WHEN ROVER NEEDS AN ANALYST

Sorbet Aaron entered therapy on Sept. 19. Her emotional problems had escalated to the point that they were wrecking her home life and had so alienated her family that they were thinking of throwing her out of the house. Something had to be done.

In Manhattan, where many citizens would no more be without a therapist than an American Express card, Sorbet would not be unusual except for the fact that she is a dog.

A bouncy blend of labrador and golden retriever, Sorbet Aaron is on the growling edge of the latest trend in pet care: animal psychology. In the U.S., where pet owners lavish hundreds of millions of dollars annually on the care and feeding of 52.4 million dogs and 54.6 million cats, pet psychologists-or animal behaviorists, as they are properly known-are the newest additions to the already massive ranks of domestic pet care professionals.

Practicing a specialty that has developed only within the last 15 years, animal-behavior consultants are becoming as prized as they are rare.

”For many, many years, animal behaviorists dealt an awful lot with animals in the wild and very little attention was paid to domestic animals, such as dogs, cats, birds and even farm animals,” says Dr. Erwin Small, associate dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ”Over the last few years, really the last 10 years or so, there has been an increased interest in this area and it is meeting a very definite need, not only within the home but also in dealing with animals within a hospital setting. Many veterinarians have some behavioral background, but when it comes to really dealing with an in-depth case, they`re in trouble. That`s when we have to look to one of these experts.”

Hal and Kathie Aaron, a young professional couple in Manhattan, had reached the ”in-depth” stage with Sorbet in September. Just in the last 12 months, 8-year-old Sorbet had become 45 pounds of sheer destruction. Congenial and fun-loving with family and visitors, when left alone she rapidly metamorphosed into a relentless wrecking machine, doing thousands of dollars in damage to the Aarons` airy duplex apartment. Hal, a former Chicagoan and president of his own software firm, and Kathie, a freelance bookkeeper, have had Sorbet since they brought her home from an animal shelter when she was 6 weeks old.

”She is sweet and we love her dearly, but it`s like this child you`ve nurtured has suddenly become a drug addict, a monster dog,” says Kathie, sadly.

Like most people, the Aarons had never considered getting psychological therapy for their pet. When their vet first made the suggestion, Hal Aaron says, ”I thought it was kind of silly.” However, things were rapidly moving toward a crisis.

”It had reached the point where we were changing our lifestyle. We didn`t want to leave her alone. We stopped fixing things in the apartment. We no longer wanted to bring people over. We`d get home and brace ourselves about what we would find when we opened the door,” says Hal.

”It was obviously getting to the point where it was either do something or get rid of the dog, and that would have been so incredibly stressful for us.”

Sorbet is unusually fortunate to live in a city where expert help is close at hand. In her case, it came in a house call by Dr. Peter Borchelt. An almost legendary name among New Yorkers with troubled pets, Borchelt, 45, is one of only a few dozen practicing animal-behavior consultants in the United States. A tall, easygoing man, Borchelt holds a doctorate in experimental psychology with an emphasis on animal behavior from Michigan State University. A consulting psychologist and head of the Behavior Clinic at Manhattan`s Animal Medical Center since 1978, he also has a private practice, Animal Behavior Consultants Inc., in Forest Hills, N.Y.

Although many veterinarians, obedience trainers and animal handlers often incorporate behavioral problems into their practices, animal behavior consultants are a breed apart.

”The first difference is in training. An animal behaviorist is somebody with Ph.D level training in the field of animal behavior,” says Borchelt, noting that most have that degree in psychology or another of the behavioral sciences and that some also are veterinarians. While there are many programs granting doctorates in this field, Borchelt says, most graduates have tended to go into research, rather than clinical practice.

”The second difference is in the techniques they use. We do not use leash-type corrections or punishment-related techniques, whereas the obedience trainers are almost always going to be doing on-leash work initially and then off-leash, but related to obedience.

”The obedience trainers also are usually training dogs to do something-relatively well-defined, relatively simple behaviors,” he says, referring to commands such as ”sit,” ”stay,” and ”heel.” ”We`re often trying to teach dogs either to do some complicated behaviors or to not do some complicated behaviors.”

Pet psychology often has been the subject of jokes. But, when the undesirable behavior includes menacing an owner, attacking visitors or gnawing through doors, it is easy to see why, to owners of troubled animals, visits to a pet therapist are no laughing matter.

Nor is it a frivolous expenditure of time or money, according to animal professionals. ”I think it`s fantastic,” says Dr. Robert Keough of the Cook County Department of Animal Control in Chicago. ”If people learn how to solve these problems, they can learn to solve other problems. I think people who really care about their pets are looking for answers. These are the answers. If they`re motivated to do it, they do it. If they`re not, they have the animal put to sleep.”

If you finally decide that Rover may need a therapist, call one, Borchelt urges. ”If they say they won`t talk to you until they come to the home and make a contract, hang up. They should at least ask you some questions to see if it`s in the realm of a behavioral problem.” Borchelt, who sees between 20 and 30 patients a month, says he gets 10 calls for every case he takes on.

In those cases he does accept, he works with the pet and its owner in the home and charges a flat fee of $200 for cats, $250 for dogs and $300 for aggression cases. The fee covers needed house calls and follow-up phone consultations until the problem is solved, generally in a matter of weeks.

One sure sign that help is needed, Borchelt says, is if an animal is biting the owner or others or ”if your life is being disrupted and the pet is causing you a lot of grief.”

Shredded shower curtains

When Borchelt rang their doorbell on a recent evening, the Aarons clearly saw him as their, and Sorbet`s, last chance.

After being greeted with excited barking and friendly jumping by a nervous Sorbet, Borchelt sat down with the Aarons in their living-room and began asking them a series of questions to ascertain the problem.

The Aarons provided the answers in a cathartic rush. Although the dog spent her first four years in suburban Long Island and then moved full-time to the city three years ago, the trouble started just in the last year, the Aarons told Borchelt. They could think of no changes in the household to trigger it, they said.

”It started with her grabbing a magazine and ripping it up,” said Kathie. ”Since then, she`s chewed two shower curtains off their hooks and you`ll notice that we have a huge strip of wall-to-wall carpet missing,” she added, indicating a ragged 4-by-1-foot swatch chewed out of the creamy beige carpeting in the dining-area.

”When we kept her locked out of the bedroom, she used to do two things:

either urinate on the futon upstairs in the loft or knock over tall houseplants, destroy them and dig the dirt into the carpet,” said Hal, noting that the destruction seemed to escalate depending on how long they were away, but had sometimes happened in as little as 30 minutes.

”We tried confining her in the kitchen using a child`s gate. That worked for a couple of days and then we came home and found this,” said Kathie, holding up a heavy, latticed, plastic sliding gate with a huge hole chewed out of it through which the determined Sorbet had made her escape from the kitchen.

Most worrisome of all, Hal said, was the day they came home to find paw prints in the bathroom sink and a frightened Sorbet nursing a badly-sprained leg. Their fear was that the dog would seriously injure herself. Giving her sedatives, prescribed by the vet, had only left her pathetically lethargic, they said.

”Anything else?” Borchelt asked calmly.

”You want more?” Kathie asked, laughing incredulously. She then added that Sorbet showed almost hysterical joy when her owners came home, even if they only had been away for a short time. She also noted that the dog is afraid of thunder and loud noises, which also makes her very skittish on the street. Hal added that she sometimes doesn`t eat her food or biscuits while they are away and always becomes nervous and over-alert as they go through their normal routine, such as drying hair and putting on coats, before leaving for the day.

Separation anxiety

While her owners talked with the doctor, the patient delivered a series of rubber toys to Borchelt and jumped up on the couch to lick his face a few times, as if encouraging him to play.

Borchelt asked the Aarons still more questions about their lifestyle and then made observations on how Sorbet reacted when her owners left the apartment for about 15 minutes and how she responded when they returned.

Finally, he delivered his diagnosis: separation anxiety. Although he could not ascertain exactly what had triggered it, he told the Aarons, the tip-offs included Sorbet`s inappropriately wild displays of joy on their return home, no matter how long they`d been gone and her show of pre-departure anxiety before they left home. What made her slightly different from the norm, he said, was the escalating nature of the destruction depending on how many hours she was left alone.

Separation anxiety, according to Borchelt, is the top problem he sees in dogs. He rarely encounters it in cats. Accounting for almost half the dog cases he sees, separation anxiety almost always is characterized by barking and howling, urinating or defecating in the house, destruction of property or all of the above.

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It has a lot to do with cultural changes in our society, he says. The problem has become more common, he says, as the size of families has shrunk and the number of single-person or working couple households, with no one at home during the day, has grown. Add in the increasingly long hours worked by many people and the problem gets even bigger, he says.

The overwhelming problem in cat cases, he says, is elimination behavior, an aversion to the litter-box, which often can be cured by removing feces from the litter and also any wet litter. In other cases, the cat dislikes the texture of the litter and a change to another type of litter may solve the problem. In yet other situations, the cat defines its territory by spraying urine, ”marking.” There are techniques, he says, to deal with all of these situations.

A truce with kids

The second most common problem in dogs and cats is aggressive behavior, directed either at a member of the family, toward strangers or toward other pets. In the case of babies, Borchelt advises that owners who suspect trouble get help before the infant becomes a toddler, when the problem usually becomes severe.

Indeed, for families, one of the most frightening situations is when a dog is aggressive toward small children, whether inside or outside the family. Symptoms of this include the dog barking, growling or baring its teeth when a child approaches.

”Although most people go on the assumption that the dog is behaving that way because it has been mistreated by the child, in the cases I`ve seen that is rarely true,” said Borchelt, who has treated many such cases. ”Most of these situations develop when the dog is defensive or afraid,” he said, noting that often the dog has been raised around adults with limited exposure to small children, whose erratic movements and loud noises they often find threatening.

”The first step in these situations is that I ask the owners, `Can we do this in a way so nobody gets hurt?` This means, if the chances of a bite are high, the owners have to be willing to supervise the dog 100 percent, such as keeping him and the child away from each other as best as possible. Then, they have to be willing to work on the problem very consistently, because it has to be solved quickly.”

Borchelt treats most fear aggression cases as if they were phobias, using exercises to desensitize the dog to its fear of the child. First, Borchelt analyzes the situations in which the dog reacts aggressively, such as only when the child is alone or only when it is with the parents.

Since the dog`s fear comes partly from the unpredictability of being confronted by the child, Borchelt usually instructs the owners initally to control the child and its movements in such a way that the dog can relax and lose its fear of the child. Then, the owners are instructed to practice a gradual introduction of the child to the dog, with the child first at a distance and then slowly brought closer and closer in proximity to the animal. ”Usually, within a couple of weeks or less, we can get to the point where the child can feed the dog or even hand the dog a tug-of-war toy,” said Borchelt.

In a small percentage of cases, he encounters a case in which the aggression derives not from fear but from a dominant personality: The dog will not back down from the child or will openly challenge him.

”If it`s a dominance situation, those cases are almost always losers,”

said Borchelt. He noted that the problem is much trickier to treat because the threat of a bite, which most parents will not risk, is much higher.

Borchelt said aggression cases have a cure rate of 85 to 90 percent, though ”in as much as 20 percent of the cases, we get a limited cure or no cure at all.” Perhaps twice a year he suggests that an animal be euthanized, usually when the owner is not prepared to invest the time or money that might be required to solve a particularly hard case.

Despite myths about cats jumping into cribs and smothering infants, cats rarely bother babies. But, says Borchelt, cats generally are much quicker to show aggression than their canine counterparts and can be far more vicious.

”I would much rather deal with a typical aggressive dog than a cat,” he says, noting that he has refused to make house calls in some cases because of the ferocity of the cat.

The `bad` dog

The third problem for dogs and cats is phobia, which ranges from fear of thunder to fear of people. ”It`s not rare, but it`s not that common,” says Borchelt.

In a very small number of cases, Borchelt suspects that the problem is physical or neurological and makes the appropriate referral. In the 10 to 20 percent of cases where medication, such as anti-anxiety drugs or hormone treatment, might be indicated, he works closely with the animal`s

veterinarian.

There is, Borchelt says, really no such thing as a ”bad” breed, but there is such a thing as a ”bad” dog. ”There`s no doubt. There`s a much more powerful effect from genetics than people want to believe.” Moreover, despite many owners` fears, it is relatively rare that they are completely to blame for their pet`s behavioral problem. In fact, says Borchelt, ”In many cases, the owner is a minimal or nonexistent factor in the situation.”

As for the Aarons, Borchelt wrote out a prescription for action. He suggested that initially they use only a quarter dose of the anti-anxiety medication their vet had prescribed and combine it with exercises to decondition Sorbet to her anxiety over their departure.

The Aarons were instructed to leave the apartment but immediately return, thus confusing Sorbet about how long they would be gone. ”You do go out, but you come back so fast, the dog can`t get upset,” Borchelt explained, suggesting they go through the exercise at least 10 times a day. Slowly, the time between leaving and returning would be extended, until finally, ideally, Sorbet`s cycle of departure anxiety and escalating destruction would be broken.

As the three-hour session came to a close, the Aarons appeared much more relaxed and even timidly hopeful.

Later, Hal Aaron confirmed that he and his wife felt enormous relief after Borchelt`s visit, and not just because he held out hope for Sorbet. ”My initial reaction was, `Oh, it`s not snake oil.` We`re going to cause behavior modification in the dog. Dr. Borchelt explained what was going to happen and it made sense. It was straightforward. So I had a great deal of confidence.” A cooperative patient

A week after therapy began, life was happier in the Aaron home. Sorbet had done no damage since the start of treatment, Hal reported, and already appeared less hysterical in her greetings when the Aarons come home.

”I think it`s going very well. I`m overjoyed. I`ll be able to fix up the apartment again,” said Hal, noting that he and his wife administer the light dose of anti-anxiety medication to Sorbet and do the prescribed behavioral exercises with her 6 to 10 times per day.

To work properly with the dog means they have had to budget about a half- hour a day into their already busy schedules.

”Obviously, it`s very important. The only thing you have to remember is that you`ve got to do what the doctor says and you have to do it

religiously,” he said.

”It`s not like a shrink for the dog, where the doctor finds out what went wrong with its childhood and then blames its parents. It`s just a matter of discipline,” he said.

As for the $250 fee, he feels it is more than worth it. ”It was costing us much more money than the psychologist cost,” he said, citing repairs and the $700 wrought-iron gates he and his wife had considered installing to keep Sorbet confined in the kitchen.

”I think it`s going to take a month or two more, but we really think it looks like it`s going to work,” said Hal.

However, he noted, they are not quite ready to invest the $4,000 it will take to replace the apartment`s ravaged wall-to-wall carpet.

”I think we`ll wait on that.”