Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human

Zoobiquity
What Animals Can Teach Us 

About Being Human
by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
Hardcover, 320 pages
Also available as an unabridged audio CD 

and an unabridged audiobook download

Okay, are you ready for some raving?

This has to be one of the most fascinating books that I have ever read.

Written by a medical doctor and a science journalist, Zoobiquity explores the similarities between humans and animals and what we can learn from them.

We are animals, after all. No matter how fancy our shoes or floral our perfumes or esteemed our CVs.

But that all seems like an understatement to me. The book was inspired after some conferring with the medical doctor (Barbara) about a patient who happened to be a primate. And not the human type.

In the spring of 2005, the chief veterinarian of the Los Angeles Zoo called me, an urgent edge to his voice.

“Uh, listen, Barbara? We’ve got an emperor tamarin in heart failure. Any chance you could come out today?”

Fascinated by her experience working with this animal and the animal doctors, especially the similarities with human medical procedures, she began to research other similarities and wondered what all we could learn from the health, behaviours and lifestyles of animals and also what we could learn from the animal doctors.

Around this time I started working with Kathryn Bowers, a science journalist. A nondoctor with a background in social science and literature, she saw wider implications in these medical similarities. She urged me to view my overlapping experiences at the zoo and the hospital in a broader context. Together we began to research and write this book, bringing together medicine, evolution, anthropology, and zoology.

The book is filled with so much information but presented in a way that is very readable. Addictive, really.

Let me show you the chapters, so you'll have an idea of what the book covers:

1   Dr. House, Meet Doctor Dolittle   

Redefining the Boundaries of Medicine

2  The Feint of Heart   

Why We Pass Out

3   Jews, Jaguars, and Jurassic Cancer   

New Hope for an Ancient Diagnosis

4  Roar-gasm

An Animal Guide to Human Sexuality

5  Zoophoria

Getting High and Getting Clean

6   Scared to Death   

Heart Attacks in the Wild

7   Fat Planet   

Why Animals Get Fat and How They Get Thin

8  Grooming Gone Wild   

Pain, Pleasure, and the Origins of Self-Injury

9  Fear of Feeding   

Eating Disorders in the Animal Kingdom

10  The Koala and the Clap    

The Hidden Power of Infection

11  Leaving the Nest   

Animal Adolescence and the Risky Business of Growing Up

12  Zoobiquity 

It is astounding how much we have in common with our fellow creatures, not just physically but emotionally too. I guarantee you will learn tons and love every minute of it.

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