The song in this video is fairly insufferable (you can mute it without losing anything), but the story certainly isn’t:
A reader recommended it:
You should link to the recent footage of a goat rescued from an animal hoarder who was inadvertently separated from his companion donkey and went into a depressive decline, refusing to eat or move although otherwise checking out as healthy. The rescuers examined the animal’s history and realized what the problem likely was. A volunteer drove 14 hours round trip to fetch the donkey to reunited it with the goat. There was an immediate improvement in the goat’s attitude toward life.
Another responds to the question at hand:
Oh my goodness yes! Dogs can TOTALLY gets depressed My Dalmatian, for instance: we moved when he was two, and we thought the poor thing would never recover from the shock! It got so bad that this normally voracious creature, who once sat stock still begging for someone’s lunch for twenty by-the-stopwatch minutes, actually stopped eating his dogfood altogether. My brother even walked right by him with a full stack of hot pizzas and he didn’t even look up! We finally had to give him doggie uppers we were so worried about him.
On that note:
I know you’re not a Michael Moore fan, but his short lived TV Show TV Nation did a “Pets on Prozac” segment. It’s a little sad and a little funny.
Another reader:
Of course animals can get depressed, sometimes severely so. Ask virtually any staffer at a large animal shelter if they have seen cats with Fatty Liver Syndrome. This awful, self-perpetuating disease occurs when a depressed cat will not eat and its body goes into starvation mode, forcing fat from their reserves to move to the liver to be converted to lipoproteins for survival. This overwhelms the liver and causes the body to shut down, yet it also has the effect of making the cat feel full, perpetuating the starvation.
This ironically comes as a direct result of improvements in adoption rates at large shelters.
In decades past, a shelter would typically euthanize dozens of animals in a day or a week. But as acceptance of spay and neuter surgery, keeping pets indoors, and other progressive policies took hold, many shelters were able to go “no-kill,” meaning that they did not euthanize healthy, adoptable animals. But an unintended result is that the average time spent in a shelter for, say a cat, went from a few days to often weeks or months. And for some cats, a shelter can be a very depressing place, with barking dogs, a constant parade of new people, cleaning chemicals, and so forth.
I ran the world’s largest cat-only adoption organization and sanctuary, and to combat this depression we utilized a whole host of techniques, including creating small free-roaming colonies, dramatically increasing the number of volunteers providing one-on-one petting and interactions, and sending cats out to long-term foster care. The consequences of depression, like Fatty Liver Syndrome, can be reversed if caught early. But it’s even more important to not let it happen in the first place.
Update from a reader, who points out that “Monty Python was all over this 40 years ago”:
Another:
You may have already seen this, but no discussion of dog sadness is complete without Allie Brosh’s story about moving with her dogs.
The Dish 