The medicine of animals How animals can heal themselves

Swine chairs and Katzenviagra - The medicine of animals

Animals, and not just humans, heal themselves: they prevent infections, care for their patients, quarantine potential patients and use medicines. They eat healing plants, wallow in the mud to shake off ticks; the Sumatran rhino eats bark that contains tannin and fights parasites; Dogs and cats swallow grass to vomit.

contents

• Swine chairs and Katzenviagra - The medicine of animals
• Healing teacher of man
• Dirty pigs?
• Valerian - Viagra for cats
• The saliva of the wolves
• Detoxification in macaws
• Birth control in chimpanzees
• Insect protection in capuchin monkeys
• Nursing the animals
• Heal with ants
• Ivy herbs against snake bites
• symbioses
• care instinct
• Hygiene and quarantine
• Animal and human

Bears, wapiti deer, coyotes, foxes and pumas eat plants that have healing properties. Stare tinker plants in their nests, which contain active ingredients against bacteria, insects and mites. In order to strengthen the nestlings, which later have a higher body weight and live longer than those conspecifics who suffered as young animals among the pests; Females prefer males using such plants. Some monkeys eat leaves that fight harmful microbes - and they eat these plants when they are ill. Turtles eat minerals that contain calcium and strengthen their shell.

Ungulates bring their young into contact with other herd members early on. Although children also learn social behavior, they also immunize themselves against germs. Big cats probably also drag their prey through the muck before the boys eat it to immunize the offspring.

Healing teacher of man

Animals are the oldest human healing teachers. Grizzlys, for example, chew the leaves of the leaflet, spread the porridge on their paws and rub their fur with it. This is how they fight mites and ticks. The Navajo in the southwest of the US also use this plant against parasites and infections. In their tradition, they learned the healing power of the league from the bears. In many American Native cultures, Bear is a mythical father of medicine.

How Animals Heal: The Medicine of Animals. Picture: taviphoto - fotolia

The natives of Peru realized that pumas always chewed on the bark of a certain tree when they were ill. We now know the extract of this bark as quinine - the remedy for malaria and fever from the cinchona tree.

Dirty pigs?

Pigs wallow in the mud. That's why we call an unclean person a "bastard". The wallowing, however, serves the hygiene: First, the animals have a sensitive skin and suffer from sunburn, and also African cultures rub with clay or ash to protect themselves from the sun. Second, the mud cools; Swine can not sweat through the skin, but pant like dogs. Third, they are riddling with pests: they bathe in the mud, later rub it off trees, and with it the mosquitoes, snappers, ticks, lice, fleas and mites.

Valerian - Viagra for cats

Cats are crazy about valerian. Valerian is a genus of over 150 species. All contain essential oils and alkaloids, including the sesquiterpenes. They have a calming effect on us humans. That is why we use extracts of the genuine valerian (Valeriana officinalis) against stress.

Valerian is totally different on cats. The alkaloids excite cats and hangovers like sexual attractants. While pharmacies sell valerian for relaxed sleep and peace of mind, the pet shop with valerian offers stuffed toys for cats. However, that should be the exception, because as well as the intoxication in humans, constant excitement for the cats means stress.

Cats purr healthy: they purr when they enjoy - that's well known. However, researchers in North Carolina found that cats also purr when sick. Because, so the amazing result: injuries healer faster with noises on a frequency of 22 to 30 hertz, as whistling volume.

It even helps people: Cats are not only partners for sick people who are expelling the tribulation, but their purring lowers the blood pressure, and the brain emits serotonin. The patient feels better and sleeps better.

The saliva of the wolves

Wolves and dogs lick their wounds (people sometimes do in extreme situations). They treat injuries and infections. The saliva fights common bacteria such as streptococci.

Intestinal parasites they encounter with grass. They eat indigestible greens for the meat eaters, which stimulates the bowel movements and excrete them again. Wolves deliberately pull booty animals through the muck so that the puppies pick up the earth and thus immunize themselves.

Detoxification in macaws

Macaws, the largest of all parrots, can crack nuts with their beaks - and they eat cores. Not all of these cores, however, get them. In Manu National Park in Peru detoxify themselves with clay. They pick up clay from limestone rocks, which binds the poisons in the stomach and ensures that the birds excrete them without harming their body.

Many other species also eat soil to prevent disease: colobus monkeys as well as gorillas and chimpanzees, tapirs and forest elephants. Clay absorbs bacteria and their toxins

Birth control in chimpanzees

Our closest relatives practice a medicine that can not be explained with instinct; it is a (pre-) cultural tradition that the knowers pass on to the next generation.

Chimpanzees treat diarrhea, infections and parasites with medicinal plants that they systematically search for - it is planned behavior. They also do not chew healing leaves like fodder plants, but roll them around in the mouth like drops that we suck so that the oral mucosa absorbs the active ingredients.

Children watched their sick mothers and tried themselves the "medicine". The healing leaves are bitter, and chimpanzees avoid foods with bitter substances otherwise.

Chimpanzees eat daisy family, vervain and hibiscus against worms, they swallow the leaves without chewing them and excrete them intact again. The plants do not kill the worms, but act as laxatives. They stimulate the intestine and thus promote digestion.

Scientists in Kyoto, Japan, studied how chimpanzees learn to use such herbs. They gave chimpanzees captive the scratchy herbs. Some ate them like "normal" plants; others refused. Few, however, swallowed the herbs on the whole and other monkeys copied this technique.

The chimpanzees in Bulindi, Uganda, are particularly likely to swallow the laxative herbs. In other conspecifics, the "medicine" is found in about one of a hundred Kotproben; ten times as common among Bulindi chimpanzees.

The monkeys in Bulindi live in small forests in the midst of human settlements. They often come in contact with humans and their livestock. That's why they also catch their parasites. Presumably they must therefore resort to the pharmacy of nature.

Obviously chimpanzees even prevent: They eat plants that also take the local people to prevent unwanted children. When they have babies, chimpanzees eat beans that contain estrogen and are therefore preventive. If the boys grow up, let them go.

Insect protection in capuchin monkeys

On the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, white-faced capuchin monkeys break up certain citrus fruits and rub the juice into their fur. They also use leaves and seed stems of Clematis dioica, Piper marginatum and Slonanea terniflorastems. They mix these plants with their saliva and rub them in with this porridge as well. Local people use these plants to deter insects and treat rashes.

Nursing the animals

Animals take care of sick members of the group. Wolves bring meat to lurking members of the pack, and mongooses in Africa also feed casualties. Elephants stay with weak conspecifics instead of moving on and do not leave the deceased alone for days. For example, a blind owl lived in the Wildlife Conservation and Conservation Station in Sachsenhagen near Hanover. His healthy conspecific fed him with mice and chicks.

Heal with ants

More than 200 species of songbirds cleanse themselves with ants. They take ants in their beak and let the feathers run along. Or they roll into anthills for the ants to crawl through their feathers. The ant poison fights feather lice.

Ants have developed special arts to protect themselves. Picture: claffra - fotolia

Even cats, squirrels and monkeys are rolling in anthills - for the same reason. Eulenmeerkatzen rub highly poisonous centipedes on their bodies during the rainy season, when the monkeys suffer from mosquito bites. The secretions of centipedes contain effective insect repellants - benzoquinone.

Ivy herbs against snake bites

Tejus in Brazil (tppinambis spp.) Eat a special root when bitten by a venomous snake and then continue fighting with the snake. These are Jatropha elliptica, which the locals use to heal snake bites and burn wounds.

symbioses

Animals of different species enter into symbiosis, both of which benefit. Nile crocodiles, which eat adult Kaffir buffalo, have crocodile keepers, small waders, pecking for parasites in their mouths, cleaner fish seek their food in the mouth and gills of large grouper.

care instinct

The care instinct not only overcomes the species border with mammals, but also the border between hunter and prey. Dogs fed tiger babies, cats took care of chicks and licked mice clean like their own boys.

Hygiene and quarantine

Singing birds pick each other's lice and mites off the skin. Cows, sheep and horses do not eat grass near their excretions. So they prevent the spread of intestinal parasites.

Scavengers, such as cats and dogs, eat up sick newborns. This points to quarantine, because they remove potential pathogens from the group of sensitive babies.

Many monkey species push foreign monkeys to the edge and expel them. In addition to social factors, this also points to quarantine: The monkeys avoid body contact and thus prevent infections by the new.

Animal and human

In summary, animals practice all the basic patterns of human medicine - they prevent, treat wounds and infections with medication, nurse their patients, and isolate potential disease carriers. Even animals combine useful methods to heal, with well-being: dogs shake with delight, scratching behind the ears and protect themselves from fleas, lice and bugs. The cat enjoys rolling on the carpet in the mornings and having its man cuddle its fur; These are also techniques to get rid of skin parasites. Rightly called yoga exercises for animal behavior. In the cat position you stretch like and trained so the muscles; Similarly, the tired cat gets going. So medicine is, of course, literally. Man developed these strategies into differentiated systems.

People developed the language. So they were able to convey healing practices to a far greater extent than animals. In addition, medicines processed to an extent and made medical devices, which is impossible for animals: animals can not cook teas, put on a hat when the sun burns or lit smoldering fires to keep insects out. But monkeys also make ointments from chewed plants and their saliva, and orangutans use large leaves as umbrella.

What Western medicine has long considered "the superstition of savages", namely the healing of indigenous peoples, means above all learning from the healing powers of nature. Quite rightly assigned American Natives their respective medicine to certain species: bears, wolves, rattlesnakes or bison. The knowledge of how animals heal was vital.

To copy everything from animals, however, would be fatal: the stomach of wolves (and dogs), for example, tolerates the germs in decayed flesh far better than the human; Berries that many birds love are poisonous to humans.

Toxic to humans, delicious to birds: suck. Rowan berries. Image: Two year old dead: unpict - fotolia

But here, too, innate ones interweave with learned abilities, and many of our behaviors unconsciously serve to ward off disease. "What the farmer does not know, he does not eat," says a German proverb. Although this shows the conservative mentality of the rural population ostensibly, it gives an evolutionary sense: Unknown food always carries the risk of being difficult to digest or even of being poisonous. For example, refugees from Syria poisoned themselves for eating wild mushrooms, and the first European researchers on the Amazon stood like oxen in front of the mountain in the face of an overabundance of plants, not knowing whether they were poisonous, inedible or edible.

Our evolutionary intuition can also be deceptive: we unconsciously reject bitterness, presumably because many poisonous plants taste bitter, but sugar in the West is consumed excessively: in nature it is as necessary as it is rare, and we sweetly associate honey and fruit, So vitamin-rich food.

In an emergency, however, modern man also says that his body does well, be it a ravenous appetite for a rollmop or orange juice after a night of drinking, to consume the necessary vitamins and minerals, or scratch ourselves when it does itches - it could be a louse or a tick; be it that we blow on a wound (to cool it) or not let it lick an injury (to disinfect it). At this level, there is little difference to the cattle looking for a salt lick and to the dog that licks our faces.

Why do animals actually treat themselves with medication instead of developing their own antibodies? Why does not the pig pour out mosquito repellent secretions, for example? Producing such substances costs the organism far more energy than "outsourcing". This is no longer true for any mammal except for humans: our naked, big-brain ancestors faced nature more helplessly than most animals.

Using tools and lifelong learning at the cost of physical adaptation to a specific habitat: just as our ancestors made clothing rather than inherently having a thick fur, they also needed their culture in medicine to survive. But this culture was not outside of biology, but belongs to it, and forgetting the natural foundation of our medicine makes us sick. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)