The only New Yorker who ever made worldwide news for going on Prozac and into therapy was named Gus. He was a polar bear.
Born in 1985 in Toledo, Ohio, Gus was separated from his parents at age 3 and relocated to the Central Park Zoo. For several years, Gus seemed fine, but in 1994, his caretakers noticed that he seemed lethargic and depressed — he’d spend his days swimming back and forth in his pool, in a figure eight, over and over and over.
“It’s just a mild neurosis,” the zoo’s spokeswoman said at the time. In truth, zoo officials were alarmed. At a cost of $25,000, they hired Tim Desmond, a therapist from California, who diagnosed Gus with boredom and placed him on Prozac.
“He’s not meeting our criteria for quality of life,” Desmond said.
Suddenly, Gus was the unofficial mascot of the city — the true spirit animal to neurotic New Yorkers, with their own shrinks and anti-depressants and existential crises. Gus was written up in People magazine, profiled on network news, teased by Letterman, proclaimed the Woody Allen of New York zoos. He became the subject of a play called “Gus” and a book called “What’s Worrying Gus? The True Story of a Big City Bear,” which depicted him, on the cover, laying on a couch in his shrink’s office.
He was nicknamed “the bipolar bear” and drew over 20 million visitors.
Gus — who died last August after he was diagnosed with a thyroid tumor — was the first known animal in captivity to be put on a human anti-depressant. But he was far from the last.
In her fascinating new book “Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves” (Simon & Schuster), author Laurel Braitman writes that animals experience emotion and psychological distress just as we do: They can be happy, sad, anxious, depressed, heartbroken.
“I’m not really sure this is new — Darwin was arguing for this,” Braitman says. “But in terms of research, our knowledge is flowering. In a lot of ways, this is the new Victorian age.”
‘Can they suffer?’
Almost everyone who has a pet believes they have feelings: the friendly dog, the aloof cat. But have you ever thought that your dog or cat could be mentally ill?
Increasingly, research is showing that animals — from flies to falcons, emus to elephants — have feelings, behaviors and rituals that we humans would recognize, from joy to OCD to burial rites. Yet this mounting evidence hasn’t sparked a larger conversation about the ways we regard and treat what Braitman calls “non-human animals.”
“It’s inconvenient for a lot of our daily life,” she says. “If we really internalized this idea that other animals are as complicated and individual and as quirky as we are, there are things we’d have to change that would be really uncomfortable.”
In 2009, scientists at the California Institute of Technology reported finding evidence of “a primitive, emotion-like behavior” in fruit flies — caused by dopamine and serotonin, two chemicals also present in the human brain.
In 2013, the Unites States announced it would limit medical experimentation to 50 chimpanzees, in the wake of activists’ demands that chimps and other primates be afforded human rights.Increasingly, research is showing that animals — from flies to falcons, emus to elephants — have feelings, behaviors and rituals that we humans would recognize, from joy to OCD to burial rites.
“I am confident that greatly reducing their use in biomedical research is scientifically sound and the right thing to do,” Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said at the time.
The Week magazine reported primatologist Jane Goodall’s endorsement: She said that there is no doubt these animals experience a range of deep and nuanced emotion. “They show . . . happiness, sadness, fear, despair,” she said.
Last June, Culum Brown, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, published a paper arguing that fish display complex thought and behavior patters, have their own culture and experience pain as humans do.
The latter point was explored in the late David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster”: How ethical is it, he asked, to boil live lobsters to death? Can the lobster experience pain? Is this torture?
Wallace addressed the problems posed by “comparative neuroanatomy,” but went on present a basic, logical observation: The lobster, when placed in boiling water, scratches and thrashes and attempts to get out. “In other words,” Wallace wrote, “[it] behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).”
The long-held standard of superior intelligence in animals is the “mirror self-recognition test.” Primates, dolphins, elephants, orcas, magpies and pigs are among the few species who can recognize themselves in a mirror, which indicates self-awareness — a metric for intelligence and feeling that Braitman finds unfair.
“Fruit flies have emotion,” she says. “Where do we draw the line? Children don’t recognize themselves in a mirror till the age of 2 — which means that, for a time, your German shepherd is smarter than your child. The real question, according to philosopher Jeremy Bentham, isn’t ‘can they think?’ but ‘can they suffer?’ ”
Dogs on drugs
Braitman first experienced the complicated inner life of an animal in 2002, when she and her then-husband adopted a 4-year-old purebred Bernese mountain dog named Oliver. He was being given up by his original owners, who described Oliver as excitable and rambunctious.
That was an understatement. Whenever Braitman or her husband got ready to leave the apartment, Oliver would exhibit extreme anxiety. As soon as the door closed behind them, he’d howl and moan; when they came home, the bed would be destroyed, pillows and towels shredded to bits, deep nail marks grooved into the wood floors. He tore up the sofa. He licked his paws incessantly and chewed through a sore on his tail.
“If we were with him, Oliver was the picture of calm,” Braitman writes. “Alone, he was a tornado.”
In May 2003, left alone by a sitter for a couple of hours, Oliver dislodged the air-conditioning unit in the kitchen window, ripped through the screen and jumped out of Braitman’s fourth-floor window. It was a 55-foot drop and Oliver landed on concrete but hadn’t broken any bones.
The vet told Braitman and her husband that Oliver would be fine physically but that he needed the canine equivalent of mental help. Oliver got a prescription for Prozac and Valium and a recommendation for a veterinary behaviorist.The real question, according to philosopher Jeremy Bentham, isn’t ‘can they think?’ but ‘can they suffer?’
“I was distraught,” Braitman says. “I grew up on a ranch surrounded by dogs, and they were always well-adjusted and fine.”
Despite medication and behavioral therapy, Oliver remained an exceptionally anxious dog. Two years after he jumped, Oliver developed bloat — a condition caused by a stomach over-stuffed with food or air, and which is fatal if left untreated.
“There’s no single thing that brings it on, and I couldn’t find any research linking anxiety to bloat,” Braitman writes. “But I believe that’s what happened in Oliver’s case. He was in a frenzy. He was gulping air and chunks of wood. He was agitated and scared.”
She and her husband, having tried everything they could to alleviate his anxiety, had him put down.
“More than 70 million dogs in the US are medicated,” Braitman says, and the drugs they’re on are the ones we’re on — the same anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, anti-psychotics. Primates are often on the same birth control.
“A lot of these drugs go both ways,” Braitman says. “Most of our human drugs are animal drugs — they were first tested on animals for safety and behavior.”
Incarcerated in zoos
As for how many animals in zoos, theme parks, and other forms of captivity are medicated, Braitman says there’s no way of knowing: there is no independent body that oversees zoos, and even, she says, “the most-well-intentioned ones” will not divulge such information.
“One of the psychiatrists that I spoke with for this book definitely consulted on the gorillas at the Bronx Zoo,” Braitman says. “He always urges for a change in their environment, but he also prescribes Lexapro and other anti-depressants and anti-psychotics.”
For this reason, Braitman would like to see zoos eradicated and turned into retirement communities.
“They’re halfway houses for a lot of these animals,” Braitman says. They’ve learned to be like people, and they can’t survive in the wild. They’re citizens of no country.”
Gus the polar bear was made better, in part, by changes to his environment: His therapist made him hunt for his food. The zoo built him a separate play area, with orange traffic cones and large garbage cans. He had two companions, the polar bears Lily and Ida, but he never completely stopped doing his figure-eights. Like most functional New Yorkers, Gus was able to manage his stress, if not eradicate it.
He did well until 2011, when he lost Ida (Lily died in 2004). He displayed symptoms of depression, and two years later was diagnosed with his tumor. When Gus died on August 27, 2013, large obituaries ran in nearly every major news outlet in America.
He was memorialized, without irony, by a zoo spokesperson as “a great source of joy for our visitors and staff.”
The emotional bond
Braitman believes that once we accept the existence of emotion, trauma and mental illness in other animals, humans will only benefit.
There is much we can learn, she says. For example, as Internet memes go, few are more popular than stories and videos of interspecies friendship — Bubbles the elephant and Bella the Labrador, Suryia the orangutan and Roscoe the hound, the kitten nursing the puppies, the donkey and the wolf.
“I was so dismissive of those, thinking they’re so anthropomorphic and stupid!” Braitman says. “But there’s something to it, oxytocin levels spike in both dogs and humans when they’re together. That’s friendship with another species.”
We can also learn from the efficacy of behavioral therapy in other species: the ways traumatized elephants are rehabbed, or the way Brian, a bonobo at the Milwaukee County Zoo who had been sexually assaulted by his father, was so successfully treated that he went on to fully integrate socially and have babies of his own.
“That’s something we can learn from, the methods used by vets and compassionate pet owners,” Braitman says. “A lot of adults and children can’t explain their anxiety.”
And, of course, there are the feedback loops. One of Braitman’s favorite examples is a friend of hers, a veteran who returned from Afghanistan with a crippling fear of heights.
“He would have to go out of helicopters backwards,” she says, and so he got a therapy dog to help with that. “But the dog picked up on it,” she says, “and now he has a fear of heights! But it’s OK, because my friend is now so concerned with helping his dog get over his fear of heights that he’s no longer afraid.”