Dog Depression

Is dog depression real? Coco seemed to be having a bad time over the past couple of weeks. He had lost his appetite, was not eating or drinking the way he normally did and thus, was losing weight quickly. He seemed to be lethargic, and spent a lot more time than usual sleeping. When he was awake, he seemed nervous, edgy, and common events seemed to worry him. None of the usual activities that normally made him happy seemed to interest him. Any psychologist seeing a person with Max’s symptoms would conclude that he was probably suffering from stress and its most common companion ailment, depression. The problem is that Max is not a person, but a German Shepherd.

It was the late 1980s when Nicholas Dodman of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University was standing next to a colleague looking at a dog that had been brought into the Animal Behavior Clinic. The dog was showing symptoms similar to Max. Extrapolating from what he knew about human behavioural symptoms, Dr. Dodman concluded that the dog he was examining that day was stressed and depressed. For a human with these symptoms, the diagnosis would have been clinical depression, and so it seemed to him that this was also a reasonable diagnosis to suggest for the dog. His colleague shook his head and warned him about the dangers of treating dogs as if they had such human-like feelings. His colleague argued, “Dogs don’t experience the same mental states and emotions that people do.”