The stress some dogs experience at the veterinarian’s office has been cited as a reason that owners skip doctor’s visits for their pets. Even if you can get a fearful dog into the exam room, anxiety — sometimes expressed as aggression — can keep a vet from examining a dog as thoroughly as he should and perhaps missing an illness that needs to be treated.
For cats who are scared of the vet’s office, anti-anxiety agents that also act as sedatives have been found to be of help. Could one anti-anxiety drug, trazodone, help doctor-phobic dogs? That’s what veterinary researchers in Korea wanted to find out.
Partnering with scientists at the University of California, Davis, they had 20 dogs go for two different medical exams a week apart. All the dogs, half males and half females, had a history of displaying signs of stress and anxiety during veterinary workups. An hour and a half before one of the two car rides to the doctor’s office, the dogs received trazodone. An hour and a half before the other car ride, the dogs received a placebo. Neither the dogs’ “parents” nor the examiners knew which week each dog received the real drug and which week they received the “blank.”
People rated their dogs on a scale of 1 to 5 for the two visits, with 1 signifying “relaxed” and 5 denoting “extremely stressed.” Without the trazodone, people scored their dogs at an average of about 4.2 — between “very tense” and “extremely stressed.” With the drug, they rated their dogs, on average, at a 3.5 — between “tense” and “very tense.”
“Very tense to tense” and “extremely stressed to stressed” might not sound like much of a difference. But for a dog, even a modest decrease in stress level can have a profound difference on his perception of the experience. Indeed, when people were asked which week their dog had the drug, they guessed correctly 90 percent of the time. These findings were consistent with experts’ evaluation of the dogs in videos that were taken during the examinations.
The study’s authors, reporting in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, stress that “with a decrease in dogs’ stress during a veterinary visit, one can expect higher-quality clinical examinations while improving the welfare of the patient.” If your pet is very emotionally distraught during vet visits, you may want to ask her doctor if trazodone might be right for those days she will
be going to the office. “I hope more people take advantage of sedation medications for their stressed pets prior to veterinary care,” says Stephanie Borns-Weil, DVM, the head of the Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic.
