Meadowcat stated: In my opinion, medication should be considered as a first-line treatment option for the vast majority of dogs with true behavior problems – including aggression, compulsive behavior issues, and any type of pathological anxiety. When we try to reserve the use of drugs as a last resort, something that we only try if the case is “really bad”, or if nothing else has helped, I believe that we do these dogs a tremendous disservice.
I absolutely agree with this. Several years, while shopping at I nearly deserted Walmart store at 11:30 PM, I was attacked and physically harmed resulting in very painful injuries. This trigger a recurrence of severe PTSD which I had previously suffered after being held at gunpoint by one of my high school students - I, rightfully so, fear for my life for two hours. The student shot and seriously wounded a relative after he finally left my classroom. For months after the Walmart exit that I suffered extreme anxiety and hundreds of adrenaline dumps that left me shaking and hypersensitive to the world. Every time I see an untreated reactive dog, I think I can relate to what they are experiencing physiologically and I want to tell you that, without the help of proper medication, it is extremely distressful for them.
I cringe when I hear people saying that they don't want to dope up their dog or mask the symptoms or put a Band-Aid on things. This is simply not understanding good medicine! The first line of defense when the body is reacting uncontrollably to non-life-threatening events by releasing large amounts of fear/fight hormones, is to break the cycle and usually medication is the only way to do this.
Imagine if a car is bearing down on you at 60 miles an hour and you are tied to a post in the middle of the road right in its path. Now imagine that I'm standing over on the sidewalk speaking to you in a cutesy little voice , "Oh, Fifi, look at that," and trying to feed you kibble as a reward for glancing at the car that's about to kill you. That's pretty much a straight up analogy for the way that things go down for lots of dogs with reactivity issues. Yes, of course there is not a car bearing down on them, but the reality of that does not matter. What matters is the way that their body is reacting to what is happening in the environment around them.
Perceived fear is the same as something real in terms of the physiological cascade of things that happened inside the body!!!! I can't emphasize this enough. When the physical body is reacting in a large scale fight/flight manner, there is no processing of anything because the ancient brain, the amygdala, has taken over and is running the show, dumping out lots of adrenaline and other hormones to be prepared to deal with an extreme situation. This is a miserable miserable miserable way to live and I see many dogs living this way without any help from medication because of their owners' uninformed stance against it.
What medication does is help the body stop reacting! If you read that again you will get it – the body has to stop reacting first! Then the behavioral training has a chance to get through. I tried to plow through the PTSD and I'm a very strong individual but things deteriorated to the point where I was literally debilitated by "reactivity". It reached it's peak one day when turned my head in a parking lot, saw a man approaching my car that only vaguely resembled the person who had attacked me, and experienced such a massive adrenaline dump that I was left with uncontrollable muscle spasms and unable to function whatsoever. When all that initial reaction passed, I was left with such extreme exhaustion I could barely hold a cell phone and had to call friends to come and get me. This was just from glancing out my window and seeing a person 8 yards away from me.
Reactive dogs must surely experience such physiological chaos on a sliding scale over and over and over and over again. I agree strongly with MeadowCat – I believe that many, if not most, of these dogs suffer a lot from the physiological aspects of reactivity; it is horrible. It also makes them hyper sensitive to touch, sound, and other seemingly "normal" stimuli; The same thing happens to so-called normal people and dogs after an incident of flight/fight hormones dumping into the body. There's some good research on this with the statistically large number of high-level athletes who commit violent crimes in the hours following competitions. The large and repetitive fight/flight hormone dumps that athletes experience during the competitions are thought to be linked to abnormal/aberrant behavior in the hours following those competitions.
What prescribed medication does is attempt to help stop the body's reactions stemming from the ancient fight/flight response. This most often needs to happen before any training or behavior modification is going to be able to be effective with the "reasoning brain". I had to be on medication and able to function physiologically before any intellectual training for PTSD recovery could work. Reading books, going to therapy, trying to work the exercises – it was not even 1% achievable until medication allowed me to be able to do those intellectual tasks.
Furthermore, repeated adrenaline dumps leave the immune system in a very fragile state. Please think about consulting with a veterinarian if you have a reactive dog. It's not hocus-pocus, it's good medicine to consider it as an option in the treatment plan for your dog. Reactivity is not just an emotional event or exercise, it's a miserable physical state as well.
"The amygdala and related fear perception neural networks create a state of vigilance that last well beyond the actual traumatic events. Over a long period of time the threat, in addition to coming from the external sources, may also begin to come from within the body, showing up as chronic pain and illness. People with chronic musculoskeletal pain, fibromyalgia, migraine, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, for example, are more likely to have a history of psychosocial or tissue trauma than people without these disorders. They are, in a real sense, living in a body that threatens them.
If this underlying body state deterioration is not treated, it can lead to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that is characterized in the DSM-IV as having persistently high arousal, flashbacks of parts of the trauma event, memory loss for other parts of that event, lack of ability to concentrate, and impairment of social functioning. Note, however, that these diagnostic criteria are primarily psychological. There are significant potential effects on the body such as chronic pain, muscle tension, movement limitations, outbursts of energy followed by listlessness, not to mention consequent illnesses of the cellular pathways in the neuromuscular, digestive, cardiovascular, hormonal, and immune systems."