s pithy western koans, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” But perhaps because, unlike lions, we live with dogs, and because they seem so able to understand us when we talk, whether with words, gestures, or just a look (the fact that we both show the whites of our eyes, I’ve read, is an important element of the human-dog connection), we presume that we know our dogs as well as they know us, and that, e.g. when they are sitting contentedly at our feet chewing a bone while we indulge in a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream it is essentially no different than when we share a cup of coffee with our spouse. I do, however, wonder if the relationship between dogs and humans isn’t more like that between women and men, with women understanding the open-book half of the species as intuitively as a dog does its master, while men are left wondering “What does a woman want?” in the same way that we humans can’t really know a dog’s thoughts any better than a lion’s.

But even if dog consciousness remains inscrutable to us talking apes, this wouldn’t necessarily prevent the placebo effect from “jumping” between human and dog, which, presumably, would only require the dog to continue reading its master as well as it always has. It is the dog and not us, after all, who is performing the Vulcan Mind Meld. I just wish we homo sapiens believed in the talking cure as much as we believe in our little pills, especially since it is a known fact that one cures a dying plant by talking to it. When you notice your hound looking anxious, you could just use the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy technique of thought stopping and let the placebo effect work like jumper cables attached to Fido. If nothing else, this would spare Fido the drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, constipation, weight changes, insomnia, decreased sex drive, impotence, difficulty having an orgasm, dry mouth, severe blistering and rash, high fever, uneven heartbeats, tremors, diarrhea, loss of coordination, headaches, memory problems, confusion, hallucinations, fainting, seizures, or breathing that stops, all of which are the side effects that may occur when Fido takes his Prozac in order to get his second hand placebo effect.