Crisis! American Dogs Are FAT!

“Is your hound round? Too much flab on your Lab? Is your husky, well, husky? A new drug may provide some help.”

So begins the a story from the AP about the exciting news that the FDA has approved the first anti-obesity drug—for dogs!

I don’t know about you, but I was a bit surprised to learn that anyone was even working on a drug for obese dogs. I mean come on; is that something we are really concerned about? Let me rephrase that? Is that something we should be concerned about? I don’t think so.

The new drug developed by Pfizer, called Slentrol blocks the metabolism of fat in a dog’s diet. The drug appears to reduce the amount of fat a dog can absorb while triggering a feeling of being full. The FDA cautions that the drug is not intended for use in humans. They have to say things like that lest some knucklehead decides he is starting to resemble his massive Mastiff, and takes the drug for himself.

Now can we get real for Pete’s sake? Dogs don’t have opposable thumbs so it’s not Fido who’s opening the Fritos, and it’s not the Dachshund eating the hot dogs or scraping the plates into his bowl. Dogs are fat because their owners are killing them.

Our beloved Max was not overweight when he died. He could have been easily; we were the knuckleheads giving him table scraps with his dog food thinking we were “loving” him; loving him until he became deathly ill when he was only a few years old. The diagnosis was “cancer probably” with a poor prognosis and the vets wanted to put him down.

I opted for exploratory surgery only to find we had nearly killed the dog we loved. He had developed a pancreatitis from the human food we gave him causing it to necrotize slowly poisoning him to death. The cure was pretty easy—after the $400 surgery that is. Stop feeding him table scraps! And we did and he lived a good long life until he died at age 14.

Ya know what the pharmaceutical companies need to be working on is an anti-stupid pill! But until that happens, if you can’t get a leotard on your Briard, then perhaps Slentrol is for you—I mean your dog that is.