What Animals Can Teach Humans About Healing

When Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz was asked to treat an exotic little monkey with heart failure at the Los Angeles Zoo, she learned that monkeys can suffer heart attacks from extreme stress — just like humans. That’s when the cardiologist realized she’d never thought to look beyond her own species for insights into disease.

So Natterson-Horowitz teamed up with science journalist Kathryn Bowers to take a closer look at health and sickness in the animal kingdom. Their new book is called Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health And The Science of Healing. The book introduces us to fainting fish, koalas with chlamydia, depressed gorillas and grasshoppers who binge on sugar when frightened by a spider.

“I started out very skeptically as a cardiologist,” Natterson-Horowitz tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “I just assumed that many of our diseases were uniquely human. But the overlap was extreme. I mean, a cocker spaniel gets breast cancer, a Siamese cat gets heart failure, a killer whale has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. … And as a physician, what was so intriguing about this … is how little human medicine knows about animal disease and how utterly relevant that is to human disease.”