Beef-flavored Prozac...

Last Sunday, the New York Times magazine featured an article about the booming industry of behavior-modification drugs for pets. It seems as though unruly dogs have become too much for Skinner’s behavioral conditioning methods: pet-owners (and vets alike) have discovered the fast fix of a pill. True to form, the pharmaceutical industry has picked up on this as a new source of income. The article writes: “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.” Eli Lilly has produced Prozac for dogs: it’s the same drug, but it’s chewable and tastes like beef.

And that’s exactly it. This new trend of chemically altering our pets’ behavior seems to be the latest incarnation of the phenomenon known as humanization. We project our own emotions, thoughts, dreams, and expectations onto our pets, to the point where we mistake them for human and attribute to them our own likes, dislikes, fantasies, and expectations of life. Marketers, of course, have provided a wealth of products with which we can express our love for our pets in material ways. It’s led to the emergence of high-class pet product stores at the mall (I know at least two in my little San Diego neighborhood), buying Christmas presents for your dog and – apparently – treating its behavioral issues with Prozac. We want our pets to behave like we do, too – we want them to be polite, and well-adjusted to urban apartment and/or family life. And when they’re not, we want to treat that problem in the same, convenient way that we treat our own: pharmaceutically.

The question that ultimately resonated throughout the article was this: is that humanization justified? In other words, are dogs, or pets in general, like us humans? Can we expect them to adapt to our clean and sterilized lives? Do dogs experience emotions, fantasies, and fears? Do they have the same mental processes that we do? And if so, can they be mentally ill? If they cannot adapt to our lifestyle, can we really stamp this inability as ‘pathological’?

I won’t go into this debate here – I don’t think we’ll ever know the extent of animal emotions, consciousness, or rational thought. But the question brings up another issue, which is that of mental illness. If animals do not possess consciousness like we do, and do not experience the same level of emotion, can they have mental illness? “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?” Let’s say that a dog with ‘separation anxiety’ really has something pathological going on in his brain – whether or not it’s aware of this anxiety.* If a drug like Xanax works for this dog, what does it say about the neurological nature of anxiety in our own brain? Can we then still connect mental illness to emotion and consciousness? And if not, do we then need to redefine mental illness? Does mental illness then become something purely neurological?** If it has nothing to do with awareness, what then are delusions and hallucinations? Can you be mentally ill if you don’t have consciousness, or when you are not aware of yourself existing in the world?

Pet-owners do expect pets to be too much like themselves. The lives we expect our pets to lead are too unnatural. A dog is not made to live indoors in 1500 square feet of space. When it subsequently develops behaviors that disrupt our calm and sterile routine – aggressiveness, or an obsessive chasing after its own tail – it is unfair to stamp it as pathological.

But don’t we do the same to ourselves? In his autobiographical account of depression, Andrew Solomon (the Noonday Demon) mentions evolutionary lag as one potential reason for the existence of mental illness among humans. Basically, the argument here is that our lifestyles have become unnatural to ourselves – our nature, our biology, has not yet caught up with the fast-paced industrial lives we lead, in which we are increasingly isolated, have too many options, and too many expectations. I don’t necessarily agree with this scenario; I don’t think modern lives are any more difficult than the lives we led as hunter-gatherers (difficult in a different way, certainly, but not more difficult in any abstract, objective sense). But I do think that we increasingly try to live lives in which there seems to be no room for the very natural occurrence of emotions. I’ve arrived again at Stefan Ecks’ “monoculture of happiness.” In the ambitious life plan of a young high school student trying to make it into a good university, then the young adult trying to get a well-paying job and then trying to perform well enough to hold on to said job and perhaps make a promotion or two, there seems to be no room for sadness, fear, anger, and the like. The thing is that these emotions are a natural part of being human. We cannot turn them off – and so we, too, ultimately develop alternative ways of expressing these feelings. Perhaps we don’t obsessively chase our tails for hours on end, but we obsess over other things. Like our make up, our email – or even our work performance (Emily Martin also writes about the place of emotions in daily life. She argues not that there is no room for emotions, but that there is only room for certain emotions. She suggests, for instance, that modern society in some way cultivates and admires certain aspects of mania). And when we cannot channel our emotions into even slightly productive directions, we take a pill.

So maybe this is the aspect of humanization we should really be worrying about.

* The article at some point distinguishes between ‘primal feelings’, a sort of basic emotional palette, and more evolved emotional states like anxiety and depression. The difference, it seems to suggest, is a component of awareness, or reflexivity. Primal feelings are primal – they’re Freud’s basic drives, perhaps. They’re purely limbic, instinctive. Emotional states on the other hand – the ones mentioned are anxiety, obsession, depression – are more cognitive (I’m reminded here of Martha Nussbaum’s work; she defines emotions as judgments about the world and its relationship to you, the experiencer). The article describes the difference as that “between a gazelle spooking at the sight of a lion and a gazelle worrying that a lion may appear.” The latter, the emotions, involve some kind of mental process that is based on recollection, foresight, experience, and so on – a kind of consciousness. But can you really distinguish between these two categories of primal feelings and emotions? Can any feeling be categorized as one of the two? Like anger. Where would that one go? Or shame? Is it a difference of degree, perhaps?

** I wonder, actually, on what basis distinctions are made between neurological and psychiatric disorders. Both affect behavior. Both affect the brain. Both can affect mood – think of a brain tumor located in just the wrong place. What is it that makes Tourette’s a neurological, and schizophrenia a psychiatric disorder? Perhaps it’s just the fact that we don’t actually know what schizophrenia does, in the brain?