Doctors by Nature – How Ants, Apes and Other Animals Heal Themselves

This pioneering study explains how animals use medicine in instinctive ways and how this can teach us about healing ourselves. The author's own field is monarch butterflies, but he ranges very widely to cover birds, bees, chimps, beetles, ants, dogs and cats, elephants, and plants and pollinators. The book is brilliantly written, with many fascinating interviews and research findings, showing how animals find ways of looking after their own health and shedding light on the remarkable relationship between the animal and plant kingdoms. Oddly enough, just this morning I read a story about a horse, which is a case in point, in Volume 6 of the Anastasia series. The author's grandmother used to take sick animals on an all-day excursion, and allow them to choose herbs spontaneously, which she would then pick and put into a mixture for the horse to drink. The horse soon recovered.