Dogs Exposed to War are Getting Diagnosed with PTSD

By JG Vibe
November 27, 2012

As I have discussed very often, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its prevalence following violent situations like wars and arrests, show us how violence is visibly unhealthy for human beings.

People often argue about how long violence has been a part of the human condition as if that somehow negates the damage that it causes, but of course, it does not.

Another argument that is put forward in debates about the morality of war is violence in the animal kingdom, which is not even really comparable to the kind of mass murder and genocide that the human race goes along with.

Despite these popular misconceptions, it seems that members of the animal kingdom have an aversion to violence as well, and can develop the same sort of PTSD symptoms that humans can.  Many professional animal trainers have even been diagnosing dogs returning from war with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
According to the LA Times:

“Veterinarians and senior dog handlers at Lackland have concluded that dogs, like humans, can require treatment for PTSD, including conditioning, retraining and possibly medication such as the anti-anxiety drug Xanax….
Walter Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine and military working-dog studies at Lackland, estimates that at least 10% of the hundreds of dogs sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect U.S. troops have developed canine PTSD.”

It is likely that this 10% statistic is far understated on account of the test subjects not actually having the ability to verbally communicate their feelings and symptoms.

It has long been known that there are more veterans who end up committing suicide than there are who actually die on the battlefield.

This fact has been so unsettling for many people in the mainstream because it exposes the true nature of what war is all about, and the effect it has on those who experience it.

When the people on the front lines are so depressed about what they have seen and what they have been forced to do, it opens up a whole list of questions that people in the US have been running from for over a decade.