A dog obsessed with a ball, barking incessantly until someone throws it, might seem like a nuisance. But when such behaviour is labelled a symptom of anxiety and treated with medication, it reveals something deeper — not about the dog, but about us.
In one recent case, a dog was diagnosed as anxious because he demanded constant play. He was prescribed anti-anxiety medication and now, according to his owners, “no longer cares about the ball.” They are pleased with the outcome. Yet few stop to ask the obvious question: why was he anxious in the first place?
This story illustrates a growing trend — the medicalisation of animal behaviour. When a dog’s conduct becomes inconvenient or difficult to manage, the quick fix is often chemical rather than environmental. Instead of examining the life we’ve created for the dog — the confinement, the routine, the lack of purpose — we treat the resulting frustration as a mental illness.
It mirrors what has happened in human society. Increasingly, ordinary struggles — restlessness, low mood, distraction — are pathologised and medicated. Some critics point to the alleged over-labelling of what may be variants of normal human behaviour, such as ADHD, as an example of this trend. Once a child receives such a label, it can profoundly shape their education, self-image, and future opportunities. We have become accustomed to a pill for every discomfort, and this mindset has quietly extended to our pets.
But unlike humans, dogs and cats live entirely within the worlds we build for them. We control their food, movement, social contact, and stimulation. If they become anxious, obsessive, or withdrawn, those states are rarely independent disorders; they are often reflections of how their environment fails to meet their needs.
A ball-obsessed dog might be signalling boredom, unmet exercise needs, or a craving for attention that only play seems to provide. A cat that over-grooms or hides constantly may be reacting to noise, confinement, or social stress in a multi-cat household. Yet too often, such behaviours are treated as neurological malfunctions rather than emotional responses to a human-made world.
Drugs can have a place. In severe cases of trauma or entrenched phobia, medication can reduce distress and make retraining possible. But it should never be the default response. The starting point must always be to look at the environment, the human-animal relationship, and the routines that shape behaviour. Compassionate training, predictability, enrichment, and patient desensitisation achieve lasting change; sedation merely masks the symptoms.
There is something troubling about dulling a dog’s or cat’s emotions to make them easier to live with. It reduces a sentient being to a manageable object — calm, compliant, quiet. In doing so, we risk erasing part of what makes them alive.
The real challenge is not to cure our pets of being themselves, but to create conditions where their natural behaviours can flourish without conflict. When we see a problem in a dog or cat, we should first ask: what in their world might be causing this? After all, we built that world.
The responsibility — and the remedy — begin with us.
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