Behavioral Medication for Your Dog
How the right behavioral medications can help your dog.
Most of the dogs I work with have serious behavior problems. Some are afraid of everybody except the people they live with. Some explode into intense aggression when someone touches them. Some are so terrified at being left alone that their bowels and bladder empty the instant their guardian walks out the door.
This week, I’ll explain why my motto as a trainer working with behavior problems is “Just say yes to drugs,” and how you as your dog’s guardian can get the most expert advice on behavioral medication for your dog.
The Right Meds Can Relieve Suffering
The right medication can relieve suffering and make behavior modification more effective. In my personal experience, that’s especially true with anxiety disorders and outright phobias. If you’ve ever been badly frightened, or had a long-lasting chronic anxiety that preoccupied you and made it hard to sleep, eat, or concentrate, you know how sweet relief can be. Dogs share with us the brain structures and neurochemistry that govern fear and anxiety, so it’s a good bet that they experience those emotions pretty much the way we do. When their anxiety is relieved, they learn more easily and are usually less likely to aggress. Their lives are happier, too.
Do you have trouble getting past the fact that doctors and veterinarians don’t claim to fully understand the neurochemistry and neurology of behavior? I’d like to reframe that uncertainty. Try seeing it as appropriate humility about a complex biological system, and instead be very afraid when someone claims to have “the” safe and effective treatment whether or not any evidence supports them.
“Medications” Aren’t All Tranquilizers
Many people say, “I don’t want to drug my dog,” and usually what they fear is that meds will make their friend sleepy, lethargic, and dull-witted. This fear may be a hangover from the bad old days a couple of decades ago, when behavioral medication mostly did mean tranquilizers.
It’s true that some meds can be sedating. Usually, though, this is a side effect that diminishes over time, or it’s associated with certain meds given as needed for specific situations. For example, many dogs do well with benzodiazepines for thunderstorm phobia, and an effective dose may (that’s “may”!) make your dog not just relaxed but sleepy. In a couple of hours, the effect wears off and your dog is back to normal. And, p.s., she didn’t just spend the entire storm shaking, panting, drooling, and trying to dig her way into the bathroom floor.
Dogs Can Be Calmed Without Being Sedated
Also, there’s a big difference between calming and sedation. I’m thinking of one of my clients, a barky, jittery little dog whose anxiety was alleviated by treatment with an alpha-adrenergic agonist, a class of medication that decreases heart rate and blood pressure. One day her guardian didn’t get home in time to give her her medication far enough in advance of our appointment. This little dog always worked with me eagerly and learned fast. Not that day! She seemed antsy and distracted and barely responded to my cues. As her medication kicked in, though, she paid more and more attention to me. Soon she was the alert, focused little learner I knew.
What About Side Effects?
Other clients worry about immediate and long-term side effects.
Many short-term side effects fade away during treatment. If your dog is on a daily, long-term medication, and side effects hang around well after they were expected to fade, there are almost always different meds to try. Or if the medication is working well behaviorally but, say, constipates your dog, it may be best to keep using it while you manage the side effect – for instance, by adding fiber to her diet.
Some meds do have potential long-term negative effects such as liver damage, and in that case your dog should be getting regular blood tests to monitor her health. Perhaps you’ll have to consider a trade-off between your dog’s present suffering and her long-term physical health. But remember, behavioral meds are usually a temporary measure, intended to give behavior modification a speed-and-efficacy boost.
Behavioral Meds Are Often Prescribed Off-Label
Many behavioral meds are prescribed off-label. This means that although the medication is legal and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved it for certain uses, the med isn’t approved for the particular use your vet has in mind. FDA approval is a long and expensive process; drug companies don’t always leap to undertake it with respect to a treatment for animals. That a drug is being prescribed off-label doesn’t mean that it’s unsafe or that there’s no evidence for its effectiveness. But off-label prescribing does call for special care.
Find the Best Vet for Behavioral Medication
A well-educated trainer will encourage you to consider medication when she recognizes that a behavior problem may have physical causes, or when the behavior problem is one that usually calls for a combination of medication and behavioral work. But she shouldn’t recommend specific meds – that task calls on a different body of knowledge, one that non-veterinarians just don’t have.
Behavioral medicine is a specialty just as complex and arcane as oncology or orthopedics. You are best off consulting a board-certified veterinary behaviorist.
The bad news is that there are fewer than 60 board-certified veterinary behaviorists in the United States (and a few more worldwide). The good news is that through the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior you can find a vet who takes a special interest in behavioral medicine even if she’s not board-certified.
The other good news is that many veterinary behaviorists will consult with your regular vet by phone. In this case, the vet behaviorist can’t prescribe directly for your dog but can advise your vet about treatment options.
Before you see your vet about behavioral medication, visit the website of a veterinary behavior service – for instance, the one at Cornell. Fill out the behavior history form the service uses for its clients and give it to your vet. The more complete a picture you give him, the more complete the picture he can give the vet behaviorist.
Having offered you that end run, I want to stress that seeing the vet behaviorist yourself, with your dog, is a much better option if you can possibly swing it. I often work closely with the vet behaviorist in New York City, so I’ve seen for myself how sophisticated their behavioral, medical and pharmacological knowledge can be.
Behavioral medication doesn’t substitute for behavior modification – they work in tandem. Your dog’s odds of improvement go way up if you take advantage of the best treatments available. Don’t hesitate to get all the help you can.
I welcome your comments and questions – email dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. And you can talk to me on Facebook, where I answer questions and post all kinds of animal-related links. Dogalini is me on Twitter. Thanks for reading, and have a great week.
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