Do animals use medicine?

Animals experience all the colds, stomach pains, headaches, parasites, and general illnesses that humans do. But unlike us, animals can’t just grab a painkiller off the shelf at the supermarket to cure it. They don’t have a pharmacy to browse… or at least, not the sort that we’d recognise.

Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines they find in nature.

Presenter Anand Jagatia speaks with the primate researcher who stumbled across a chimp chewing on a bitter leaf 35 years ago, Professor Mike Huffman, whose observations opened up a whole new field of research. We discover why plants contain the medicinal compounds they do, and how butterflies with brains no bigger than a pin-head are still able to select and use medicine to protect their young.

We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.

Presented by Anand Jagatia
Produced by Rory Galloway

Image: Chimp eating. Credit: Getty Images