I know all you Bull Terrier owners out there love your dogs (and if I knew them I would probably love them too) but I must comment on the staggering incidence of mental illness in this breed.

Obsessive-compulsive behavior, dominance aggression, fear aggression, predatory aggression, generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, and miscellaneous phobias abound.

The good news: they are highly intelligent. Anecdotally, I correlate unusually high levels of intelligence with ,behavioral disease, in dogs. Incidentally, this has definitively been found to be true of humans with respect to several specific forms of mental illness.

The other good news: they respond to Prozac, Paxil, clomipramine, buspirone, Elavil, and other psychotropic drugs.

Mr. French needs more than just a prescription, of course, but in his case a pill a day is likely to help a whole lot.