When animals are allowed to choose their medicine, it can alleviate much unnecessary suffering and save lives, while simultaneously providing us with clues and insights into their needs. Over the decades I have worked to prove that domestication has not interfered with the mechanisms involved in self-medicative behaviours and that it is a mechanism that is hard-wired into all living animals including newborns. I have observed that providing medicinal plants (secondary metabolites) have been in an animal’s evolutionary history, animals can recognise them as medicines, while also being able to regulate their dosage. They have evolved to use these plants to aid their survival – any animal that didn’t have this innate mechanism would have died out long ago.
