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Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#61

Post by chrisweekly »

datavirtue wrote: post #55
hnick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd considered the dog eating grass thing as more of a now-disputed myth, but maybe someone has evidence. Either way my own dog loves munching on the taller/thicker grass every time we walk, like he's a sheep. His favourite foods also include broccoli and bok choy so that could be why. I think a lot of people downplay the role plants play in a dog's diet (not required but helpful especially with processed diets that…

My dog loves Bell peppers. She will eat any piece that hits the ground, quite greedily.

my dogs are the same -- but substitute "anything even conceivably food-related" for "Bell peppers"

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#62

Post by taneq »

NoPicklez wrote: post #51
anigbrowl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a school of thought that says a lot of thinking happens in the gut, which delegates tasks to the brain, so to speak.

My gut instinctively knows I need chocolate right after eating dinner

I reckon that's just your tongue in a silly hat with a fake mustache.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#63

Post by taneq »

lsaferite wrote: post #30
darth_avocado wrote: post #28

Obviously orangutans are much smarter as a species, they are know to pass down knowledge/behaviors, including tool usage, down generations. But there could be more to this behavior. A dog instinctively knows to eat grass when they have stomach issues and Alaskan Bears eat certain plants to expel parasites after hibernation. How do they know? Zoopharmacognosy is a fascinating subject that needs more research. https://…

Another one that I've been watching recently is chicks knowing to take dust baths with zero interaction with adult chickens. One reason for this behavior is apparently pest control.

I find it interesting when people attribute abstract intentions to this kind of behaviour. The chick's probably not thinking "man I gotta dust myself for mites", it probably just feels good to get dusty. Now, the reason it feels good is probably that dust baths are correlated with fewer parasites and better overall outcomes, but I doubt the chick knows that.

Same thing with cats liking scritches under their chin. They're not thinking "ah yes I am scent marking this human", scent glands are probably just itchy.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#64

Post by NoPicklez »

taneq wrote: post #62
NoPicklez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut instinctively knows I need chocolate right after eating dinner

I reckon that's just your tongue in a silly hat with a fake mustache.

My tongue needs to go further down on the decision making food chain

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#65

Post by scotty79 »

NoPicklez wrote: post #51
anigbrowl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a school of thought that says a lot of thinking happens in the gut, which delegates tasks to the brain, so to speak.

My gut instinctively knows I need chocolate right after eating dinner

I have this after eating a bare steak. I think there's something about eating a lot of something that does not contain carbs that immediately turns on craving for sugar.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#66

Post by dudeinjapan »

observationist wrote: post #48
mattlondon wrote: post #3

It would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibraurea_tinctoria There are all sorts of beneficial chemicals in nature, way more than we've accurately assessed and documented. Because plants can't be patented, they're left largely unknown - the incentives that might bring access to things like this are almost entirely missing from the modern Western market.

Wild plants themselves can’t be patented, but chemicals derived from plants can be, provided they are non-obvious and have utility. Novel plants like GMOs can also be patented.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#67

Post by dorn-1845 »

snikeris wrote: post #32
RenThraysk wrote: post #25

It's interesting for sure, but the mystery is how he gained that knowledge. Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do or his ancestors?

Aren’t we faced with the same fundamental mystery of human insight? Where does it come from?

We have systematized these pursuits. Even before modern science, language could be used to crudely pool together individual trial and error as a huge force multiplier.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#69

Post by andoando »

_yb2s wrote: post #59
frogpelt wrote: post #34

Dogs eat grass when they need to throw up.

I don't think this is true- every dog I've had eats grass frequently and it doesn't usually cause them to throw up. Also- dogs can throw up on demand at any time, they don't need anything like grass to help them. This is because it is the natural way that female dogs bring home food for puppies, they vomit up the food to share it with them. I'm pretty sure dogs sometimes vomit on purpose with the explicit goal of sha…

Mine too. Just munches on grass on every walk, never seen her throw up. I think she just likes it.

Re: Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant

#70

Post by alphazard »

mattlondon wrote: post #3

It would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully…

There's obviously a lot of nonsense that floats around in the herbal medicine community. But antimicrobial plants are relatively common, and applied topically, they do what you would expect them to. They generally aren't an antibiotic replacement because they aren't orally bio-available. They won't reach an infection in the periphery if you eat them.

To make a medicinal plant more effective you can immerse a lot of it in a solvent and use that to extract and concentrate the chemical you care about. These concentrates are commonly referred to as "essential oils".

None of this stuff was invented by a person, working for a corporation, and so you should not expect to see any of it commercialized, regardless of its efficacy. There will always be a synthetic analog, usually more effective (because it has been designed), and more importantly, patent-able.

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