Animal doctors, or how they treat themselves with "medicine".

[HysteryDiagnosis]

Much more at link: http://www.peopleforanimalsindia.org/articles-by-maneka-gandhi/303-intelligence-i.html

Edited to reduce content

Animal bodies , like ours , cannot manufacture most of the chemicals they need to function. Instead they must rely on plants to directly or indirectly provide them with the essentials of life. Animal health is therefore intimately dependent on plant chemistry. The point is : humans have very little idea even now which plant is good for what. But animals know and their behaviour is divided into nutritional and medicinal. High-energy foods, eaten primarily for the purpose of fuel intake, are at one end, and substances considered nonnutrients, eaten primarily for medicinal purposes, are at the other.

When laboratory scientists started to explore how animals select their diets, they found that rats that are presented with a range of foods will select a nutritionally balanced diet. This ability, termed nutritional wisdom, can be applied to the way in which wild animals manage to meet their nutritional needs from foods that are often changing in composition, availability, and location. Although fallow deer are considered to be grazers, in temperate environments they generally graze only in summer. In autumn, when the grass dies back, they switch to browsing fruits; then in winter, when the fruits are exhausted, they browse on brambles and ivy. When the grass returns in spring, they stop browsing and start grazing again. As the food supply changes, they strive to obtain a balanced intake of nutrients and energy. This ability is not limited to mammals; insects can regulate their intake of sugars and amino acids by changing what they eat.



Wild animals never poison themselves, and considering that an estimated 40 percent of plants contain some kind of dangerous chemical, animals in the wild are amazingly adept at avoiding the worst.

[KT2000]

1. Saw a documentary

featuring two tpes of Colobus monkeys - Red and Black & White.
They both ate leaves that contained arsenic. The Black & White would spend its days suffering indigestion problems. They spent most of their time sitting in trees.

Miles away the Red monkeys were very active all day long. They ate the same leaves but they also visited villages where they would pick up charcoal from abandoned fires. They ate small amounts of the charcoal. Charcoal, which you probably know, filters out many poisons.
Pretty amazing.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Seems as if the smarter ones will be the ones to survive or at least have a better

life, it isn't survival of the dumbest in this case.

[trotsky]

3. "Wild animals never poison themselves"

"Never", eh? How can anything making such a laughable claim be considered a valid source of any piece of information? Most animals are unaffected by toxins in a lot of plants because they've evolved that way. And how they evolved was, THE ONES WHO WERE AFFECTED BY THE POISON DIED while the ONES WHO SURVIVED PASSED ON THEIR GENES. Geebus fracking cripes. Naw, it can't be the simple naturalistic explanation - animals must have some magic sense of what will harm them. :eyes:

[KurtNYC]

4. My dog eat spinach, sage and arugula but he also tries to

eat asphalt and plastic. He swallowed a plastic bag off the street the other day while I was trying to get it away from him. My point is he is a fairly smart dog but doesn't seem to avoid eating harmful stuff on occasion.