Walk Your Dogs or Medicate Them?

A Diet Pill for Dogs

When people first began to keep dogs in their company, there was method in their madness. When survival was in question, dogs had to serve a useful purpose or be driven out. By the same token, if dogs were going to fulfill our ancestors’ purposes and help them survive, they had to take good care of their dogs. That naturally included appropriate food and rest. The fact that our ancestors were self-interested users of the dog was the very reason their dogs were so healthy as individuals and breeds.

Nothing has appreciably changed since the first dogs wandered into human camps. We are still self-interested users of dogs, but now we mainly use them as pets. When we deny pet dogs proper exercise and overfeed them, that use becomes abuse.

Dogs still have their true friends who work and hunt with them and train them for these tasks, celebrating and cultivating their many extraordinary capabilities, or who, as pet owners, run, jog, hike, bike, walk, stroll, and play with their dogs. The best pet owners have chosen dogs that suit their own healthy lifestyles, from very to mildly active, give their dogs the daily exercise that both owner and dog require to stay fit, and provide good nutrition without overfeeding.

Countless other dogs are overfed and underexercised until they are sadly obese and can barely move. This abuse of dogs by their owners is matched by the abuse of dogs by breeders who flood the pet market with physically and temperamentally unsound dogs.

Back in the day, as current lingo has it, veterinarians might have admonished owners to take better care of their stock, and livestock owners would have listened or lost the services of the only vet in the area. In today’s cities and suburbs, however, with many vets in competition for the same clients, a veterinarian must consider the risk of losing clients to some more sympathetic ear. Just as the peace officer has reluctantly entered into the world of "law enforcement" and no longer keeps the peace, and as the school teacher has been transformed into an "educator and facilitator" who no longer teaches, veterinarians have become independent business people, some of whom can no longer be concerned with the well being of animals as much as the well being of their business if they hope to survive in an increasingly competitive market. Better to give pet owners the quick fix they are looking for, or someone else will. This kind of thinking could not be more apparent in the recent FDA approval of a diet pill for dogs.

Perhaps this should not be considered so surprising an event in a society that treats behavioral problems in children by drugging them. A society that has already prescribed using such drugs for dog behavior problems as well! There is great danger in deferring our personal responsibilities to institutions and professional practitioners. We have seen the terrible outcome of this behavior, and will see more as we continue to leave our problem children, dogs, cats, and the disturbed and vulnerable among us in the hands of others. B.F. Skinner warned years ago that handing off social problems to professional caregivers, without proper oversight, would lead to self interested institutions and persons that no longer regard their original purpose as important and that instead become dedicated solely to their own status and privilege. One need look no further than the local animal shelter or child protective services organization, public or private, for evidence of this tragedy in the making.

The truth of the matter is that, in this climate of total abdication of personal responsibility, how we are treating dogs is just a reflection of the methods we have adopted to disengage from the more relevant problems of our lives. In what other time period or climate could we make a hero of the likes of Cesar Millan, who has single handedly taken dog training back into the Stone Age? Is driving a dog into fearful submission the answer to our concerns about dog behavior? Is giving the dog a diet pill because we now refuse to walk him, both for his good and ours, the answer to our ills? I think not.