Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn From Them [Hardcover]

Cindy Engel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 2002

This is the first book on a fascinating new field in biology -- zoopharmacognosy, or animal self-medication -- and its lessons for humans. When Rachel Carson published SILENT SPRING, few people knew the meaning of the word "ecology." Even fewer people today probably know the meaning of "zoopharmacognosy." But that is about to change. In WILD HEALTH, Cindy Engel explores the extraordinary range of ways animals keep themselves healthy, carefully separating scientifically verifiable fact from folklore, hard data from daydreams. As with holistic medicine for humans, there turns out to be more fact in folklore than was previously thought.
How do animals keep themselves healthy? They eat plants that have medicinal properties. They select the right foods for a nutritionally balanced diet, often doing a better job of it than humans do. Animals even seek out psychoactive substances -- they get drunk on fermented fruit, hallucinate on mushrooms, become euphoric with opium poppies. They also manipulate their own reproduction with plant chemistry, using some plants as aphrodisiacs and others to enhance fertility. WILD HEALTH includes scores of remarkable examples of the ways animals medicate themselves.
- Desert tortoises will travel miles to mine and eat the calcium needed to keep their shells strong.
- Monkeys, bears, coatis, and other animals rub citrus oils and pungent resins into their coats as insecticides and antiseptics against insect bites.
- Chimpanzees swallow hairy leaves folded in a certain way to purge their digestive tracts of parasites.
- Birds line their nests with plants that protect their chicks from blood-draining mites and lice.
In other words, animals try to keep themselves healthy in many of the same ways humans do; in fact, much of early human medicine, including many practices being revived today as "alternative medicine," arose through observations of animals. And, as WILD HEALTH, animals still have a lot to teach us. We could use a little more wild health ourselves.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A timely treatise for a health-obsessed culture, this book takes the idea of "natural remedies" quite literally. Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at the U.K. Open University, has compiled a wealth of fascinating laboratory studies and field observations on how animals treat and prevent diseases. Eschewing pseudomystical assertions about the innate wisdom of beasts, the author bases her assertions on scientific premises. For millennia, humans have observed animals in the wild eating plants and minerals and applying naturally occurring topical antitoxins from the same sources to combat infectious wounds, parasites and internal disorders. Herds of elephants risk injury and death in a perilous journey to hidden salt caves where they supplement their sodium deficient diets. Monkeys rub poisonous millipedes on their fur to repel biting, disease-carrying insects. Birds line their nests with parasite-resistant herbs. Engel details a world where nature is the pharmacy and every animal is its own practitioner. The reader also learns about the inbred weaknesses unintentionally visited upon domesticated animals through centuries of faulty genetic tampering by humans. Engel notes that the implications of all this for human health are sadly familiar: our biggest killers today (cancer, heart disease) result from unhealthy eating. Animals in the wild stay remarkably fit because they stick to a diet for which they were adapted, while human beings are ill-equipped to handle our current predilection for dairy, grains and processed foods. Occasionally, Engel lapses into apocalyptic rhetoric about the ravages of technology, which gets in the way of her otherwise clear-sighted and crisp narrative. Nevertheless, this is an engaging book that will enlighten those interested in health, biology, environment and animal behavior. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Birds do it, bees do it, and animals of every stripe seem to know how to forage for plants and minerals that will promote health. The author is a leading researcher in zoopharmascognosy, or animal self-medication.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (January 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618071784
• ISBN-13: 978-0618071784
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #763,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book!, February 8, 2002

By 

Tom D. (Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn From Them (Hardcover)

Everyone should read this book! It's truly revolutionary and fascinating. It will change the way you think about animals and yourself. The things animals do to stay healthy are mind-boggling, and Dr. Engel is always careful to say what is scientifically proven and what isn't. I've always been suspicious of alternative medicine, but it opened my eyes.There are incredible lessons here for human health as well as animal health, and the book isn't heavy lifting at all. It's as full of ideas as Stephen Hawking and as fun to read as Dave Barry.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wild health - thorough research, March 24, 2002

By 

"alisoncraig" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn From Them (Hardcover)

Cindy Engel's book is fascinating because not only does she perceive our urgent and profound new need for sustainable healthcare, she has also taken the trouble to research in depth zoological and ecological examples of animals' healthcare strategies. It is for the thoroughness of these surveys, which support a compelling argument, that we should be grateful to her.

Messages from pharmaceutical-industry-led medicine have misled us for too long. Who realised, before reading Cindy Engel's book, for example, that having a temperature is the body's mechanism for combating harmful infection? Or that secondary compounds in food, some `toxic', can be deliberately ingested by animals for their protective health effects? Or that, though we know instinctively that lemon and pine are cleansing, we may not be aware that the volatile oils in those plants interfere with bacterial respiration and are commonly detrimental or repellent to arthropods and insects?

Cindy Engel concludes that human beings are too much like animals in captivity in the way we have limited our own healthcare strategies. Like Native Americans, she advocates, we should observe animal behaviour as the first step to achieving sustainable healthcare.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Read: Healthy Living using "Nature's Pharmacy", June 8, 2007

By 

Michael Uschold (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wild Health: Lessons in Natural Wellness from the Animal Kingdom (Paperback)

Have you ever wondered what happens to a wild animal that breaks a leg? What does it do if it gets infested with parasite worms, or if there is are many infectious bugs around?

Read this book to find out.

The author takes a very scientific approach explaining how there are important differences between romantic notions about animals magically knowing exactly what they need to stay well vs. hard scientific evidence of an animal intentionally seeking and engaging in self-medication.

In truth, animals don't magically know what is good for them, for when animals raised in captivity are let go in the wild, they can die from eating poisonous plants that no one taught them to avoid. It is also exceptionally difficult to meet a scientist's rigid definition of self-medication which entails a observation in the wild of 1) an animal is visibly unwell 2) it starts eating things that it normally does not eat 3) it goes out of its way to find those things to eat 4) it becomes visibly better after consuming the unusual `food' in a reasonably short period of time and 5) there is a clear cause and effect link between the treatment and the condition.

Such observations are hard to make because most animals are healthy and fit most of the time just by living a naturally healthy lifestyle with varied diet, plenty of exercise etc. If you get plenty of vitamin C in your diet, you will never get scurvy. Similarly, many animals from mice to primates to elephants eat clay on a regular basis - it seems to prevent many forms of disease.

Yet such examples do exist. A most interesting one is the widespread consumption of rough textured bitter leaves which are carefully folded up accordion-style before eating by primates. The texture and folding is used to catch and mechanically expel worms.

Animals have been observed chewing on the root of a specific tree known to protect against malaria, during times of heavy infestation. Animals watch other animals to see what is safe to eat, or to see what they are eating when sick.

Native people have watched what animals eat to learn how to treat human ills. Bears are a particularly good source of information. Western societies have in turn, learned much from native peoples about medicine.

There is a lot to learn from this book, both in terms of what we can apply in our lives, as well as just remarkable facts from nature. Like: why do so many animals seemingly intentionally get drunk on fermenting fruit? Could it be that alcohol reduces stress which is keeps animals healthy and thus has an adaptive benefit?

Did you know that when a giraffe starts eating leaves from a tree, the leaves turn bitter in 10-15 minutes. Furthermore, the nearby trees sense this is going on, and their leaves turn bitter as well. Yet this only happens to the leaves that are in reach. Those that are higher up in the tree out of reach, remain succulent. The trees are not wasting any more energy than needed. The giraffes have learned that after they graze on one tree, they need to go quite a distance (45 minutes or so) to find trees that did not get the signal from the last feeding.

Highly Recommended Reading!