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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Explainer Can I Take My Dog’s Pills?It’s probably not the best idea. Varvara Druhzinina/iStock/Getty Images Plus Slate’s archives are full of fascinating stories. We’re republishing this article because it remains a reader favorite. It was originally published April 5, 2011. A Texas death row inmate is challenging the substitution of pentobarbital for the more traditional sodium thiopental as the initial, anesthetizing drug in his three-drug execution cocktail. The state’s supply of sodium thiopental expired in March, and there is a worldwide shortage of the chemical agent. Pentobarbital, the proposed replacement, is commonly used in animal euthanasia. Do doctors and veterinarians use a lot of the same medications? Absolutely. Dogs, cats, horses, and sheep regularly take the same medicines as wounded bipedals. Many, and perhaps most, antibiotics are approved for use in humans and animals. Versions of some of our anti-anxiety medications and painkillers are approved for other species as well. But just because the active ingredient is the same in human and animal formulations doesn’t mean the pills are identical—there’s often a difference in dosage, and the inactive ingredients may differ (in kind and amount) as well. So the state of Texas won’t buy its pentobarbital from the animal hospital, even though there is a super-concentrated veterinary dose specially formulated for euthanasia. Many animal drugs start off as human medications, because there is far more money invested in human drug research. In such cases, manufacturers sometimes reformulate their drugs for sale to animal owners. For example, if the dose for dogs is less than for humans, they may have to add more binding agent to bulk the pill up to a manageable size. (The active ingredient constitutes a minuscule fraction of the overall volume of any pills.) The company might also put more or less of a chemical that aids in absorption. In other cases, large companies working in both the medical and veterinary fields develop the two formulations side by side. The approval processes for human and animal drugs are entirely separate, although similar. Just like ordinary medicines, veterinary drugs have to clear randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials. Animal trials,
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