Zoobiquity Quotes

“One thing is clear: cancer is not unique to humans. And neither is it a product of our modern times.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Preventive medicine isn’t just for people. Keeping animals healthy ultimately helps keep humans healthy.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Grooming actually alters the neurochemistry of our brains. It releases opiates into our bloodstreams. It decreases our blood pressure. It slows our breathing. Grooming someone else confers some of the same benefits. Even simply petting an animal has been found to relax people.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“As the pumping engines for the circulatory system, ventricles must have a particular ovoid, lemonlike shape for strong, swift ejection of blood. If the end of the left ventricle balloons out, as it does in takotsubo hearts, the firm, healthy contractions are reduced to inefficient spasms—floppy and unpredictable. But what’s remarkable about takotsubo is what causes the bulge. Seeing a loved one die. Being left at the altar or losing your life savings with a bad roll of the dice. Intense, painful emotions in the brain can set off alarming, life-threatening physical changes in the heart. This new diagnosis was proof of the powerful connection between heart and mind. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy confirmed a relationship many doctors had considered more metaphoric than diagnostic. As a clinical cardiologist, I needed to know how to recognize and treat takotsubo cardiomyopathy. But years before pursuing cardiology, I had completed a residency in psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Having also trained as a psychiatrist, I was captivated by this syndrome, which lay at the intersection of my two professional passions. That background put me in a unique position that day at the zoo. I reflexively placed the human phenomenon side by side with the animal one. Emotional trigger … surge of stress hormones … failing heart muscle … possible death. An unexpected “aha!” suddenly hit me. Takotsubo in humans and the heart effects of capture myopathy in animals were almost certainly related—perhaps even the same syndrome with different names.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“So certain were experts that neonates felt no pain that through the mid-1980s major surgeries on newborn babies were sometimes performed without anesthesia. These included major cardiovascular procedures requiring prying open rib cages, puncturing lungs, and tying off major arteries. Though provided with no pharmacologic agents to blunt the pain that cracking ribs or cutting through the sternum might have induced, babies were given powerful agents to induce paralysis—ensuring an immobile (and undoubtedly terrified) patient on whom to operate. Jill Lawson’s remarkable story of her premature son, Jeffrey, and his unanesthetized heart surgery provides a heartbreaking account of such a procedure. After Jeffrey’s death in 1985, Lawson’s campaign to educate the medical profession about the need to treat pain in the young literally changed the field. And likely led to improved awareness of pain in animals, too. bA technique called clicker training pairs a metallic tick-tock! with a food treat every time the animal performs a desired behavior. Eventually the animal comes to associate the sound of the clicker with the feel-good neurochemical rewards of the food. When the treat is discontinued, the animal will continue doing the behavior, because”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“When women buy a box of plastic ovulation-predictor sticks, they are purchasing fertility-detection technology that a stallion’s nostrils can provide for free.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human

“The mature Charley—Charles Darwin—even later forgave his father’s tough parenting, saying, “My father, who was the kindest man I ever knew and whose memory I love with all my heart, must have been angry … when he used such words.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Modern parents can take comfort from the fact that most of our teenagers come through adolescence, too—perhaps a little bruised, maybe a little humiliated, but stronger for the journey.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Of course, all animals have different things to learn while traversing the arc that takes them from sexually immature, vulnerable child to reproductively capable, developed adult. In our case, those include advanced language skills and critical thinking. But there’s one feature that defines adolescence in species from condors to capuchin monkeys to college freshmen. It’s a time when they learn by taking risks and sometimes making mistakes.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“One thing you can say about meals in the wild: they’re never boring. Every bite requires a life-or-death focus on two things: getting food and avoiding becoming food. If an animal cannot find and secure consistent meals, he will die of starvation. If he’s not vigilant, he will fall to predation. In nature, eating is drenched with danger, risk taking, stress, and fear.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Deep inside every animal colon, ours included, thrives an entire cosmos of creatures more strange and wondrous than any dreamed up in a Hollywood special effects lab. There are whip-tailed bacteria and tripod-legged viruses, frilled fungi and microscopic worms.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“When Richard Jackson calls obesity a “disease of the environment,” the setting he’s taking issue with is the one we’ve built with human ingenuity. The food we’ve tinkered with.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

“Circadian rhythms, together with the diurnal rhythms of Earth’s yearly trek around the sun, influence hunger, appetite, ingestion, and even digestion.”
― Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing