Pets on the Couch: Neurotic Dogs, Compulsive Cats, Anxious Birds, and the New Science of Animal Psychiatry - Hardcover

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Nicholas Dodman is one of the world’s most noted and celebrated veterinary behaviorists. He founded the Animal Behavior Clinic—one of the first of its kind—at Tufts in 1986. A leader in his field, Dr. Dodman is has published four bestselling books, two textbooks and more than 100 scientific articles and contributions to scientific books and journals, and holds patents for inventions related to the control of animal behavior. Dr. Dodman appears regularly on national radio and television, and lives in North Grafton, Massachusetts.

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Pets on the Couch

CHAPTER ONE

The Dog Who Ate Wineglasses

When the Brain Short-Circuits

Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.

—A. A. MILNE

I sat in my office and watched a video of a male Golden retriever going insane.

The footage was murky because it was shot in a darkened house at night. The animal was sleeping peacefully on his blanket, the picture of domestic peace, until his muzzle began to twitch. In a gradual transformation reminiscent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the twitching became more rapid, and suddenly, the beast jumped up and attacked his own bed.

The Golden’s name was Comet, and the speed of his abrupt assault was worthy of his name. His targets varied, according to his owner. On the video, Comet attacked a blanket, snarling, snapping, and ripping the thing to shreds, but his owner told me that he also occasionally tore into his canine housemate, an English setter, sending the poor thing yowling in retreat. Somehow the violence appeared just as vicious when Comet’s prey was an innocent patch of fabric.

I looked from the monitor to the dog who lay placidly at my feet. This was the monster I had just witnessed going berserk? During the day Comet was a gentle dog who would happily play-wrestle with the English setter and always lose, content to end up on his back on the ground with the setter lording it over him. At night, though, he became aggressive. Even though the attacks were over in a few seconds, they were scary to watch.

In my practice as a professor of veterinary science specializing in animal behavior, I had encountered such episodes before. A bull terrier would wake abruptly in a rage and attack a door. Another bull terrier would try to attack his master, though I had advised her to attach him to a metal leash that was long enough for him to move around but not so long that he could reach her while she was sleeping. More than once she woke up with the dog snarling and snapping inches from her face. She was extremely grateful for that metal leash!

The cause behind each unusual behavior in pets is a puzzle to be solved. Sometimes they’re multiple. Sometimes they’re biological. But sometimes biological causes create psychological problems. Comet the loving, playful sweetie pie became Comet the snarling nighttime werewolf. Bully the loving pet and Bully the berserker. Every owner of every dog has a secret knowledge, at times relished, at times feared, that there is an animal in the house who back in the mists of time was once a wild beast. But when a dog inexplicably reverts to its wolflike nature, can anything be done?

I diagnosed a neurological problem in Comet, a possible seizure disorder, so I prescribed meds that had anticonvulsant properties. With a combination of clonazepam, a Valium-type anticonvulsant, and phenobarbital, Comet’s nighttime attacks reduced considerably.

For other dogs suffering similar issues, I used similar approaches. The metal-leashed bull terrier responded well to Prozac, which has antiepileptic as well as mood-stabilizing properties, and he stopped his nightly attack. Later I was able to keep him calm by switching him from Prozac to nighttime melatonin, which is also considered something of an anticonvulsant.

Let’s stop a moment and take a deep breath. The preceding paragraph might strike you as worrisome. “Dr. Dodman, you propose to give my pet what?” Many pet owners prefer to hear about herbal remedies and nonpharmacological measures. And of course we often employ them, too. But I’m going to suggest that treating animals with human medications is not an instance of Big Pharma run amok. In the course of this book, I hope you will come to see the simple, practical truth. Modern medicines work. They alleviate suffering and save lives.

Such treatment approaches weren’t arrived at by luck, and weren’t random stabs at a cure, either. I knew how to address Comet’s problem because, long before he came into my examining room, I had embarked upon a quest to understand such bizarre aggressive episodes. I delved into the available research on animals and had also reached across the species barrier to investigate the basis for sudden unexplained aggression in humans. When I put it all together, it seemed clear that there was a neurological trigger for what was happening.

The dogs weren’t choosing to go berserk. Their attacks weren’t the result of bad dreams. The afflicted animals were experiencing seizures, the result of misfires deep within the brain.

In my search of the available case histories I encountered many accounts of nocturnal seizures, and most were expressed as aggression. Why did such episodes occur only at night? Once again, the available case histories have long shown that sleep can promote seizures in people. It turns out that some natural mechanisms that inhibit behavior are switched off in deep sleep.

Back then, at the dawn of my career as an animal behaviorist, we didn’t know much about the neural processes involved in this often upsetting and sometimes dangerous behavior. So I recruited fellow researchers to develop a way of addressing it. Our approach was remarkable in one respect: we proposed to treat animals with many of the same treatments that are successful in healing people.

On the one hand, our method might seem obvious. Human beings and canines are both vertebrates, both mammals. We are evolutionary relatives—distant relatives, but relatives all the same. Complex partial seizures are more common than grand mal seizures in people, so it made sense to assume that dogs had a high incidence of complex partial seizures, too. Why shouldn’t we find common treatments of our shared pathologies?

But science doesn’t assume. Science proves. Obvious as our hypothesis might be, there was a problem verifying it: How could we really tell when partial seizures were happening in dogs? People can describe experiences to their doctors, but animals obviously cannot. This probably explains why complex partial seizures remain undiagnosed by many veterinarians.

Despite the obvious success of the treatment regimens I was developing, many veterinary behaviorists were skeptical that seizure-based aggression existed. An eminent animal behaviorist, Dr. Ilana Reisner, who did her research for her doctoral thesis on springer spaniel aggression, stopped short of saying definitively the condition was seizure-based. One widely accepted textbook labeled sudden violent aggression in dogs as “idiopathic,” a wonderful five-dollar word that simply means the cause is undetermined. It’s what vets and doctors alike say when they are loathe to pronounce their least favorite three-word phrase: “I don’t know.”

For all this academic back-and-forth, animals were still coming to vets in distress. Successfully treating patients was one thing. Verifying the cause of their behavior was quite another.

A vital step along the way came when I saw Brock, a really big,150-pound Chesapeake Bay retriever, whose aggression was completely out of control. The dog had put his owner in the hospital on more than one occasion. He was such a beast that he would even steal wineglasses and crush them in his jaws in front of his terrified owner. If the owner attempted to intervene, the dog would attack her viciously.

It was hard to understand how this much-bitten owner remained loyal to her dog, but love often wins out with pets. Fortunately, she brought Brock in to see me, and I in turn discussed the...