Quoted Text

Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Dogs, off the
menu, look
for their meds

    Catching up on my dog news, I see first that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly marketing mood-changing drugs like Prozac, but with different names, to ease the anxiety of dogs that get left home alone and in general to minister to dog neuroses.
    Second I see that the Beijing Food Safety Office has requested that hotels remove dog meat from their menus for the duration of the Olympics in order to “respect the dining customs of different countries.”
    What a world of difference is implied in those two items! Just think: Americans are spending something like $15 million a year to assuage the anxieties of their beloved pets while the Chinese are still eating such animals.
    Personally I don’t endorse the timorous policy of the Beijing Food Safety Office in suppressing the normal offerings of hotel dining rooms. I think it might be salutary for Americans and others of like mind to see dogs being treated as mere animals, akin to cows and pigs, though I certainly understand the politics of it. But what strikes me is the difference in perspective.
    The New York Times Magazine had a nice article on Sunday, full of unintended humor, about the mental and emotional disorders of American dogs and about how the owners of those dogs are going about treating them — with the help of dog therapists, veterinary specialists and of course our always-ready pharmaceutical companies.
    That’s where I learned that Novartis is marketing a drug called Clomicalm (a dog version of its Anafril) and Eli Lilly a drug called Reconcile (a dog version of its Prozac) to soothe the nerves of those distinctly American animals that are treated like privileged children and encouraged to be fawningly dependent, when they are left alone for the day, which is when they tend to chew their tails, whine, eat the carpet, or bark till their heads explode.
    Obviously the problem lies with the owners rather than with the animals themselves, and I can’t help think that a little time spent in a Beijing restaurant might do wonders for these people, I mean, just in terms of bringing them back to reality.
    I don’t know Beijing myself, but if it’s anything like Hong Kong, which I do know, emotionally disordered dogs do not exist there. They are too busy scavenging for scraps of food and keeping out of the way of human feet to be chasing their tails and chewing the carpet.
    Nobody ever talks babytalk to them or takes them for rides in a car or kisses them or buys health insurance for them, so when their owners go away for a day they don’t stand at the door whimpering. They go about their business.
    Likewise in Mexico, where I visit occasionally. It always takes me a day or two to conquer my natural reflex of cringing when a dog comes near me there, I am so accustomed to being jumped on, licked, sniffed and pawed by the neurotic American counterparts of the harmless and scrofulous creatures one encounters there.
    Marketers apparently refer to the common American attitude toward dogs as “humanization,” and the Times says, “Humanization has pharmaceutical companies salivating like Pavlov’s dogs,” which I can well believe, considering the great success they have had in marketing mood-altering drugs to children. Dogs are the obvious next market.
    I call it anthropomorphizing myself, but it’s the same thing: treating dogs like humans. The funny thing is being surprised that it drives the dogs themselves nuts. What else could it do?
    It might be valuable shock therapy for Western humanizers to see dog meat on a Beijing menu, but alas, it’s not going to happen.
Carl Strock can be reached
at 395-3085 or by e-mail at