The term “zoopharmacognosy” was proposed by Eloy Rodriguez and Richard Wrangam in 1987, to describe the process by which wild animals select and use specific plants with medicinal properties for the treatment and prevention of disease. This was following several anecdotal evidences from many naturalists’ observation that animals in the wild resort to plant self-medication to seek relief from disease conditions. Since then several reports on the various behavioral strategies of animals in maintaining health care are being documented world over by behavioral scientists, parasitologists, chemical ecologists, ethnobotanists, herbalists, veterinarians and physicians. A study of such self-help strategies of animals is slowly starting to reveal several facets of life, hitherto unrecognized by modern science. Several of its long held assumptions are being disproved one after another thus reaffirming the tenets of herbalism, folklore and traditional knowledge of well established societies that have all along been denigrated as “claims of a pre-scientific era of witch-craft and superstition.”

One of the assumptions of modern western medicine is that deliberate treatment of disease with medicines is a unique human trait. Also the fact that animals feel pain was itself accepted as late as 1985 at a Seminar Conference of the British Veterinary Association for “recognizing, assessing and alleviating pain in animals.” Despite such scanty knowledge about animal physiology in health and disease, know-how of other knowledge systems on animal health and disease treatment has been denied any value.

Tradition of veterinary therapy in India developed as early as Vedic times predating history. There is extensive literature on animal treatment between 1500 and 600 BC when oral knowledge was first put to script.

For example, the Atharvanaveda (VIII, 7, 23) states that “the wild boar knows the herb which will cure it, as does the mongoose.” Careful observations of animals in health and disease have given way to a rational and coherent medical system that developed several centuries before the Christian era. There is a large volume of literature in Sanskrit and other Indian languages on procedures for the treatment of horses and elephants then extensively used in war and in peace. Treatises dealing with therapy for camels, cattle, sheep and several other domestic animals stress on the prevention of disease, moderation in animal feeding, and cleanliness, which are now being realized as vital, due to “fresh new observations” of modern day naturalists.

Though observations of animals healing themselves with natural remedies have been documented from several parts of the world, scientists have dismissed assigning such human traits to animals as romantic anthropomorphism.

Such denial can no longer continue in view of the extensive newer reports on animal behavioral strategies aimed at health maintenance. This is because, despite the medical advances of the last century, health issues still loom large among our concerns. Our pathogen targeted antibiotic therapy approach to even known infectious diseases, is creating drug-resistant super microbes! In this scenario, it is now being realized that the wealth of successful strategies created by animals over millennia offers the potential for providing sustainable health care for both animals and us—humans.