Our Animal Natures
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/opinion/sunday/our-animal-natures.html?ref=opinion
AS an attending physician at U.C.L.A., I see a wide variety of maladies. But I also consult occasionally at the Los Angeles Zoo, where the veterinarians’ rounds are strikingly similar to those I conduct with my physician colleagues. Intrigued by the overlap, I began making careful notes of the conditions I came across by day in my human patients. At night, I combed veterinary databases and journals for their correlates, asking myself a simple question: “Do animals get [fill in the disease]?” I started with the big killers. Do animals get breast cancer? Stress-induced heart attacks? Brain tumors? How about shingles and gout? Fainting spells? Night after night, condition after condition, the answer kept coming back “yes.” My research yielded a series of fascinating commonalities.
Melanoma has been diagnosed in the bodies of animals from penguins to buffalo. Koalas in Australia are in the middle of a rampant epidemic of chlamydia. Yes, that kind — sexually transmitted. I wondered about obesity and diabetes — two of the most pressing health concerns of our time. Do wild animals get medically obese? Do they overeat or binge eat? I learned that yes, they do.
I also discovered that geese, gorillas and sea lions grieve and may become depressed. Shelties, Weimaraners and other dog breeds are prone to anxiety disorders.
Suddenly, I began to reconsider my approach to mental illness, a field I had studied during the psychiatric residency I completed before turning to cardiology. Perhaps a human patient compulsively burning himself with cigarettes could improve if his therapist consulted a bird specialist experienced in the treatment of parrots with feather-picking disorder. Significantly for substance abusers and addicts, species from birds to elephants are known to seek out psychotropic berries and plants that change their sensory states — that is, get them high. The more I learned, the more a tantalizing question started creeping into my thoughts: Why don’t we human doctors routinely cooperate with animal experts?
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We are all animals anyway.
I remember when my kids were little, my daughter (Ellie May Klampett with the critters) had brought home a pregnant stray kitty. As she delivered her kittens some time later she needed assistance so daughter and I did the mid-wife thing. Aside from a terrified cat who didn't know what was happening to her~~and the chaos that ensued from that~I was absolutely struck by the smell once those babies started arriving.
I knew that smell. Ugh! It was the very same as when I had my own human babies.
We have a lot more in common with animals than many would like to believe.
Glad to see some doctors recognizing it and learning from it! We can all learn from animals, just like Dr Doolittle always said. 
Julie
She was obviously depressed. 
All mammals have the same core emotional structures (the Limbic System is often called "the early mammal brain"
, and so despite differences in intelligence between different species, it makes sense that all mammals have similar emotional responses. Birds' brain structures are very different from those of mammals, but they too have complex emotions. Corvids (crows, ravens, and jays) in particular seem to have a very rich emotional inner life.
The notion that non-human animals are mere automatons needs to go.
