Light Room Book
Light Room Book
Light Room Book
14
Deprived of the animal kingdom’s equivalent of
Boots, Elephants have instead displayed
incredible intelligence in foraging their natural
environment for cures and remedies to ailments.
There’s a specific word for this:
zoopharmacognosy –an animal’s knowledge of
medicine, and Elephants have a PhD in it. They
often eat dirt (geophagy) to neutralise toxins
from plants they’ve eaten, and induce labour
using the Boraginaceace tree. Recent research has
even discovered that the South African elephant
fought off extinction with the help of
Ganoderma – a mushroom used in traditional
Chinese medicine as an anti-cancer and anti-viral
agent. People who live near these elephants even
boil elephant poo and drink it, much as we would
drink herbal tea for its health benefits
16
With some minor exceptions, all eight bear
species have roughly the same appearance: large
torsos, stocky legs, narrow snouts, long hair,
and short tails. With their plantigrade
postures—walking upright on two feet—bears
walk flat-footed on the ground like humans but
unlike most other mammals.