- Hardcover: 286 pages
- Publisher: W&N (10 Jan 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297646842
- ISBN-13: 978-0297646846
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.4 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
815,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18 in Books > Science & Nature > Veterinary Science > Exotic & Zoo Animals
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More About the Author
Product Description
Celeste Biever, Financial Times, 17 January 2002
'A Sensuous, rigorous analysis of how animals stay healthy in the wild'
Jeffry Mason, author of 'When Elephants Weep'
'A fact-filled fun-to-read book... Read this book, marvel, and start imitating the wisdom of wild animals'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
animal wisdom,
By linda sonntag (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn from Them (Paperback)
A truly absorbing read. Based on meticulously sound scientific research, Wild Health by Cindy Engel is also easily accessible to the general reader. It's tightly written and densely packed with absolutely fascinating information. The author peels back a layer I didn't even know existed, looking behind the usual way animal behaviour is presented to the deep instinctive wisdom that enables wild creatures to keep healthy and to treat their own wounds and diseases. I love the positive approach of this book - so often we think of keeping healthy only after disease has struck. Why are humans so thick? Many of the examples of animals self-medicating are unforgettable. A man in a South American rainforest attacks a snake that invades his hut by beating it with a stick - but the snake keeps coming back with its wounds healed. The man starts to follow it and observes that after every beating it rolls in a particular plant to heal itself. Then what about the elephants who risk their lives walking a narrow path by an abyss to get to a clay pit and eat the clay? The clay provides them with essential minerals, and even though some do fall into the pit, the health of the herd is assured. But my favourite was the story about giraffes eating acacia leaves. As the acacia tree is eaten away and its life starts to be endangered, it manufactures a substance in its leaves that makes them bitter, and the giraffes stop eating it. Not only that, the tree gives off an airborne a chemical messenger that lets other acacia trees in the vicinity know what is happening, and they begin to turn their leaves sour in advance of getting eaten. Result: giraffes move off to find fresh trees. So not only are the trees saved, the giraffes are guaranteed a fresh supply of leaves when they return to those same acacias the following year. So probably trees are smarter than humans too. I could go on and on - but get the book yourself - what we want now is a film please, Cindy!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and very readable,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wild Health: How animals keep themselves well and what we can learn from them (Hardcover)
I loved this book. Seriously scientific but written in very accessible language. Highly topical with its relevance to BSE, foot and mouth, human allergies and drug addiction. Loads of fantastic anecdotes you find yourself repeating to friends, and a bibliography that makes you feel like you've covered a very broad range. 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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wild Health - thorough research,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wild Health: How animals keep themselves well and what we can learn from them (Hardcover)
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.
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