Your pet dog or cat might soon be a chubby little munchkin no more.
Welcome to the burgeoning era of — we swear we’re not making this up — “ozempets,” in which your servile critters might shed some extra pounds by taking animal-focused diabetes and weight loss drugs similar to Ozempic and Wegovy.
It hasn’t quite happened yet, but it’s seemingly about to. As the New York Times reports, a San Francisco based biopharmaceutical firm called Okava Pharmaceuticals is expected to announce the first pilot study of using these drugs, which are known as GLP-1 agonists, on obese cats.
Spoiled as ever, the cats won’t even need to receive regularly injections of the drug. In a setup that seems designed to fuel conspiracy theories but is intended to make the treatment more convenient for owners, the cats will instead be injected with microchip-sized implants that slowly release the drug for periods up to six months, according to the reporting. Okava hopes to carry out similar trials in dogs.
“You insert that capsule under the skin, and then you come back six months later, and the cat has lost the weight,” Chen Gilor, a veterinarian at the University of Florida, who is leading the study, told the NYT. “It’s like magic.”
Originally intended to treat diabetes, GLP-1 agonist drugs mimic a gut hormone responsible for regulating blood sugar levels, but also your appetite. Its hunger-suppressing properties have made it a blockbuster drug for helping people lose weight.
The idea of using them on pets will undoubtedly lead to whole new territories of ethical quandary. It’s already the case that dogs and cats have been selectively bred to conform to strict human beauty standards, sometimes with no regard to how it affects the animals’ well-being. Now, we’re demanding our pets further conform to our idea of a trim body-type by foisting brand new drugs upon them.
On the other hand, maybe some pets could really use it for the sake of their own health, especially if their lazy owners aren’t making sure they get enough exercise or paying close enough attention to their diet. As the NYT notes, roughly 60 percent of dogs and cats in the US are obese, with hundreds of thousands of them suffering from diabetes as well, according to Gilor.
Some veterinarians are already prescribing GLP-1 drugs intended for humans to pets, with one veterinary endocrinologist at Texas A&M telling the NYT he uses the drugs a “handful of times a year” in diabetic cats. Perhaps it was just a matter of time before we made it official.
“I think this is going to be the next big thing,” Ernie Ward, a veterinarian and the founder of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, told the NYT. Veterinarians, he claimed, are “on the precipice of a complete new era in obesity medicine.”
More on GLP-1 drugs: Low Doses of Ozempic-Like Drug Can Counteract Aging in Older Mice, Study Finds
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