Why are so many dogs on Prozac? How we Brits overmedicalised our pets

Dogs across the UK are increasingly being prescribed drugs from Xanax to fluoxetine to manage their behavioural difficulties, from separation anxiety to hyperactive tendencies. If the names of those drugs sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones that are used to treat humans with mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.

Over the last 12 years, the number of dogs on fluoxetine – also known as Prozac – has increased twentyfold to one in 500, according to a study last year by the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) using data from 2.3 million animals in the UK.

Licensed for use in the UK in 2008, Eli Lilly’s Reconcile (“Puppy Prozac”) comes in a chewy tablet form, tastes of beef, and costs around £30 per month. Its active ingredient is fluoxetine.

Other prescribed mental-health and behaviour-targeting medications include Clomicalm (clomipramine) and trazodone, which are long and short-term anti-anxiety medications.

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According to the PDSA Animal Wellbeing (PAW) Report, the British dog population increased from around 8.2 million in 2011 to 10.6 million in 2024, with over a quarter (28 per cent) of UK adults now owning one. The veterinary pharmaceutical market is also booming. In Britain, some vet practices report that up to five per cent of their canine patients are now on some form of psychoactive medication.

This rapid rise in drug use has stirred fears of a “Puppy Prozac nation” in some quarters, with warning that pets are being overmedicalised.

“We are overusing these drugs before addressing other issues,” says Dr Bianca Major, lead nutritionist at Different Dog. “Which means you’re putting a plaster over the problem, and not always getting to the root cause.”

Veterinary surgeon Dr Julian Hoad, president of the British Small Animal Veterinary Association (BSAVA), says we are in danger of “anthropomorphising” human illnesses onto dogs.

This, in turn, can actually cause anxiety in the first place – a study by the University of Helsinki suggests that owners who treat their dogs like substitute children – projecting complex human emotions onto them – often inadvertently create “insecure attachment” in their pets.

But others argue that the drugs are useful tools when combined with behavioural training, and have saved problematic dogs from being put to sleep. “Not prescribing medication when it’s needed is a welfare problem,” says Bryony Francis, head of clinical behaviour at the RSPCA.

Other experts point out the drugs simply were not available in the past. “Ten or 20 years ago, if a pet developed diabetes, people didn’t treat it,” says Dr Michelle Rassool, a behavioural veterinarian based in Melbourne. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that what we’re doing is weird or excessive – in the past, dogs with these sorts of problems would have been put to sleep because people couldn’t deal with them.” Now pets are more likely to be viewed as deserving of medication for physical and behavioural issues.

“Most people now consider their dogs part of the family,” says Dr Dan Mills of the University of Lincoln – the UK’s first professor of veterinary Behavioural Medicine. And the past decade has seen a real growth in mental health awareness in humans, explains Charlie Edmonds, veterinary surgeon at The London Vet Behaviour Clinic. “There’s been a paradigm shift in humans openly discussing mental health treatment in the last 10 years alone, so people are more aware of how these illnesses could affect their pets.”

There has been a genuine surge in the amount of anxiety experienced by dogs, too – in particular, a post-lockdown readjustment, with animals struggling to cope with their owners being back at work. This resulted in “separation anxiety” prescriptions for 19 per cent of dogs left alone for five or more hours, according to a 2024 PDSA survey.

“A lot of puppies bought in the pandemic weren’t socialised enough, too,” explains Hoad, “so we’re seeing a lot more separation anxiety problems, aggression and unruly behaviour.” Edmonds agrees, and adds that issues were compounded by “a lot of irresponsible breeding” during the pandemic, leading to an influx of dogs who “weren’t quite right” or “were in the wrong environment”.

This all begs the question, do dogs really get depressed?

“Honestly, we don’t know if dogs get depression or not. We can’t stick a dog on a psychiatrists’ couch and say, ‘Tell me about your previous life.’ But it was discovered that human mental health medication can have an effect on certain unwanted and undesirable behaviours,” says Hoad. “The majority are given for one of three reasons: to change unwanted behaviour, as an appetite stimulant, or as a pain reliever.”

He cites a case where a “very snappy dog” responded well to fluoxetine, as well as dogs showing symptoms that might be recognised as obsessive compulsive disorder in humans.

For Hoad and Mills, it is not the diagnostic labels that are important in themselves. Rather, it’s the fact that the treatment works. “A lot of psychiatric diagnoses are somewhat arbitrary constructs,” Mills suggests.

He thinks dogs do get sad, like humans, largely due to a feeling of being “out of control”. SSRIs (the class of antidepressents that includes fluoxetine) help to rewire the brain and increase plasticity, or openness to new thoughts.

Some of these dogs live in imperfect environments, too. “Most pets would prefer to be in the countryside where there are fewer triggers,” Edmonds says. “But that’s not where humans want to be. Some of those pets may need to take medication which they wouldn’t have had to take if they lived rurally.”

The medication helps pets which are struggling with emotional dysregulation in a world which was never necessarily built for them, but for which they’ve been bred and put into.”

For Edmonds, that’s OK. But not all vets think dogs should be taking these drugs.

“I do worry there’s a lot of times these drugs are given out instead of good behaviour advice, and certainly without the tandem approach of behavioral consultations,” says Hoad. “Sometimes [owners] just don’t have the time. And other times they may think, ‘Well, great, there’s a tablet that will help. Let’s rely on that.’”

“I definitely feel the pressure of clients saying, ‘Look, I’m really desperate. I need help,’” adds Rassool. “And if you only have a 15-minute appointment with them, it’s hard to determine if the dog will benefit from medication in such a short window. So then you have an ethical conundrum: you might be using medication to provide immediate relief because people have financial and time constraints, and even sometimes educational understanding constraints about what they can achieve with their pet.”

Clearly, medication is often a cheaper option than behaviour school or training which can cost in the hundreds of pounds for single sessions.

Rassool believes that owners have unrealistic expectations and often don’t have the time or money to properly train or look after their pets. In the UK, 22 per cent of pet owners – five million people – report that the cost of living crisis has affected how they care for their animals.

Perhaps, too, as “therapy speak” grips the human world, it has captured the minds of pet owners? One survey conducted in 2019 concluded that a whopping 85 per cent of pet dogs had “behavioural problems” – alarmingly high at first glane. But what did the survey class as a behavioural problem? Disturbing, abnormal obsessions such as a “tennis ball fetish”… I can’t be the only sceptic?

Either way, the medicalisation of dogs shows no sign of slowing, as trials for Ozempic for dogs are under way in the US. If approved, a weight-management drug could be targeted at the over two thirds of UK dogs who are obese.

Rassool is open to changing her mind – but at the end of the day “on some level, I know that I’m in charge of my dog’s food.”

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Why are so many dogs on Prozac? How we Brits overmedicalised our pets

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