Tag: Medical/Health

Animals sometimes display a wide variety of mental and emotional distress very similar to what humans can experience. The author describes this both first-hand in an account of her adopted dog’s extreme separation anxiety (and how she failed to alleviate it despite trying many many different things) and more widely, drawing from historical and anecdotal accounts as well as personal interviews and travels to visit different places and see for herself how animals are faring.

There are in this book many sad and upsetting stories about animals abused or mistreated when young, shocked by land mines going off under their feet, traumatized by seeing their parents killed, terrorized by thunderstorms, completely lacking social skills due to being removed from their mothers too early and/or isolated, self-mutilating (feather-plucking parrots and paw-licking dogs), lashing out in violence or exhibiting repetitive behaviors (probably from the frustration of being locked up in cages, bored out of their minds, or forced to learn inane tricks) and the list goes on and on. In some cases, clear parallels can be drawn between the animals’ disorders and human psychiatric diagnoses, although nobody will actually call it “mental illness” in animals because we can’t actually know what they are thinking or feeling. In other cases, odd behavior displayed by animals still has no explanation.

There are sea lions and whales that behave strangely, due to absorbing toxins from red tides, or ingesting mercury up the food chain. There are dogs that snap at invisible flies, horses that chew on wood or suck air, apes that pull out their own hair. Much like people with anxiety or OCD. Sections of this book that explained how our understanding of human emotional and/or mental ailments has changed over time due to our own growing knowledge of the mind and how to treat such things, was pretty interesting. In Victorian times for example, many animals were literally said to have died of “a broken heart” or “homesickness” or “melancholia”. Nowadays I’m guessing we would say it was depression with the resulting apathy leading to weight loss and further physical deterioration. I found the chapter where she discussed the idea of can animals commit suicide or not disturbing.

And all the explanations of how unhappy, stressed and crazy animals get when confined and unable to do things really made me feel glum. The author points out that enhanced zoo exhibits for example, often only make the viewers feel better about the animals’ environment, because plants are fake or have to be guarded by electric wires so the animals don’t actually eat or pull them apart. For the animal that’s just frustrating. She pointed out so many behaviors seen in zoo animals that are due to the stress they suffer, no matter how great things are it will never be like a free life, that I now feel guilty for ever enjoying a zoo visit. It went a bit extreme I think, saying that all zoos should be done away with. Yet several stories in here describe great efforts zoo staff went to, helping animals adjust and overcome their problems. Some it took years. This included things like changing the environment, carefully monitoring which animals interacted, behavior modification training, and sometimes even using psychoactive drugs.

Another part of the book that took me by surprise was about whales and dolphins that beach themselves. Apparently a new understanding is that if the animal is so weak or ill it can’t hold itself at the surface to breathe, beaching is a way of being able to rest and not immediately drown (so people shouldn’t try to return them to deep water). I’d never thought of it that before. Why healthy companions beach themselves alongside is still unknown. But it may be they are offering support with their companionship. There were also some great stories of abused or lonely elephants that did so much better after befriending another elephant. It wasn’t people that helped them, it was their own conspecifics.

Well. This book felt a bit repetitive to me at first, because it has some material similar to Zoobiquity, and the parts about elephants included a lot I’d read before too. Also it’s kind of jumpy- switching suddenly back and forth between telling about the author’s dog, to wild animals, to other domestic animals, to what happened to her dog later on, then back to some of his earlier treatment, in a way that was hard to keep track of sometimes. Though I’m not sure I always agree with the author’s conclusions, it had a lot to make me think, and made me realize again how closely we are related to the other animals in our world (emotions and brain chemistry so very much the same). And we often don’t treat them well. I’m saying this in general. I was pretty curious if there were cases of animals displaying mental illness in the wild? but no mention of that. I do remember a few examples from Jane Goodall books- a chimpanzee that lost its mother young and then had bizarre or inappropriate behavior as an adult which caused problems- but I can’t remember the details now.

A lot I can’t mention here, there was actually tons of material in this book- and much of it fascinating. Not all depressing- many stories of animals having a full recovery too- some which are remarkable. Animals often appear to have a lot more resilience than we do, to emotional stress or trauma. I just mentioned the ones that leaped out at me right now. And why is that always the dramatic negatives? I have a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation on my shelf, and feel a strong urge to read it next, though I really could do with something cheerful instead!

Animals can have many of the same illnesses and disorders that humans do, sometimes called by different names. The author (a cardiologist) was surprised when she found out that primates can die of stress-induced heart conditions, and started looking for other examples of maladies that are common in both human and animal species. There’s tons. She started to wonder why veterinarians and human doctors didn’t consult with each other, especially because she saw that in many cases treatment and techniques from one discipline could inform the other. So this book was the result. A bit disappointingly, it didn’t go into a lot of detail on any of the examples, but on the other hand, I really blazed through the pages in a short time. Horses with skin cancer. Gorillas in a zoo with eating disorders. Parrots that self-mutilate. Dogs, rats, monkeys, bighorn sheep and other animals that seek out mind-altering substances and consume them over and over. Pigs that aren’t ill per se, but refuse food to the point of starving. Obese pets and zoo animals (and how their caretakers get them to loose weight). And so many more examples I can’t mention. There’s a whole chapter on animal sexual behavior, and another on diseases transmitted that way (a real problem among wild koalas). For some reason I first had the assumption that this book would be mostly about diseases that cross over from animals to humans, and while it’s not, it does mention viruses like Ebola, West Nile, rabies, lyme disease, toxoplasmosis, etc etc. I can only imagine what it would have to say about covid, had it been written just eight or nine years later! Like The Ancestor’s Tale, this book reminded me how very closely related we really are, to all the other living creatures on this planet.

Borrowed from the public library.

I felt iffy about this book, at first. When I picked it up off the library shelf, I assumed from the cover and title, that it was mostly about the author’s young black lab, Lenore. And while he does first acquire her as a puppy in this narrative, she’s not the focus by a long shot. It’s more about his border collie Izzy, and himself. The first few chapters honestly started to bore me- I noticed some inconsistencies, and the prose didn’t feel focused. He tells about finding Izzy, a border collie that had been basically living in a field with another dog for three years without human contact. Although has often stated he doesn’t take in rescue animals, the author accepts this dog, thinking he’ll rehabilitate it and then find it a new home. Instead he finds it a new job and purpose working alongside him doing hospice visits. And that’s what most of the book is about: hospice care using dogs to comfort people. Izzy seems to be a natural at it. Mostly he speaks in general about this work, but there are a few stories about specific people they visited regularly during their final weeks. Lenore, the young labrador, doesn’t really come into the picture until chapter fourteen. I didn’t see anything remarkable about her character- she’s food obsessed, friendly and energetic like most lab puppies. But her loving nature is a balm to the author, who honestly relates his struggles with depression and some health issues. For the rest of it, I wasn’t much interested in the pages about his camping trips- yes nature is peaceful and restorative, and camping can take a lot of work and planning too, but nothing about this really stood out to me. To be honest, my favorite part of the whole book was the chapter about his goats. So it was really an uneven read, one I nearly gave up on until I came to the goat chapter, but then kept going because the hospice subject was so gently and honestly written. Just felt like it needed a little better focus in some places.

Borrowed from the public library.