'Zoobiquity'

After consulting at the Los Angeles Zoo on a monkey with heart failure, Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz discovered that animals experience many of the same health problems as humans — from obesity and breast cancer to substance abuse and depression. She collaborated with science writer Kathryn Bowers to learn more. What can animals teach us about our health?

Interview Highlights

On the paleo-fantasy:

“One of the assumptions I had, I have to say, before this project was what others have called the paleo-fantasy — that in the past and in nature things were disease-free and  animals died of predation. But of course with a little closer thought, disease occurs everywhere.” 

— Barbara Natterson-Horowitz

On risk-taking:

“We had the chance to visit some otters in the Monterey Bay area. There’a an area off the coast not from here called the triangle of death and its an area that has lots of great white sharks. There’s not very many protective kelp beds underneath. There’s really rough riptides out there. And adult male otters never go to this area, neither do female otters, but there’s one group that will go into the triangle of death and it’s the adolescent males — the dare devils of the otter world. And what we learned is that risk-taking and sensation-seeking, although we think of it as a being abig, dangerous thing for our own human teens, is actually species-spanning and it can be found in other animals.”

– Kathryn Bowers

On captivity:

“The question is what is amplified by captivity and what is created by captivity. Our premise is that nothing can be created by captivity but that certain behaviors and diseases can be amplified.”

– BNH

• More: About the book “Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing” – at Zoobiquity.com