How Animals Heal Us by Jay Griffiths: Forget dogs, get a THERAPY SKUNK

During the pandemic, writer Jay Griffiths went to visit the charity Medical Detection Dogs.

No need to take a Covid test, she was told, because ‘the dogs will check you out’. On arrival, a labrador/golden retriever cross trotted round her, had a good sniff and then tossed his head approvingly; she was in the clear.

Trained dogs such as these can detect Covid more than 90 per cent of the time.

In this book, Griffiths looks at the many ways that animals make our lives better. If you own a pet, you’re half as likely to feel lonely as someone without one, and studies show that families who get a pet argue less and play more.

Animal therapy is being used to address all sorts of problems, from depression and anxiety to anger, social withdrawal and feelings of helplessness.

Cats, dogs and horses are popular therapy animals, but Griffiths has tales of therapy owls, parakeets and even a therapy skunk. ‘Despite their bad reputation, skunks are sweet and affectionate,’ she writes, though there’s no mention of what the skunk smelled like.

How much could animals tell us if we could only talk to them? Before the terrible Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, both wild and domestic animals acted strangely. Elephants screamed and ran for higher ground, flamingos abandoned low-lying areas and dogs refused to go outdoors. More than 225,000 people died in the tsunami, but relatively few animals.

Dogs, which have a sense of smell that is thought to be 10,000 times more acute than a human’s, can be trained to give warnings of an impending medical crisis, like an epileptic fit or a diabetic event.

And they seem to have great potential to sniff out undetected diseases.

In Italy, German shepherd dogs have been trained to recognise the chemicals linked to prostate cancer in a urine sample. In Florida, a company is using dogs to detect breast cancer, simply by smelling a woman’s breath. A British study of whether dogs can spot Parkinson’s disease has shown very promising results.

Griffiths races from Lucy the chimpanzee, who was successfully taught sign language, to the Polynesian sailors who would set sail with a pig because they were so good at smelling land even before it was visible, and would helpfully point their snout towards terra firma.

In Slovenia, there’s a school where difficult conversations are held next to the school’s beehives, because the bees make everyone calmer.

Animals, writes Griffiths, are capable of so much more than we realise, and for many of us their uncomplicated love provides a still point in a spinning world, transforming our lives ‘into something larger and fuller than our senses alone may detect’.