The Pets We Love—And Drug

Fluffy is getting old. Going on 13, she’s geriatric for a Rottweiler. And like many people past retirement age, she takes a lot of pills—steroids for her bad hips and pinched nerve, a chewable tablet for her underactive thyroid, even Benadryl for her allergies. Her owner, Kelly Dowd, is happy to pay the $75 monthly. But to date, there has been no pill to treat Fluffy’s most serious ailment—at 110 pounds, she’s 25 pounds overweight, borderline obese.

Next month this will change when Slentrol, the first diet drug for dogs, hits the market. Developed by Pfizer and approved by the Food and Drug Administration late last year, Slentrol suppresses a dog’s appetite and limits fat absorption. Although Dowd says she’ll try to cut the amount of food Fluffy eats before resorting to drugs, at a cost of nearly $2 a day Pfizer believes the owners of at least 17 million dogs will be willing to try Slentrol. That could be a conservative bet: about one third of the 74 million dogs in the United States are overweight (5 percent are obese). And, increasingly, Americans are willing to open their wallets for Fluffy and friends, spending nearly $40 billion on their pets last year, double what they did in 1994.

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Tagged as: Animals, Diet Drugs, Dogs, Food and Drug Administration, Human Medicine, Pets, Pfizer, Slentrol