Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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!

I loved this book. Seriously scientific but written in very accessible language. Highly topical with its relevance to mad cows, foot and mouth disease, human allergies and drug addiction. Loads of fantastic anecdotes from all sorts of animals and environments, and a style and bibliography that lets you know the author has carried out in-depth research. Constantly refers to the need for studying animals in their native habitat ... not the laboratory. Makes you aware of how new the science of animal behaviour still is, and what fascinating facts it can reveal to us.

This is the book I have been waiting for! Herbalists and other behavioral scientists such as nurses who have encouraged the public to look at their health behaviors will be buoyed up by Engel's research and ability to deliver the "message". This is a must for all health science collections both personal and institutional. Timely.

Wild Health is one of the most interesting books I have read in recent years. Dr. Engel describes in great detail what strategies wild animals have to keep themselves healthy. If you are a pet owner, or have anything to do with animals - actually, even if you have nothing to do with animals - this book makes fascinating reading and is packed full of facts and examples from observations of wildlife as well as some old wisdom from the likes of Juliette de Bairacli Levy.

It also reminds us that real life does not take place in a laboratory, that more field research is needed, that living with parasites, diseases and co. to a degree may be better than bombarding them out of our lives, and that there is still a whole lot we can learn by observing nature and it's creatures.

I highly recommend this book!

This is a totally fascinating, wonderfully illuminating book--it's become a favorite for me. Cindy Engel is a superb writer.

this book is in perfect condition, it arrived soon after I ordered it.
I am very satisfied with the service experience.

I have recently received this book at home and I started to read it. At the moment, I finished the chapter one and I started the second one and I can tell you that this book is very interesting. I had not listened about other similar book with this topic.
Really, I recommend that Wildlife and Zoo's vets read this book, in order to learn more about the means to be healthy in the wild.
We can learn more of Wild's medicine and probably to be able to use it in a captivity environment.

Congratulations To Cindy for this book!!