ZOOS USING DRUGS TO MANAGE ANIMALS

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 Article published Monday, September 12, 2005

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050912/NEWS38/50912012

Zoos using drugs to help manage anxious animals

Toledo has wealth of success stories

 

 

Char Petiniot, in front of the gorilla enclosure at the Toledo Zoo, has used

Prozac and Valium on gorillas.

( THE BLADE/LISA DUTTON )

 

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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 didn’t help her get along with

her daughter. It wasn’t 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.

 

“They’re definitely a wonderful management tool, and that’s how we look at

them,” said the Toledo Zoo’s 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 tiger’s 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

Zoo’s 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, she’d be

attacked again.

 

Things got so serious, there was talk of blunting the silverback’s teeth, an

idea no one liked.

 

“We finally decided, after watching what was going on, that it really wasn’t

Kwisha’s fault,” Ms. Petiniot said. Kwisha was just being a normal dominant

male.

 

“He was trying to approach her, and she would go berserk. He’d walk up to her,

and she’d scream bloody murder and charge him and jump on him.”

 

By tracking Johari’s menstrual cycles against injuries in the gorilla group, Ms.

Petiniot noticed a correlation.

 

Troupe members were most likely to be injured the week before Johari’s 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 everyone’s delight, the reintroduction was trouble-free.

 

“They were fine. I don’t 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. She’d 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 it’s 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 — it’s unethical not to treat them with drugs if it will make them

not as anxious or not as aggressive. You’re 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 )

 

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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. Kwisha’s 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.

 

“They’re afraid to move. They want to stay where it’s safe,” Ms. Petiniot said.

 

Today, Kwisha gets a dose of Valium before any gorilla is sedated for treatment.

Unfortunately, the calm isn’t flawless. It does nothing to stem the nervous

diarrhea.

 

In zoos, increased contentment can mean decreased injuries. When the Toledo Zoo

opened its Africa exhibit in 2004, it used the antipsychotic medication

haloperidol to ease animals into the new, mixed-species exhibit.

 

Haloperidol is used to treat schizophrenia in humans, but it is known for its

severe side effects. Extended use can produce tardive dyskinesia — involuntary

movements of the face, tongue, lips, trunk, and extremities. The dyskinesia can

be permanent. But when Haldol is used for short periods in animals, it acts as a

tranquilizer, zoo staffers say.

 

The zoo’s four new wildebeests were on Haldol off and on from April, 2004,

through December, and they have been put on it at various times this year as

well.

 

The wildebeests’ feisty nature drove the zoo’s veterinarian to try drug

intervention.

 

“They’re sort of unique in the hoofstock world in how they deal with the

different challenges they face as a herd animal,” said Wynona Shellabarger, the

zoo’s veterinarian. “They tend to stand and challenge rather than run away.

There’s a lot more just general competition for the alpha spot, the dominant

animal.”

 

The animals were continually monitored while on the drugs, she said.

 

“We were looking for all the potential side effects,” but saw none, she said.

 

The zoo’s new Grant’s zebras were on haloperidol in November and December to

ease them into new surroundings.

 

Zebras will chase anything new or unfamiliar in their environment, said Dr.

Shellabarger. When it was time for the zebras to join other animals in the

Africa exhibit, the animals received haloperidol.

 

“It would be silly to try an introduction without some type of intervention,”

Dr. Shellabarger said.

 

When one of the impalas in the Africa exhibit gave birth, the zebras were put on

haloperidol again.

 

“Zebra are known to kill baby impala. That’s just a natural behavior,” Dr.

Shellabarger said. “Something new, something vulnerable, perhaps they somehow

perceive it as a threat.”

 

This time, the zebras were on haloperidol for three days, Dr. Shellabarger said,

blunting their response to the new animal in their environment.

 

But the antipsychotic failed to work on Maxine, a swamp monkey at violent odds

with a young daughter reaching sexual maturity. Last year Dr. Shellabarger, Ms.

Meyerson, and the zoo’s behavioral specialist agreed to try the drug on Maxine

over the objections of the monkeys’ keeper. At first, Haldol made Maxine groggy.

But a reduced dose did not stop her attacks on the youngster. Eventually,

Maxine’s daughter was removed from the family group.

 

Nor did the drug work on a pair of female ostriches.

 

“It’s not a foolproof thing,” Dr. Shellabarger said.

 

A dose of caution

 

Karen Overall, a veterinarian who specializes in animal behavior at the

University of Pennsylvania, has acted as a consultant to zoos and animal

sanctuaries. While she is an advocate for the use of antidepressants in animals,

including pets, she’s more cautious when it comes to haloperidol.

 

While antidepressants generally increase the availability of the neurochemical

serotonin, haloperidol works with the brain chemical dopamine.

Dopamine-effecting medicines tend to produce more side effects, Dr. Overall

said.

 

“I’ve seen it used in monkeys. I usually get called after it doesn’t work,” she

said. “I don’t like Haldol. I don’t like the dopaminergic drugs, the ticks they

produce. It can make some animals more anxious.”

 

She acknowledged Haldol is often used successfully in parrots and other birds,

but she noted that a bird’s metabolism is dramatically different from that of a

mammal.

 

Laurie Bergman, a veterinarian and behavior specialist with the University of

California, Davis, says haloperidol is a drug of last resort. Dr. Bergman also

does consulting work with zoos.

 

“Something like Haldol, that’s in many ways a sloppy drug. You have a lot of

risk of side effects and also overall repression of normal behavior.”

 

Haloperidol was effective for the Toledo Zoo’s female Birds of Paradise, Trouble

and her sister, Double Trouble, said Robert Webster, the zoo’s bird curator. The

females were plucking out feathers, and no amount of new toys or other

interventions put a stop to the behavior. After three days on Haldol, Trouble

stopped plucking. Double Trouble, who now lives at a Fort Worth zoo, stopped

plucking after a second three-day treatment.

 

Although there is little published veterinary literature about the effects of

drugs like haloperidol in wild animals, the use of psychotropic drugs is likely

to increase, as zoos look for ways to keep confined animals as happy and as

injury-free as possible.

 

“It seems to me if people are willing to keep animals in a zoo, they ought to do

anything necessary to make those lives as atraumatic as possible,” Dr. Overall

said.

 

Contact Jenni Laidman at: jenni or 419-724-6507.