Even the Gorillas and Bears in Our Zoos Are Hooked on Prozac

OC: I am against zoos, no question. First, animals are enslaved, made to perform and strut for human entertainment, gleeful, sticky hands poking at fin and fur. Second, they are raped, made to reproduce under the guise of conservation, never establishing that funds and greed are the main desire. And third, now they are drugged, stifling their natural urges, made to parade in a halcion-induced stage of docility. Please defend animals by never using them as entertainment, be it in a zoo, and aquarium, or other such nonsensical human-endorced whimsy.


Source Stop Making Sense
By mrdsk

Laurel Braitman, author of Animal Madness, featured excerpts from her book in Wired:

‘One of the first nonhumans to be given psychopharmaceuticals as a patient (and not as a test subject) was a western lowland gorilla named Willie B., who was famous in Atlanta, Georgia. He was captured in Congo as an infant in the 1960s and sent to Zoo Atlanta, where he lived for 39 years, 27 of them alone in an indoor cage with a tire swing and a television. According to Mel Richardson, who was working as a veterinarian at Zoo Atlanta at the time, Willie broke a glass window in his enclosure in the winter of 1970–71 and had to be transferred to a much smaller cage for six months while the glass was replaced with heavy metal bars.

“He weighed around 400 pounds, and the cage was way too small for him,” said Mel. “If he stood up and stretched each arm all the way out he could almost touch both sides of the cage at once.” The vet staff decided to medicate him so that the six months would be more bearable. They put Thorazine in the Coca-Cola he drank in the morning. According to Mel, Willie responded to the drug as many institutionalized humans do: He shuffled back and forth across his cage with dulled eyes. “It was a little like watching the men in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Mel said.

Dolphins, whales, sea lions, walruses, and other marine creatures in parks like SeaWorld have also been given psychotropic drugs for what their vets see as depression, anxiety, compulsive regurgitation, flank sucking, or other distressing behaviors. Two marine mammal veterinarians who have spent decades on staff or consulting for American animal-display facilities and the military’s marine mammal program told me that antidepressants and antipsychotics are commonly used but that “no one was going to talk to [me] about it.” Even they wouldn’t speak about the subject on the record.’


READ MORE…

• Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves (Book)
• Fish swimming in water tainted with Prozac exhibit ‘antisocial, aggressive and even homicidal behaviour’
• Pets on Prozac: The dark side of animal emotions
• Effect of psychoactive drugs on animals

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dear humans.

it is in all your science books,
maybe you are too busy exploiting us
to take a look,
guess what humans, you are animals
too.
and in your hearts you
know this is true.
so treat us as brothers,
as companions
as friends.
it is about time all the
abuse and torment
comes to an end.

signed,
the animal kingdom!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson