A neighbor has a boisterous young adult 80-lb. Golden-Poodle mix who is kept confined to the kitchen (so that he doesn’t mess up the house/shed) and walked for about one hour per day. I ran into her in the woods the other day. Her dog was beyond excited to see and play with Mindy the Crippler and, of course, knocked over our 2-year-old a couple of times (he also tried to pull down said 2-year-old by his hood). She said that the beast was barking at night and she was going to put him on Prozac, at the vet’s recommendation, to calm him down at home and also for an upcoming kennel stay while the family goes to Europe.
This got me wondering if Medication Nation has reached our canines. Kids that are energetic and don’t want to sit still for six hours per day in school are put on meds, right? Now we’re doing the same thing to dogs? I wonder if this dog would be fine if he had 2-3 hours of daily exercise and full access to the house/family.
this is a common rallying cry among “free range parents” (Lenore Skenazy, teir founder, who’s known as “World’s Worst Mom” for allowing her son to navigate the NYCity subway independently as a 12 yo (approx) back in the 1990s). Recess has been destroyed by the public schools since the kids line up beforehand/afterward for almost as much as the free play time. In jurisdictions like DC which can’t cope with snow/ice, they favor indoor recess on blustery days due to risk of litigation. Don’t get me started on this topic since your nephews at the International School of Geneva had 3 recesses per day (morning break, after-lunch break, and afternoon break), and had snow boots stowed in their cubbies so they could have a free-for-all with the snow during the breaks. American elementary kids do far too much seat work versus active work/play, and according to my pediatrician in DC, something insane like 2/3 of his patients are on some sorts of meds (but he didn’t break it down, so could be a lot of allergy meds and not ADHD-type meds). As to dogs, this is an affluenza problem, n’est-ce pas?
add to this, the organized activities after school (which require the parents/caregivers become full-time Uber drivers to karate lessons, etc.), so the playgrounds no longer have a reliable contingent of kids older than 10. My own kids played a lot of pickup sports at the local park, but they were the exception in a sea of toddlers & pre-schoolers with their nannies. There’s also the sad reality that it’s not safe for many kids to walk independently to the local park, since the pedestrian conditions in this country mostly suck.
Phil,
Americans have been using dogs as playthings for years. Like a toy, the humans want to enjoy doggie then put him away. However, it doesn’t work like that in reality.
This person clearly has no business with a dog. Sounds like they really don’t care about it, anyway.
I had a Golden/Chow mix who lived to be 18. She had a buddy, a delightful Rottweiler born around the same time, who died at 11. When the first dog realized the second was never, ever coming back, she about lost her doggy mind. Prozac kept her from destroying (i.e., eating) even more of my wood furniture.
Can’t she afford a dog walker? In Buenos Aires the upper-middle class simply hire dog walkers for just such situations. Or doesn’t this person have a fenced yard?
F em. They really should not have a dog in the first place. I prefer just letting the couch get scratched up.