Here's the text, just in case. Surely someone must have an opinion about psychiatrically medicating swamp monkeys and wildebeests.
Zoos using drugs to help manage anxious animals
Toledo has wealth of success stories
By JENNI LAIDMAN
BLADE SCIENCE WRITER
Johari the gorilla is on antidepressants. It eases her PMS.
When the Toledo Zoo needed calm zebras, it used an antipsychotic medication to quiet their jitters. Zoo staffers tried to soothe wildebeests with antipsychotic medication for eight months last year, and even occasionally this year. A swamp monkey was dosed with the antipsychotic, but it didnt help her get along with her daughter. It wasnt much good for ostrich aggression either. Yet a little Valium calmed the silverback gorilla when one of the females had a doctor visit. And Prozac helped a female orangutan negotiate life in her group.
Now that humans have warmly embraced citizenship in the Prozac Nation, zoo animals are making tentative gallops, flights, and knuckle-walks into the world of psychotropic pharmaceuticals.
In the last decade, zoos across the nation have turned to antidepressants, tranquilizers, and even antipsychotic drugs such as haloperidol, sold as Haldol, to ease behavioral problems in zoo denizens.
Theyre definitely a wonderful management tool, and thats how we look at them, said the Toledo Zoos mammal curator, Randi Meyerson. To be able to just take the edge off puts us a little more at ease.
Klechka was 300 pounds of sinewy orange ferocity. Then keepers hung shade cloth in the Amur tigers enclosure to keep him out of the sun. (Amur tigers are also called Siberian tigers.)
That did it. He morphed from brave tiger into cowardly lion.
It was terrifying for him, Ms. Meyerson said. He even stopped eating.
To help Klechka get accustomed to his altered environment, the big cat received a low dose of Valium for two days. It did the trick. The 2-year-old tiger went back to being his normal, formidable self.
Long-term treatment
Most often, the drugs are short-term interventions to help animals through a bad patch, but occasionally, they become a long-term treatment for animal behavior. Take the case of Johari, a 17-year-old female gorilla.
To hear gorilla keeper Char Petiniot describe interactions among the Toledo Zoos gorillas is to follow a soap opera featuring a greater-than-average number of bite wounds.
Johari is a nervous gorilla at the best of times, plucking hair from her arms and face the way some people chew fingernails. To make matters worse, her family group has had more than its share of drama, with members moving in and out of the group, and alliances constantly shifting. When Kwisha, a silverback, returned to the group in 2002 after a lengthy separation, Johari kept getting injured in fights with Kwisha.
At first, keepers blamed Kwisha. He attacked Johari on a number of occasions, and many of the attacks required medical treatment. Johari had to be knocked out, separated from her group, and given time to heal. On return, shed be attacked again.
Things got so serious, there was talk of blunting the silverbacks teeth, an idea no one liked.
We finally decided, after watching what was going on, that it really wasnt Kwishas fault, Ms. Petiniot said. Kwisha was just being a normal dominant male.
He was trying to approach her, and she would go berserk. Hed walk up to her, and shed scream bloody murder and charge him and jump on him.
By tracking Joharis menstrual cycles against injuries in the gorilla group, Ms. Petiniot noticed a correlation.
Troupe members were most likely to be injured the week before Joharis menses.
Johari was given daily doses of an antidepressant often used for premenstrual tension. A month after she started on Prozac, she was reintroduced to her group. To everyones delight, the reintroduction was trouble-free.
They were fine. I dont think we had any injuries, Ms. Petiniot said.
In fact, Johari and Kwisha bred, and the female gave birth to Dara in August, 2003. The zoo staff hoped the hormonal changes of pregnancy and nursing would reduce her premenstrual symptoms. Antidepressant treatment was stopped. It proved a mistake.
She got kind of psychotic on us, Ms. Petiniot said. Johari was back on antidepressants in a month, and she remains on them.
Ms. Petiniot acknowledges she is conservative when it comes to the use of any drug. Shed rather have the animals living drug-free whenever possible. But animal behavior expert and veterinarian Kathy Houpt of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says real ethical problems can arise when needed treatment is withheld.
Ethical issues
I think its unethical to have an animal for example a dog with separation anxieties, desperately trying to get out of the house, digging until his paws are bloody its unethical not to treat them with drugs if it will make them not as anxious or not as aggressive. Youre making an animal feel more contented, Dr. Houpt said.
Robert Webster, the Toledo Zoo's bird curator, says Haldol helped keep two of his birds from plucking their feathers out. Nothing else the zoo had tried seemed to work as well.
( THE BLADE/LISA DUTTON )
The emotional lives of great apes seem to demand special intervention. When any of the gorillas is immobilized for treatment or surgery, Kwisha becomes completely unglued, Ms. Petiniot said.
He just gets really upset, she said. His displeasure is compounded by profuse diarrhea. Kwishas emotional state, and its unpleasant side effects, spreads to all the other gorillas. Everyone gets sick. The male also refuses to take his group outside.
Theyre afraid to move. They want to stay where its safe, Ms. Petiniot said.
Today, Kwisha gets a dose of Valium before any gorilla is sedated for treatment. Unfortunately, the calm isnt flawless. It does nothing to stem the nervous diarrhea.