About this episode
What happens to animals when they get sick? If they're pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just languish in misery? Well, not so much. It turns out that animals—from bees to butterflies, porcupines to primates—medicate themselves. They seek out bitter plants, they treat wounds, they amputate limbs, they eat clay—the list goes on. This all raises an obvious question: How do they know to do this? How do they know what they know about healing and medicine? It also invites a related question: How do we humans know what we know? My guests today are Dr. Jaap De Roode and Dr. Michael Huffman. Jaap is a biologist at Emory University, and has studied animal medication in insects; he's also the author of a forthcoming book about animal medication across the tree of life. Mike is a primatologist at the University of Nagasaki, and made some of the very first observations about animal self-medication in chimpanzees in the 1980s. Here, Jaap, Mike, and I talk about how they found their way into this field, in both cases kind of by accident. We discuss what defines animal medication generally as well as what defines its more specific subtypes—social medication, allomedication, prophylactic medication, and others. We consider how animals know what they know about healing—whether these medicinal behaviors are mostly driven by innate tendencies, by individual experimentation, by social learning, or by some combination. We talk about the evidence that many of the medical insights that humans have had over the years actually began with observations of animals. Along the way, we touch on medicinal amputation and medicinal cannibalism, geophagy, leaf-folding in primates, animal quackery, bear medicine, why lemurs rub themselves with millipedes, and the anti-parasitic power of cigarette butts. Alright, friends, this is a fun one. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available
