Humans suffer from a plethora of mental illnesses caused by chemical inbalances, so it seems logical to me that other animals would also be afflicted by the likes of OCD, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, autism and all the other manifestations of brain disfunction. But, I have never heard of any such diagnosed cases, nor of any research into the issue.
So, have you ever encountered information on animal mental illnesses? Do you have a dog which you suspect is autistic? Is your bird bipolar? Is my cat - who repeatedly filches toys and dips them in her water bowl - obsessive-compulsive, or just silly?
Hmm, I’ve heard a lot about animals who’ve developed mental problems due to abuse and mistreatment.
But, I don’t doubt that some animals could be naturally …um…messed up(?). I’ve just not seen a hard core example of it yet.
I’ve seen examples of self-destructive behavior in dogs and horses. Dogs that compulsively lick their paws or gnaw on their legs - usually a result of frustration or boredom. Our mare and stud both bit their flanks when frustrated and angry. If you let the mare out and left him in (they were pastured together, since the mare was bred), or if he got bored, he’d bite his flanks until they bled. The stud was leased and therefore I’m not sure if the problem developed with his original owner, but as I said, the mare did this as well when angry, and she led a normal, happy, healthy life. (she also bucked in her stall without hitting the walls, but that was just neat)
Animals also can develop phobias - horses with trailers, etc. Some breeds of dog (schnauzers) go through a “fear” period as puppies (schnauzers have 2, actually) where something unfamiliar can imprint itself as a lifelong phobia to the dog. My mom’s dog has a fear of women coughing -not men, women.
Lessee… raccoons could be considered OCD with their obsessive-compulsive washing habit. Never give one bread. G
Crows/Ravens/magpies - I think these three birds are notorious for an obsession with shiny objects.
That’s about as much as I can think of OTOH while this tired… it figures I’d wear out just when the server was less jammed. The only other thing I can think of at the moment are situations that are the result of poor breeding ethics, etc.
As far as just being downright wierd… I think all animals, especially the happy/content ones, are just plain quirky. Either that or our personalities are consistantly imprinting on our pets around here.
It has been my experience that animals (i.e. dogs) can be just plain insane. But I always wondered just what is the dividing line between insane and really really stupid.
I would caution against being so quick to label unusual animal behaviors as being obsessive-compulsive or phobic or like any other mental illness. Also, with all due respect, I don’t think the examples given fit the definitions of OCD and phobia.
OCD is a two-part disorder: it has the obsession element and the compulsion element. A person with OCD would have, say, an obsession with germs and being contaminated, and the compulsion to ritualistically cleanse his body and possessions in order to avoid being contaminated. Unless you mean to say that raccoons are obsessed with germs and eating contaminated food, then you can’t say they’ve got OCD. Same with the birds and shiny objects-- they may be compulsed to pick up every shiny object they see, but what is the obsession element? (Or if the shiny object is the obsession, what’s the corresponding compulsion?)
Also, since it’s a behavior that is observed across the species, it can’t be considered symptomatic of a mental illness. Attraction to shiny things is just a trait that crows/ravens/magpies have, just as washing their food is a behavior that racoons perform.
“Phobia” tends to be used as though it simply means an intense fear, but a real phobia is an intense and irrational fear. Something that poses no real threat is feared as though it could kill anything and everything instantly. My prof’s former client’s fear that little brown cane toads could somehow do her life-threatening harm is an example of a phobia.
While an animal might show signs of an intense fear of something, it doesn’t necessarily have a phobia. It might just have learned to be afraid of that thing (for whatever reason), or it fears it because it associates it with some other fear-evoking object or situation.
I may regret this generalization, but I bet most of the time, when pet/animal owners say their animals have phobias, there is a logical but overlooked explanation for the behavior. Calling it a phobia is a simple, fast, and endearing conclusion.
I remember watching a show on Animal Planet where they mentioned that German Shepherds, as a breed, are prone to OCD. Why they knew this they didn’t say and unfortunately I can’t cite it so take that for whatever it’s worth. I only remember because I’ve been a lifelong fan of German Shepherds so it stuck with me (although none of my Shepherds had OCD).
Dogs, at least, can certainly suffer from some mental disorders. Anxiety probably being foremost among them (separation anxiety in particular). I would also say they can suffer from depression but that may be a judgement call. When does sadness change to depression?
Can they suffer the full range of human mental disorders? I doubt it. I’m not sure you could diagnose schizophrenia in an animal even if such a thing existed for them. Still, animals wear their heart on their sleeve, so to speak, and in some cases it is even easier to spot some mental issues with them than it is with humans who may try to cope or hide their illness.
The best I can offer here is anecdotal evidence. My sister and brother-in-law got an English Mastiff puppy who for three years was a happy, loving, all-around wonderful pet. At age four, he started to deteriorate mentally. His behavior became very erratic; he’d be calm for hours and a time and then suddenly snap at them. He was a HUGE dog, so it got pretty scary for them. They finally put him to sleep when he was five. He’d pinned their toddler son Jamey and snarled into Jamey’s face (unprovoked-- my sister saw the whole thing), and the episode made it clear that they just couldn’t trust the dog to remain in the house.
They had him examined many times by a vet, and the vet said that there was nothing they could do (or could have done differently). Sometimes dogs just break down. My sister still can’t talk about him without crying, and Jamey still occasionally mentions him. Sad for everyone.
First, please realize that the second part of my post was, for the most part, tongue-in-cheek.
Not being a mind reader, I cannot say exactly why a raccoon has the compulsive need to dunk everything it eats (it doesn’t actually “wash” anything, but makes washing motions) - they’ve been known to dunk their own kits to the point of drowning. So no, it might not qualify as OCD, but it definitely qualifies as obsessive…and wierd. (apparantly they don’t all do this -but it was at one point thought to be a result of the animal’s instincts being screwed up due to captivity -however, it has been observed in wild raccoons as well, so… shrugs)
“must take it/pick it up”
true.
Not all phobias are based on the idea that the object in question could kill the person. Also, what directly debunks that all phobias are “irrational” is that most of them stem from a traumatizing incident - so how is that not “learned fear?” I think you’re getting too caught up in pedantics…
"*
pho·bi·a (fb-)
n.
A persistent, abnormal, or irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid the feared stimulus.
A strong fear, dislike, or aversion. *"
My agoraphobia stems from a fear that I will get sick while I’m out and be trapped somewhere instead of “safe” at home. It’s not an irrational fear, it’s happened several times - so it’s a “learned fear” - it still disrupts my ability to live a normal life. Therefore, it’s a phobia.
So given the example above of a learned fear becoming a phobia, you’re saying if the animal learns to be afraid of something, it can’t be a phobia? IMO, if it’s a dehabilitating fear that causes the person (or animal, as it were) to try to get away or avoid the situation at all costs, it’s a phobia.
Did the dog get beaten repeatedly by someone with a cold? No. Was the dog repeatedly exposed to frightening and unfamiliar situations by someone with a cough or allergies? No. During the “fear” period of his life, the dog breeder had a cold. It scared him & the fear was imprinted. He’s now terrified of women who cough - not men, just women - and it’s not just that he gets worried or ducks out, he’ll do everything and anything he can do to get away (to the point of lunging at a car window if my mom coughs in the car). The dog has a phobia -as annoying as that might be to attribute a human mental disorder onto an animal, the point is, even by your definition, this is an irriational fear. By the textbook definition, this is a fear that is so great the subject is “compelled to avoid the feared stimulus,” therefore, it’s a phobia.
How is it “endearing”? How on earth does it qualify as a cute “quirk” the pet has? When it comes to some fears and certian animals (i.e. horses), it can be downright dangerous, if not deadly for both owner and animal.
The problem with both rational, irrational, intense and only slightly dehabilitating fears (I.E. both fear and “phobia” -though, not all phobias) is that the treatement for both is often conditioning. The person who has a phobia of elevators has to ride one 120 times till they get to the point where they’re conditioned to not fear the elevator. A horse that is terrified of a gum wrapper is sacked out hours on end (sacking out is a process in which the person takes a sack or rope and gradually, through exposure, desensitizes the horse to it’s fear) until it no longer fears the gum wrapper. A horse who has to be sedated to the point of barely standing to get it in a trailer has to be conditioned out of their fear by loading and unloading constantly and repeated exposure in varying levels of the thing that frightens them… the arachniphobic (my husband :D)is gradually exposed to drawings, then photos, then the real thing in a jar, then eventually they hold the spider, etc. Our dog, who would literally claw and bite to avoid the stairs had to be gradually exposed to stairs until she got over her fear.
The problem here is that the treatement for the phobia and intense fear is very nearly the same thing - so where does the line fall when it comes to distinguishing “intense fear” from “phobia”? … avoidance. My dog fears water, but if I’m in it, she’s got to be near me, so she’ll come in, swim around me and whine. She doesn’t avoid it. When it came to the stairs, she wouldn’t go near them even if I’d just gone down them. At that point, I’d say she had a phobia of stairs - a fear so strong she’d avoid the frightening thing at all costs (in this case, being away from “mom”) - she was conditioned out of the phobia to a fear…and then from the fear to confidence. There’s a stepping stone of events and it works both ways - a fear can be escalated into a phobia as well…so IMO, you cannot confidently say “nope, that’s not the case, it’s just an intense fear” without also allowing for the possibility of a phobia existing. If the animal can experiance fear as well as anxiety, they can most definitely develop a phobia.
Meg
Horses can develop set a mental problems that are known collectively as “Stall vices” because they usually get them from being cooped up in a stall more hours per days than is mentally comfortable for them. Horses that spend most or all of their time outside rarely if ever develop these vices.
Some are:
Woodchewing – self-explanatory, they chew things constantly.
Cribbing – Latching onto something solid with the teeth and then taking a big gulp of air. Once a horse has this habit you CANNOT break them of it, not even with electroshock-type collars. They are addicted to the behavior (it provides an endorphin rush.) You can try to control it with special collars, but even this is only partially successful. Some people believe it is hereditary.
Windsucking – like the cribbing only they dont use their teeth.
Weaving – very hard to describe, kind of an excessive, rhythmic, repetitive shifting of weight.
There is a horse in my barn, and everyone swears she is clausterphobic (sp?). She cannot stand to be in her stall. As you as you put her in there (to be fed, for instance) she paces her stall constantly and cannot hold still. She acts very anxious, poops constantly (thats a sign of anxiety in a horse LOL), and stands in front of the door hoping someone will come & “free” her. Pace, pace pace, eat a bit of food. Pace pace pace, eat a bite of food. etc. As soon as you let her out (all of 10 mnutes later), she relaxes and will stand quietly. This horses has never been beaten or harmed in a confined space (we know her whole history) but has hated being confined since she was young.
Thank you all for the input. I suspect that very little formal study of animal mental health has occurred, and it seems that the field of panspecies psychiatry is wide open for anybody looking at career options.
Damned or. In my lesson plan notes, the definition was always abridged, excluding the or. I got used to it. My bad. That it is a disruption in the person’s life is the important part.
A former neighbor of mine owned a dachshund. The dog would hide whenever a neighborhood kid would ride by on his skateboard. My neighbor observed this, and was convinced the dog had a skateboard phobia. She’d tease the dog about it (not that the dog could understand the teasing, or that she thought the dog could understand it, but you know what I mean) and tell the cute story about her skateboard-phobic pet to everyone. Turns out the kid was harassing the dog when she wasn’t around. She’d had hints that something was up, but she didn’t pay them much attention until it was obvious what was happening.
Anecdotal, I know. But I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that as much as people like to talk about their pets and the weird/funny things they do, they might find their pet’s phobia of something endearing.
I had little dogs or cats in mind when I wrote that. But yeah, if it was a pet horse or alligator that had a phobia, then you’d have a serious problem on your hands.
We had a few 'coons when I was growing up, and if you think bread is bad, try giving them icecubes on a hot summer day with a pan of water to play in. When the ice melts, they practically go nuts trying to find it. The theory I’ve heard on the practice is that water sensitises their hands, the better to feel shell fragments, gravel, etc. in their food (lots o’crawfish in the wild, if they can get them). Never heard of them drowning their young, though. I’ve not known them to “wash” anything they didn’t plan on eating. I think it’s more instinct than obsession, though; rather like dogs taking a few spins before they lie down. This is thought to be for the purpose of mashing the grass into a bed for the animal, but they do it whether there is grass or not. More of a learned habit, I think.
About 13 years ago my wife picked up a kitten from a friend of hers. A nice little kitty about 3-4 months old. The fellow who had him didn’t spend much time with him because his job had him out of the house much of the day.
“Bean”, the kitten was very sweet, but a tad shy. He hated when people visited and spend most of the time under the bed when there was any odd or new noises around the house.
Short of that, Bean was just a shy cat.
Fast forward to about 2 years later. Bean starts to lick himself. Not just for cleaning, but to the point of loosing hair. Several times he came very close to having a bald tail. He would yank large chunks of hair out in his mouth for hours at a time. I would come home from work and know just where Bean spent his day from the piles of hair.
The vet (several of them) said “It’s fleas” which sounded good at first, but after flea dips, shampoos, drops, etc, etc… nothing seemed to help this. I never saw fleas on him in the winter, but he continued to yank out mouthfuls of fur until he was bald and bleeding.
Fast forward to about 4 years. Bean starts having very distinct personallities. So different, we named 4 of them. The sweet, purring bean was “Ricardo-Bean”. The sitting face first in a corner or towards a wall was “Wallboard-Bean”. The ‘freak out then run and hide like someone tried to kill him’ version of our cat was named simply “Aaaaagh-bean”. Then there was the rip out the fur until bleeding version we just called “bean”. It was like having 4 cats in one.
The really strange part is he would slip in and out of these personallities. He’d be on your lap purring away and then just freak out. He’s dash off not to be seen for hours. Later you’d find him sitting and staring at the wall from about 2 inches away. Very odd.
As a joke I started “pet therapy”. I would hold him down when he freaked out and just pet him. I wouldn’t let him run away. I would only let him leave when he relaxed and I felt he could just walk away. The entire time I held him I would just talk softly to him and pet him. This went on for about 5 years. He slowly started getting better.
For the next several years, he was much calmer, but still slightly out of wack. Even today he is mostly “Ricardo”, almost well adjusted, but every now and then he snaps and does his weird things. He even comes out when we have friends over, sometimes he will sit on their lap.
So… I don’t know what all of this means, but I always figured it was a mental thing. As far as I know in the first few months of his life he was never abused, just without human contact (another littermate of his lived there as well).
And, he’s still alive and healty… at least in one way.
Honestly, except for the ripping the hair out of the tail bit, this sounds like normal cat behavior to me.
Our cats have a sweet purring mode, a freak out mode (we call it cat crazies) and a psycho-ceramic mode (where they emulate a ceramic statue of a cat). Spend a day with them and you are likely to spot all of this behavior…certainly over the course of a few days.
As to the tail that is weird. Did anyone ever suggest allergies? I only mention it because dogs that are allergic to some things will bite their arms till they are raw and bleeding. I guess some allergies manifest themselves as itchy arms and legs and the dog will go nuts trying to get rid of the itch (to the point of hurting themselves). I have no idea if this is relevant to cats and if such a thing could manifest itself in the tail but it’s just a thought. The allergy thing I just described in dogs can be treated with simple allergy medications.
Your “attention” approach was right on the money -the second part of it is to try to get rid of or lessen what’s upsetting him.
When we moved from our ground floor apartment to our house - the cat went bananas. We finally figured out it was the vibrations in the floor when we walked or played the stereo. She wasn’t used to it and it set her off (probably thought it was an earthquake every 2 minutes). She got used to it after a while (didn’t have much choice but to do so - we have a floating foundation, so even the basement has a plywood floor), but for a while she was stressed out and verra jumpy. In your case, maybe designating a safe place - a cubby he can go to when there’s people where no one will accidentally stumble into, etc. might help?
AudreyK said:
That’s true… I see your point.
Horses: oh, the wonderful world of rope burn, or “why I am a big fan of leather gloves” Sparteye said:
Actually, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but there seem to be plenty of pet shrinks around… I don’t say I consider them valid…but I’ve heard of people calling in a horse psychiatrist, etc. I see ads for them on bulliten boards at places like Vitamin Cottage and Wild Oats and down at the barns. Damn, another field I missed out on along with horse medical insurance…
Prozac for pets - a friend of ours has her wiemeraner on puppy prozac. Say’s it’s helped bunches. Who knew.
With regards to the canine Prozac: assuming what I read in an article the other night still holds true, the prescriptions require concurrent enrollment in a behavior-modification treatment program. So does the Prozac eliminate crazy canine behaviors, or does it just slow them down enough so that they can get the crazy behavior trained out of them?
Samantha is a demon-cat. My pet (and I use that term loosely), she’s been mine since she was a couple of weeks old. My brother sent his car to a friend’s to be repaired, and while it was over there a female cat made her nest in it. When my brother picked the car back up, he found Samantha in the back seat, all alone. He brought her home to me, saying he couldn’t find her mother.
I and my mother have been so good to this cat. We fed her, we cuddled her, we spoilt her utterly rotten. I’ve never done a thing to her that would warrant bad behaviour. Yet, for some reason, she absolutely DETESTS us. She growls and groans when you pick her up, and as soon as she is placed on the ground, she’s start licking herself, as though to wash away all the icky human cooties. She doesn’t want to be petted, she doesn’t want to be held, she doesn’t want us period. What have I done to deserve this? The only lifeform she likes is our Rottwieler, Viktor, and even then she doesn’t want him around her (not that I blame her for that, sweet as he is, Viktor has a tendancy to drool). I say she has abandonement issues going back to her mother. My mom says she thinks that when we held her as a kitten, we made her sore, and she equates our hands with pain. Either way, I’m sick of her attitude. I feed her, put a roof over her head, and take her to the vet regularily. The very least she could do is let me pet her once in a while.
Another cat we had (not the same as Samantha, whom we had sterilized as soon as possible, as I can’t bear the thought of little demon-kittens running around) had her kittens in my closet when I was nine-years-old. There were three of them, but two were stillborn. Still, we had one pretty fluffy one, with big brown splotches all over her. I adored her, and couldn’t wait to tell the other kids in school that I had my very own kitten at home.
Well, suffice it to say I got home from school one day about a week after my kitten had been born. The first thing I did was run to my room to check up on my new pet. The mother cat is no-where to be seen. I peek in my closet, but don’t see my kitten right away, so I reach in to pick her up.
And…my beautiful little kitten didn’t have a head. God, this still makes me sick to think of it. It sounds like something from a bad horror movie, right? But it happened. I can still remember the sheer shock of seeing the limp little body in my arms, with the stump looking like someone had played some hideous joke on me. I was expecting a kitten, and got a corpse.
I screamed and dropped the kitten. Running to the telephone, I called my mother and hysterically told her what had happened. I begged her to tell me why my kitten was dead, and what happened to it’s head. She was as upset as I was, and could only tell me she thought the mother must have killed it, that maybe it was sick. I was to the point of fainting in utter horror. It wasn’t like it had been born without a head, and I just never noticed. That kitten had a head when I left that morning. Stuff like this sticks with you your whole life – never really leaves you. My mother came home, and tucked the little body into a shoebox to be buried. She looked for the head, but couldn’t find it. Maybe the mother took it. My father said it wasn’t unheard of for mother animals to kill their young – he’d known dogs that actually ate their puppies.
My question is what happened to my kitten? Was it sick? Why did it’s mother take it’s head? Exacly how did she remove it’s head, now that I think of it? I can’t imagine her bitting it through, but that’s the only explanation. Will I ever recover from my phobia of little dead animals after this?
Phallyn, the best theory I’ve heard posited for the mother-eating-her-young behavior (and I’m sorry, but I can’t remember whether I saw this on some nature program or read it somewhere) suggests that mothers will eat their young when they conclude that the babies have a low chance of survival (due to disease, predatory threat, lack of food supply, whatever), and reclaim the resources invested in the young for future use; protein being an expensive commodity, mom recycles it. You said that the kitten’s siblings were stillborn; that suggests some problem with the litter, doesn’t it? Mama cat decided that the surviving kitten probably wasn’t going to make it either, and put an end to the project.
It was a horrifying experience, I’m sure.
I wonder what diagnosis your Samantha would get if you presented her history to a psychiatrist who was unaware that she was not homo sapiens.
IIRC, one of the polar bears at the Calgary Zoo was put on to Prozac a few years ago. It was to lessen the repetitive pacing that is found so frequently in animals in captivity; I believe they attribute it to stress.
At the time, the news stations in the city treated it as a human interest type of story. I personally thought it was just sad.
However, after living in the Arctic, I can honestly say that I prefer polar bears on Prozac in captivity to those in the wild.
