How Animals Can Heal Themselves

In his new book, Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes and Other Animals Heal Themselves, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology Jaap de Roode explores how animals from butterflies to bears—even family dogs and cats—use natural medicines.

“I definitely look at my dogs differently,” says de Roode, director of the Infectious Diseases across Scales training program in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. “When they’re eating grass, I think about how that may be a relic behavior of their wolf ancestors to purge worms from their guts.”