Detroit Times Article by Carla Hall / Los Angeles Times

Separation anxiety is a common reason animals are getting prescriptions for antidepressants.

LOS ANGELES -- What could be wrong with Shadow? The green-eyed, long-haired cat had adapted well to his Santa Monica home. There was a carpeted cat tree in the living room for his climbing pleasure. He appeared to have reached an understanding about sharing the house with the other resident feline.

Then one day his owners saw wet spots around the house: Shadow was urine-spraying. The door was a favorite target. So was the side of the sofa. And a corner wall of the living room.

Not to be confused with eschewing the litter pan, spraying is a ritual of territorial marking that cats sometimes do whether they are spayed or neutered -- as Shadow is -- or not.

Shadow's keepers, Fernanda Gray and Elliot Goldberg, grew distressed and their vet was running out of ideas to halt the habit.

Then Gray saw a newspaper ad in the fall of 2001: "Spraying Cats Needed for Study." Shadow was accepted into a double-blind study of an undisclosed medication's effect on the behavior.

Fourteen days later, the spraying abruptly stopped.

The drug was Prozac. Five years later, Shadow still takes the medication -- half a 10-milligram tablet once a day -- in its generic form, fluoxetine, a $16 supply of which lasts him about four months.

"He's still active, he's still his hyperactive self," Gray said. "But it just takes that anxiety away."

They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners' furniture has been spared by the use of antidepressants.

It's not a big nation yet. But, "Over the past five years, use has gone up quite a bit," said veterinarian Richard Martin of the Brentwood Pet Clinic in West Los Angeles. Half a decade ago, no more than 1 percent of his patients were on antidepressants. Now, Martin estimates that 5 percent of the 8,000 cats and dogs seen at the clinic take such drugs.

The use of antidepressants is another example of the growing sophistication of medical care available to animals and willingly financed by owners who see pets as cherished companions.

Veterinarians who prescribe psychoactive drugs insist they are not Dr. Feelgoods for the animal set. They do medical work-ups, they say, to rule out physical causes for destructive or neurotic actions and prefer to use behavior modification instead of -- or, at least, along with -- drug therapy.

Prozac can cost roughly $70 or $80 a month, but most vets now prescribe it in its generic form, fluoxetine, which can be bought for less than $20 a month.