Animals are the influencers of original well -being

At the start 2010, Mexico City researchers noticed that Passeri and Finguelli at National University were flooding their nests with cigarette butts. The birds collected the butts – mostly smoked – seriously removed the layer of external paper and intertwined the fibers from the filters in their homes, between the twigs and the grass.

This type of choice of dubious but intriguing lifestyle will be familiar to anyone who follows health tendencies. It seems strange, but does it have a sort of backward sense? In this case, the birds have been claimed: more cigarette filter fibers had nests, less parasites that nourished, probably because nicotine rejects insects. There are disadvantages, however: the chicks raised in the nests of the head are more likely to develop blood cell anomalies. Once again, familiar.

Although we may not want to follow this particular lead, animals are the influencers of original well -being. “The healers and shamans looked at animals for thousands of years,” says biologist Jaap de Root, author of the recent book Doctors by nature. Some of these discoveries went down: the Oshá root – which, as American indigenous have for some time observed, plays chewing and rubbing on their fur – is available in many natural medicine shops for various uses, including pain relief. Other animal welfare trends may not be just as imitable, unfortunately, for our species.

Illustration: Haeryung Choi

Herbal of insects

Parasites are one of the best concerns for animals and have inspired waves of evolutionary creativity. Some snails of the sea infected with parasites have freed all their body, then they regenerate from the head. But more common is what De Root calls “animal drugs”. Animals are considered to medicate when they eat or apply an external substance that they normally do not do and helps them “by preventing or deleting the infection or reducing the symptoms of diseases,” he says.

In recent decades, other studies have focused on animal drugs in a particular group: insects. When the woolly bear caterpillars are infected with Moscow worms, they begin to eat multiple alkaloid plants, which kill parasites without nutritional value. The research has shown that the infection changes the bruci gems so that bitter plants “have a really good flavor,” says De Roode, perhaps like a sauteine when you are finally calculating the Norovirus. Wooden ants fill their nests of dried fir resin, which has antibacterial and antifungal effects.

We can learn a lot from insect herbalists, says De Root. The chemical mixtures present in the resins and plants can help other animals to avoid resistance to drugs that humans come across single chemical medicines. And many insects invest in the health of the community and intergenerational, practicing what some researchers call “social dressing”. For example, monarch butterfly mothers infected with a parasite lay their eggs on more powerful munnel species, so their offspring will not have to suffer like them.

Company ideas of monkey

The proximity can help in more direct ways. Social animals, in particular primates, also share tricks for well -being with each other. The Cappuchin monkeys will rub with the toxin Millipede extruded, which acts as a repellent for insects and also makes them slightly high. The groups of Cappuccini pass around a powerful ‘pede.

The great monkeys obtain wisdom from others through a behavior called “scrutiny”, says the primatologist Isabelle Laumer. When one monkey is doing something, another approaches and will look at them carefully. Peering and other ways of teaching and learning have led groups of primates to develop specific well -being cultures. The chimpanzees, the gorillas and the Bonobos face parasitic infections that swallow hairy leaves, such a widespread practice that is known as “swallow the leaves”. While the leaves cross the digestive tract, the Fuzz Foglia grabs the parasitic worms and ferry them. Several monkeys companies have different preferences for disability of the leaves, their equivalent of the recipes of family chicken soups.

In addition, innovation is a constant, both for human and animal well -being. The research that Laumers and others have published in 2024 describes how an Orangutan named Rakus made a plaster from a chewed plant and applied it to a large gash on the face. The plant is known to be “anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal and pain reliever,” says Laumer. Rakus transformed it into a bandage: a behavior never seen before, which means that it could be an innovator in the space of the Orangutan wound. Will the new swallowing of the leaves become? Virality is notoriously difficult to predict, but who knows, it has a blow.