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lectures > lectures spring 2002

Lessons from the Wild

Speaker: Cindy Engel
20th April 2002

Folklore and traditional medicine have long laid claim to observations of animals healing themselves with herbs, mineral waters and earth. Until recently though scientists have dismissed these stories as romantic anthropomorphism. Now, as more and more scientists uncover examples of insects, birds and mammals self-medicating their ills, that situation is changing. Monkeys, bears and birds protect themselves from skin-pests and infections by rubbing medicinal plants and insect secretions into their skin. Chimpanzees carefully select anti-parasitic medicines to deal with intestinal parasites. Elephants roam miles to find the clay they need to help counter dietary toxins, and birds line their nests with pungent medicinal leaves and so improve their chicks' chances of survival against blood-sucking skin pests. As these strategies have successfully endured the ravages of natural selection, they offer us vital clues as to how we might better manage the health of domestic and companion animals. By observing the many similarities with human self-medication, we may even discover (or rediscover) ways to improve our own health.

Cindy Engel has a PhD in animal behaviour and is author of Wild Health: How Animals Keep themselves Well and What We Can Learn from Them (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January 2002).

She has been a contributing journalist in the foot-and-mouth debate and is also science advisor to several independent production companies and was consultant and contributor to BBC Radio 4's series 'Murder, Magic, and Medicine', Programme 4: The Natural History of Medicine which was first aired in Spring 2001.
Since 1987 she has been an associate lecturer in the Life Sciences with The Open University.