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Are you guilty of focusing on the physical health of your pet, while neglecting their mental and emotional wellbeing?
Most pet parents (including myself) are.
Today this comes to an end as we discuss what emotional disease is, how you can spot your pet dog or cat may be struggling, before diving into some cutting-edge treatment options…
Related links and posts:
Complete guide to cannabis and CBD use in pets
How to eliminate separation anxiety in dogs
Not one more vet: the mental health status of the veterinary profession
Emotions are functional states that have a central roles in promoting survival and have really emerged over time.
So when I say emotional disease, I’m really saying that there’s just some type of dysfunction, dysfunction, dysregulation in this set of emotional states.
As a veterinarian, I'm always interested in hearing about new and innovative treatments that could benefit my patients, but I am equally insistent on there being some evidence to support their use, evidence which must extend beyond anecdote and personal beliefs.
Emotional Disease in Animals
In this fascinating conversation with Dr. Casara Andre, we explore the emerging field of psychedelic medicine and how it might be applied to animals suffering from emotional disease, a term that refers to a dysfunction or dysregulation of emotional states that serve a functional purpose.
Diseases that are more common that you may realize.
What is Emotional Disease
Emotional disease isn't a term that's commonly used in veterinary medicine, but it's an important concept to understand because it describes a range of issues that can impact an animal's quality of life in a very detrimental way.
Clinical manifestations of emotional disease in dogs, for example, include separation anxiety, canine PTSD, anxiety, aggression, and reactivity.
How Common is Emotional Disease in Pets
The exact number or proportion of dogs and cats struggling with emotional disease is unknown, which as Dr. Casara pointed out is because it can be difficult to collect data and understand the extent of the problem when there isn't a consistent definition of what emotional disease actually means in the veterinary field.
One thing that we do know is that emotional trauma can be incredibly damaging to animals. Dr. Casara cited a survey that showed a 700% increase in canine separation anxiety post-COVID, which is a clear indication that the pandemic has had a significant impact on our pets' emotional well-being.
How to Spot Emotional Disease in Dogs and Cats
Recognizing the signs of emotional distress in pets is important for both veterinarians and pet owners.
After all, we can only start treatment for a condition if we first recognize that it is a problem.
Common Symptoms
Hyper vigilance is an early indicator that something is wrong in the animal's environment. This means that pets may become more alert, easily startled, or sensitive to stimuli that they previously ignored.
Other signs of emotional distress can include hiding, excessive licking or grooming, aggression, or changes in appetite or sleeping patterns.
If you notice any of these signs in your pet, it's important to seek veterinary advice and support as soon as possible, as emotional disease is not the only cause. In fact, chronic pain due to arthritis is one example of a condition that can display very similar symptoms.
Psychedelic Medicine Use in Pets
Moving on to the use of psychedelic medicines in animals, it's important to note that this is still a very new and emerging field. There's a lot that we don't know yet about how these treatments might work in animals.
However, there are a few psychedelic molecules that stand out as potential options, including MDMA and psilocybin. And there is emerging evidence of their benefit in people suffering from conditions such as PTSD.
Is Psychedelic Medicine Safe?
One of the challenges with using psychedelic medicine in animals is that many of these molecules have a long period of action. This means that it can be difficult to know what kind of care should be provided for animals undergoing a psychedelic experience. However, Dr. Casara believes that this new modality is worth exploring, especially in cases of canine PTSD and animal victims of sexual abuse, where there are few other behavioral options currently available.
Treatments for Emotional Disease
Of course, it's important to note that psychedelic medicine may not be the best option for every individual animal. Just like with any other treatment, it's important to consider the animal's overall health, age, and individual circumstances before deciding on a course of action.
However, the fact that psychedelic medicine is even being considered as a potential treatment option is exciting and shows just how much the field of veterinary medicine is evolving.
Summary
Overall, my conversation with Dr. Casara highlighted the need for more precise terminology and greater understanding of emotional disease in animals. We need to be able to recognize the signs of emotional distress and understand how to provide the best care for our pets.
While the use of psychedelic medicine is still a relatively new concept in veterinary medicine, it's important to explore all potential treatment options and to continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible when it comes to caring for our furry friends. As always, I'll be keeping a close eye on the latest developments in this field and sharing my insights with you as they emerge.
Full Transcript →
The following is an AI generated transcription:
Dr. Alex: Dr. Casara, it's wonderful to be talking to you again today. You're actually our first guest who has come back for a second time. So I'm really honored to be to be chatting to you again. And I think last time you actually kind of gave us a little tease about this topic.
And you mentioned psychedelic medicine. So that's what we're jumping into today and really about its treatment with emotional disease. So I'd love to start off really before we jump into that side of things. We're talking about emotional disease because it's probably not something that we maybe recognize a lot in our pets.
Dr. Casara: Yeah, I totally agree with that, Alex, And I'll just say that it's lovely to be back with you and your audience. I had such a fun time chatting with you before about cannabis medicine. And you're right, I've I've recently begun to shift a little bit of my professional interests and some of my practice directions towards psychedelic medicine.
But really it's about that emotional health and looking for novel solutions of which psychedelic medicine is one. So I think that's a perfect place for us to start just to chat about emotional disease and what this kind of could mean. So first, let's just start off by saying that that term you're not going to see directly applied to animals or I can't find it yet in any published research or paper because I think we're seeing a lot of mixed species interactions. So you see on the human side a lot of information about mental health, mental illness.
And when I ask my human counterparts, they sort of say that's from an insurance perspective, like why it's called that, Because I always ask a question why not emotional illness or emotional disease. And so there's some, there's some like underlying policy things there. But when I look at what our human colleagues are working on from an emotional perspective on a mental health perspective, and then as a veterinarian, I see the patients that I'm dealing with in clinic and then also some of the other areas of my life that I intersect with them.
Dr. Casara: We see a lot of similar clinical signs and we know that behavioral conditions are not exclusive to humans. So what our terminology is, I think, really still needs to be defined. But that's true in any area of emerging science. We have to have that precision in our terminology so we can actually talk across industries. So I don't think that's necessarily there. Now, when I use the term emotional disease, I'm really pulling a lot from the human side.
And I have a couple of quotes that I just wanted to to pull out. This is from a really interesting paper actually, on the expressions of emotions across species. And this is really saying emotions are functional states that have a central roles in promoting survival and have really emerged over time. So when I say emotional disease, I'm really saying that there's just some type of dysfunction, dysfunction, dysregulation in this set of emotional states that really serve a functional purpose.
And we look at the human side, we see definitions like disruption of physiology, disruption of mentation, disruption of behavior. So I think we see some really, really close cross-industry use. But I don't know that we've yet seen a one health idea of what this emotional disease is, and that's the part that I'm really interested in. Yeah.
Dr. Alex: And guess, I mean, it's a developing field in the human side of things. The mental health has gained a lot more exposure I guess over recent maybe don't know, maybe the last decade or so. Certainly. I mean, we've got our problems within the veterinary profession, which I've spoken about before. Um, and here in New Zealand we have big issues with, you know, people kind of really struggling and mental health services maybe not being nearly adequate to meet that need.
I guess people will recognize some pretty common maybe emotional diseases, separation anxiety, that's one that springs to mind is probably one that people are really more familiar with.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. Ones that are really important on in my work is canine PTSD. I am a veteran of the US Army Veterinary Corps and so human PTSD as well as canine PTSD. When that comes from a combat scenario and whether the animal is still utilizable or we need to get adopted out, that that's actually been a big part of my early career.
So that in particular, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder in humans and what that looks like in animals, that's that's kind of the area that I'm particularly interested in. But yes, separation, anxiety, anxiety in general, aggression, inter animal aggression. Reactivity is also one that we're seeing a lot leash reactivity, leash, aggression. Those are some of the ones that spring to mind For me.
Dr. Alex: Yeah. And like it then becomes difficult, I would imagine, to draw a line of where does it go from being a healthy behavior? I'm thinking here, you know, the old fashioned, the dog who was absolutely terrified of the vet because every time they went there, something horrible happened.
Well, that's not a disease that they're scared of that situation. That's a learned, completely appropriate response. Thankfully, not one that we want anymore with our fear free practices and things. But where do we then draw the line, you know, from a dog who's just being a bit difficult on a lead through lack of training maybe, or because they are actually experiencing some real distress there?
Dr. Casara: Yeah. And Alex, you know, I think that that's probably where we as medical communities, human and veterinary, need to spend a lot of our time. When does it become detrimental to that animal's well-being? For me, that's a definition definition of disease because the emotion itself isn't wrong. I'm anxious, I'm nervous, I'm upset, I'm hungry. I'm happy. Those are just summations of what the physiology is experiencing and kind of that outward expression of it.
So you're right. Those aren't the things. We're not trying to make the animal emotionless and just nothing ever experienced. But I think for me, it's really when it begins to intersect the health of the family unit, that's a big well, that's why our clients come to us. This is disrupting our family. My you know, there was a bite risk. A bite did happen.
And we can't go for a walk. We can't leave our house to, you know, think about the animals that we're not able to give appropriate medical care to because that reactivity or that aggression has become so severe. So for me, that's the line when you start to see something detrimental from a health and wellbeing perspective.
Dr. Alex: Yeah, yeah. And that, I mean, that sounds very, very sensible and something that people can relate to from the point of view of how common this is, because those are everyday situations. And then you've got your kind of combat PTSD situation, although I think people will be much more familiar that PTSD, it came into maybe our recognition and our consciousness through combat situations, but actually the recognition that that people can experience that through all kinds of different manner of experiences, which may not seem particularly severe from that, even from the outside.
How common, how common are these conditions? Do you feel or do you is that do we do we know that? Do you have a gut feeling or you know what? Yeah. How common is this a problem? Because I suspect it's probably a lot more common than we we really do appreciate.
Dr. Casara: I think in every area of medicine, when we don't have precise terminology, we are automatically not doing a good job of collecting data. It means that we're missing something or overrepresenting something. So I always like to say that first, that when we're beginning to explore a new area, we have to come into it with a lot of humility and say, Well, here's the parameters we're starting with.
Does this at least get us moving? Give us some new ideas of working with something and then always be willing to change, Right? That's the that's the purpose of scientific scrutiny, is to say, well, I, I had my hypothesis, but it was wrong. Let's go back to the drawing board and not just determinedly stick with it, but, you know, there are definitely numbers. There's one actually in 360, if you all have that publication, which, you know, kind of is a little bit more blog article, but it has a really interesting article that I found interesting from a post-COVID perspective.
So it does a brief survey and obviously those are a little bit biased, but the numbers that they said there were over a 700% increase in canine separation anxiety post COVID.
Dr. Casara: And what I want to add into the conversation is we might not be tracking this well or as scientifically as we should in the animals, but if we look at what's happening to the human side, we have better numbers there. So so then thinking about how much is the animal being affected is probably going to give us our best idea of what our animal population is being how it's being affected. So some of those numbers mean those are just overwhelming.
Um, this 1 in 2019, so prior to COVID and shut down and pandemic one in every eight people. So that's 970 million people around the world have a mental health disorder. So we're talking a lot a lot of people, a lot of humans. And, you know, for me, yes, think about our companion animals, but also think about deforestation, captivity, things like that. And probably not the focus of today's conversation. But think we can say as humans suffer some conditions and maybe figure out our way about what we need to do in this world, animals really are bearing the brunt of our decisions.
Dr. Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And I think anyone who's gone to, you know, maybe zoos or, you know, seen captive animals, you know, we recognize that they can be very stressful sometimes more than others, but we can recognize the humanity, if you like, in terms of emotion in other animals when we when we see them. Yeah. Yep. Sitting there.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. And and you know, even another way for us to assess that would be how much effort zoos put into environmental enrichment behavioral therapy, like to make the animals have a good environment. How much effort do the keepers need to put in just to maintain that at a basic level?
So I think there's a lot of pieces that we can look at and sort of say this deserves better scrutiny without really thinking that we have good numbers. Because I would say that I don't think we we do now. I'm a little bit biased in my practice because I see primarily animals with emotional trauma. That's just where I've begun to work. So from my from my practice perspective, 100%. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Alex: Wonderful. Do you want to have a quick break?
Dr. Casara: Yes. Hold on. Okay. Ready?
Dr. Alex: Cool. It's not much fun being sick, is it?
Dr. Casara: It's more fun being on this side of it than it was previously. Fair enough.
Dr. Alex: So I guess so. That's the size of the problem. And. How can we then maybe improve our recognition at home if we're a pet parent sat at home? What are maybe some of the telltale signs that our pets, you know, guess primarily we are speaking cats and dogs here.
How can we know that they are experiencing some level of emotional distress, distress without leaving it to the the case of them trying to chew their way through walls or burst through windows because, you know, by the time we get to their they've been telling us a long time before they.
Dr. Casara: That's the very last ditch effort to say something is really, really wrong. I have found that hyper vigilance is one of the most telltale signs of an animal really being in distress. One of those early, early indicators of the animal not being able to find that parasympathetic or restful space on their own.
And an early indicator of there's a lot going on in this animal's environment that it feels deserves attention. And I think that's an important piece of this conversation, that it doesn't always have to be justified. For me, a lot of my clients and my pet parents are frustrated at the he's reacting to nothing. He's reacting to the beep of the dryer when it finishes or when I open the dishwasher.
And so that Nonsensical connection sometimes think is really hard for us as humans to find our compassion and say, okay, there is something wrong and not just blow it off as you're being you're so annoying. Like, what are you doing? Why are you barking in the middle of the night? So that piece of what is the animal actually paying attention to and what does it perceive as the threat from the environment is a lot of where I think we need to be looking now.
Again, a lot of my work and my interest in animal emotional trauma does come from my background in loving and being around many, many military individuals or families or children, servicemen and women themselves.
Dr. Casara: And we really see that that hypervigilance is a key component of PTSD in humans as well. So for me, that's usually what I have. My pet parents pay the most attention to journaling a camera at home. Really seeing what the animal cues on to are really, really great ways to kind of pay attention to that.
A couple of other things though, out of character aggression. So something that the animal never would have reacted to before now, there could have been an escalation, right? There could have been something we just weren't noticing. But when that pet parent comes to you and says this just I just don't this isn't my animal. This isn't my cat, this isn't my dog.
That for me, is a really good indicator that we need to be looking at something else. First, rule out obvious medical conditions because we know that those can definitely affect emotions. But then beyond that, what's really causing this need for aggression or the feel of the animal that it needs to push kind of that environment away from them. Other things are prolonged arousal or really rapid arousal.
Dr. Casara: Now this ties into that hypervigilance piece. If you have an animal who's already ready for something to be wrong, you're also going to see a really fast upswing in that arousal level and interestingly, really difficult to get them to leave that arousal state and calm down again.
So pet parents might notice things such as they're not responsive to cues when they're overstimulated, so they can't even focus on you telling them to come or to sit. They're just so hyper focused on something shut down in the face of stimuli. So if something happens, there's just. Nothing, you know, they're just kind of freeze. Freeze mode.
And then again, I'll just mention it because it's important in some of the work that I'm interested in, just body posture. There's a lot that we as medical professionals, I think can do to make the situation better with just some basic body language communication training for our pet parents. What does the tuck tail mean? What does the ears pinned back mean? What does that crouch stance? I'm ready to leave or go like I'm my muscles are all on and activated. I think that that's really easy for a lot of pet parents to pick up on.
And so I always include that in my journaling instructions.
Dr. Alex: Yeah, love that. Love. A few things about what you've just said there, and I love the fact that you know, what you're saying about needing to rule out other medical problems because, you know, just as you were talking, it just struck me, well, that's like pain causes a lot of those things
So change in aggression, change in vigilance, change in reactivity to noises, you know, maybe as well, skin disease, you know, all kinds of very common conditions. So there's no yeah, they try and communicate with us, but there's a lot of similarities between different conditions. So not jumping to that emotional distress and equally not jumping to, Oh, well, it's probably just a bit of arthritis. Not that we should ever be saying just a bit of arthritis, but there could be something more involved behind things.
And then yeah, focusing on the fact that there is a problem rather than what's causing that problem. Because it's only natural, isn't it, to think, well, it's only a it's only a beep of a washer like you say. It's, you know, that is not a threat. How can you think that way? Well, it doesn't really matter. They they feel that way. So it is a reality and kind of get over that hump and just focus on on the problem.
Dr. Casara: Exactly. And, you know, we see in animals, just like in humans, the consistent or the repeated injury, whether that be from an environmental stimuli or a medical issue, really can result in those longer term behavioral disorders.
Like think about the animal who has beginning stages of arthritis, but as it ages, it becomes so sensitized to anyone touching it that that in itself becomes a behavioral problem with pain as the underlying disorder. So so again, I think that's really interesting for us as medical providers to think about because it is a spectrum.
In the past, I think we've always looked at behavioral conditions as. Diagnosed treatable and then medical. But really, I think we need to move our view a little bit and say emotions really are an indicator of what the internal physiologic status is and how that status is responding to the environment.
So you can have this triangulation and if an uncared for problems exist over time, you're absolutely going to see the emotional state of the animal try to fix that environment, whether it's justified or not, whether it works or not. So that meshing in the middle, I think, is really important for us.
Dr. Alex: Yeah. And I and I guess then as well if we've got. Well, going back to the arthritis example, you know, you tackle the pain, you do all of the, the things that we can do for arthritis if we're not addressing that behavior aspect, we could be in a situation where the animal isn't actually in pain anymore, but they are still emotionally distressed.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. You know, I think we talked about this last time when we were talking more about cannabis. That's such an amazing place to utilize one of the emerging medicines of cannabis medicine in helping decrease that pain as well as anxiety.
And when I'm working with cannabis in my practice, we really try to focus on what is the animal's perception of what's going to happen next. Do they think it's going to be painful? We could have done a tplo and they're great. Like they they should have full function. But if the animal's still like, oh, it's going to hurt, I don't want to I don't want to try. You know, we can be the best surgeon in the world.
And if we don't have that, I mean, we need to be careful from the anthropomorphic perspective, but the buy in from the animal, because we're pretty limited on what we can actually do. Yeah.
Dr. Alex: So that then brings us to what we can do. And guess the field that we're talking about of psychedelic medicine. And it's funny, you know, when you you mentioned that I don't think I'd maybe come, you know, read, read a few headlines about it and, you know, not really paid it much more attention but then have been seeing more and more, you know, news reports from a people point of view of of them suffering with PTSD and having very good results with psychedelic medicine.
And clearly, we need to be a little bit careful about the headlines we read in mainstream media, not necessarily reflecting the reality. Absolutely. But but, you know, absolutely starting to see this. So I guess the beginning question has to be what are psychedelic medicines? Because people probably jump to a number of different, you know, drugs in their mind. But it's important that we know what we're talking about.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. In general, there are quite a few psychedelic molecules and people will list MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca. There are quite a few others.
But then you start to get into indigenous use. So peyote and there's just a lot essentially is what your listeners should kind of be familiar with. Most humans who have experienced psychedelics, if you say psychedelic medicine for animals, the first response that I get is, Wow, that's a lot for an animal. Like that's a lot for an animal to go through.
But then I always sort of push back and say, That might be a really human perspective. The. Things that humans experience on a psychedelic experience might be very human. So there really is an element of veterinary professionals advocating for animals in any emerging medicine field, whether or not we use that medicine for animals, sometimes it's just the, um, let's pause for a moment and think about species differences.
One Health Translational and veterinary professionals are just the ones who usually end up doing that. But when I say psychedelic medicine for animals, really there's two that stand out as think potentials, MDMA and psilocybin. And the reasons for that is just basically timeline. Many of these molecules have a long period of action, so a human might undergo an experience with a psychedelic and it be like ayahuasca, eight hours, ten hours, like the experience is quite long.
Mdma and psilocybin, they both have about six hours from administration to end from the human side, sort of what we see humans experience with the peak being at three hours. So Alex, if I say that to you and you think about dealing with an animal, I think probably the length of time is what pops to your mind. Like, can I just ask, like what springs to your mind as a practitioner when I say that?
Dr. Alex: Yeah. I mean, that's a long time. That's a long time to be managing them and to be making sure that they're safe and well and yeah, and it's appropriate for them and they don't need any extra assistance. And that's kind of that's my initial thoughts without any experience of psychedelics from a human or animal point of view.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. I agree with that 100%. And it's not something that we have an answer to. But I'll I'll say that that's what, you know, my team and I are really investigating. Now, what does that need to be? What type of care should there be? Can the animal be by itself and okay, or does it need to have a guide? We see in a lot of the human research and a lot of human work, the guide perspective is really important, but that's a lot of verbal guiding.
You know, when we think about the human side, so much of that is built on human interaction, verbal interactions. What does that mean for an animal? If we ever find the case where we really need to use psychedelics and I'll just throw that in there, we can circle back to it later. But many times psychedelics might be an answer.
But if we really intentionally work with endocannabinoid system, health healing, family unit medicine, get the human on a good path. Many times the animals just okay. So I want to throw that out there for your listeners of think this is worth exploring because it's a new and emerging modality in our world.
And I have a couple of other areas other than direct use in animals that I think veterinary practitioners need to be aware of what's happening on the psychedelic front. But, you know, many times animals are okay if they're humans are okay. So this might just be a humans. Let's really make sure that you can get the help you need and make sure your animal is okay in the midst of it.
So I'll just throw that out there as, um. Sure. It's it's definitely a family unit thing. Yeah.
Dr. Alex: Or even if it becomes, you know, even if it becomes more of a mainstream option, just like everything, it's not necessarily the option that every individual will need. You know, it's a it's another tool that we have available.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I do think that there probably will be cases. So canine PTSD from a combat scenario when we have a really point injury, I think that those might be the best scenarios to really consider some of these psychedelic modalities, animal victims of sexual abuse, that's an area that we don't have really any options from a behavioral perspective.
So I do think there are going to be places where this is justified. But as we're exploring this, for all of us pet parents and veteran practitioners alike, we just need to have our critical thinking hat on. Yeah. And our scientific scrutiny, we kind of look askance at everything and make sure we're examining it closely.
Dr. Alex: Yeah. And with our with our one health kind of hat on, if you like thinking of we can learn from the emerging field from a from a human treatment point of view. There is, as I understand it, some pretty encouraging work that has been done and has shown to make a big benefit.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. Some of the and I have an article that I'll send you for that. Some of the work, particularly in MDMA and human PTSD, is incredible. The numbers of response are just breathtaking. And again, because I have really strong connections in the veteran world, I'm so excited to see that there are just so many people that I care so deeply about that I see struggle with that and I think everyone knows what what I mean when I say that.
To have an answer from the human perspective is just amazing. At least something else to try and think, you know, that I'm really interested in MDMA for veterinary professionals as humans. So as. Health care workers. We're beginning to see a lot of research come out about psychedelic use, cannabis use for medical professionals, for health care professionals, but that professionals usually aren't counted among among those groups.
And so many of the ongoing studies we're not eligible for. So there's a there's just a lot going on in the veterinary professional and our animals and intersection with psychedelic world. And so sometimes when when I chat with someone, it can be a little confusing because sometimes it's not clear which species I'm talking about and it's usually a one health, usually it's across the board. What can we do better?
Dr. Alex: I guess one thing that just springs to mind is that we've spoken about one health here and have spoken about it in the past, but people might not be aware of what that term actually means. So what does that mean when we're when we're saying one health?
Dr. Casara: So the basic idea is the the that human health, animal health and environmental health are connected, that it's really not possible to look at one without evaluating the effects on the other. Now, a lot of times this is taken from the direction of humans kind of in the middle.
But when you hear it from a veterinary professional, we tend to be a lot more balanced. And actually all of these are connected and we need to be looking at every part and place. And I'll throw in an additional perspective that I'm working on. It's not just how does one damage to one affect the other, but how can 1 in 1 area of interconnectedness actually be utilized to improve the effects of the other group? Does that make sense?
Looks like sometimes we usually think about it from a we have we tore down that forest and so we're going to see health affects everywhere else. But in my work, we're really trying to think about if we really improve the health of the animal. So again, back to emotional disease.
If you have a medical service animal, so a diabetic alert animal, a seizure alert animal, a working dog, and you have emotional disease and that animal. So they're not able to do their utilitarian function. We have a really direct risk to the human. So almost a public health risk if we make that animal more resilient, more emotionally resilient, physiologically resilient, does that improve the health of all the other sectors so that that positive back direction, I think is a really important thing for us to examine?
Dr. Alex: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a wonderful summary of that. It's a, it's a, it's great that that conversation or this conversation has been started among all of the different, different professionals and every different area in the environmental sector as well.
And there's a lot more awareness that we've spoken about many times on this podcast about the environmental impact of our pets and what we can do to improve that, which then has a knock on benefit for for us and for for them as well. So Doctor Cassar, I'd love maybe just to kind of think about what the future might hold. I mean, crystal ball gazing, I know a lot of this might, might be, but maybe with respect to our psychedelic medicines.
But also, you know, you spoke to us at length in in great detail about cannabis and our CBD and the endocannabinoid system. And many people will, I guess, put all of these more alternative forms of therapy in inverted commas into the same bucket. So what does maybe, you know, what would maybe you hope the future looks like and you know, over what kind of time frame maybe?
Dr. Casara: Well, I think the time frame is going to be pretty short. If anyone is following for some reason. Colorado politics and regulation, the state of Colorado just decriminalized. So not legalized, but decriminalized, most naturally derived psychedelics. And so psilocybin is the one of those.
There are several, but that's the one that's gotten the most attention because humans can now grow that at home. So a human can have a grow of psilocybin and it not be criminal. Again, different from legal, but it's not criminal.
And Alex, I think you can easily see that my work from the cannabis side is just exactly the same here. And so we're really pushing for harm reduction education first. Just like with cannabis, if a human has a stash of cannabis and your animal gets into it, we have THC intoxication, we have potential for foreign bodies. We have a lot of things that can happen negative from there.
The same thing happens with any of the psychedelics. So if someone human is using a psychedelic at home, either legally, illegally scripted out like whatever that future looks, the harm reduction the pet parents need is to the same. Put your stash up high, put it behind a lock and key. The same thing that you would do for a child is really, really important for animals. Because imagine that.
Dr. Alex: Yeah, imagine the impact is potentially a lot more severe with an overdose of those compared to with a cannabis overdose, which is generally very, very safe.
Dr. Casara: Yes, absolutely. Now, the animal might be a little bit. All on a THC overdose. But from the psychedelic side, we see some really powerful molecules there. And importantly, Alex, they're really small. So a lot of these are in pills and tablets and it's really, really easy for an animal to ingest.
And it's just that's something that we really want to raise awareness of. Of your animals are in your space. They are sharing your same space. What safety mechanisms do you have in place? And an additional piece for psychedelics as humans explore the use of psychedelics, often at home, privately led ceremonies, whatever that means, I want them to remember that animals share their space and probably are sharing their emotional state.
So again, back to that emotional disease perspective. If a human and I'm just talking about what's happening here in Colorado, if a human decides to consume, let's say, psilocybin on their own and guided or not, they're really having a robust emotional experience. No one's told the animal that that's either okay or not okay, or what they should do in the middle of it.
So if you have an animal that already has emotional disease, say, separation anxiety or just really having a tough time settling itself and they're in that same room now, we don't know this, but just from a well-being perspective that raised awareness of your animals can absolutely be worried about you.
When your heart rate changes, your breathing changes, you're laughing or you're crying. Think about what that means for the animals that share your space. And it's simple. Just make sure that they have a place to go, that they have the choice to leave the room if they want to.
Dr. Alex: Yeah, wonderful. And then for people who are, you know, pretty excited about this and maybe it's their reality, I wasn't aware the fact that that had become decriminalized. So yeah, things do move very quickly. I mean, we're still struggling, still struggling with availability of other medications and substances here in New Zealand. So it will be a long time before anything like that comes here, I would imagine.
But for people who really want to, you know, keep up to date and maybe dive more into the world of the work that you're doing. Dr. Casara, where where can they go? Where's the best place to send them?
Dr. Casara: I would actually direct everyone to our newsletter of our nonprofit Care for the Healer is where we are really beginning to investigate doing some of this research. So we're interested in looking at MDMA for canine PTSD, MDMA for veterinary professional burnout and kind of suicide ideation, see if there's some improvement there.
And then psilocybin for pet loss, grief support. So those are the three pieces that we actually are going to start fundraising for soon. So care for the healer.org is our website that will be the housing organization and kind of leading that research. So that's probably the best way to stay in touch with the bigger things that are happening. Veterinary SCI, veterinary c.org is where I'm putting a lot of my veterinary specific information and and pet parents can find the harm reduction education.
So we're trying to keep all of that together in one easy place because there's a lot going on. There's a lot of research, there's a lot of conversation. And I think just like cannabis, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But the potentials, it's kind of mind blowing what what we might have potential for.
Dr. Alex: Yeah, for sure. That's wonderful work and it's important work that people do because like you say, we need to have our hypothesis and we need to explore them and there may be dead ends that come across, but then we know and it helps guide us and, and gives us more tools to use for for these. Yeah. Very debilitating and quality of life altering. Sorry, I've just had a cat join me on my lap. Um. Quality of life. Yeah. Quality of life influencing problems. So, Doctor Casara, thank you so much for for joining us again. It's been a wonderful conversation and you'll have to come back for your next project as well.
Dr. Casara: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks, everyone.
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