Book: Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn from Them by Cindy Engel
(2002, 276 pgs., softcover) -- 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 proper raw foods for a nutritionally balanced diet, always 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. Some of the many interesting examples of animal behavior cited in this book include:
* Desert tortoises will travel miles to mine and eat the calcium needed to keep their shells strong.
* Monkeys, bears, 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 form blood-draining mites and lice.
* All vegetarian mammals eat clay!
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.
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