The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife by Lucy Cooke

Author:Lucy Cooke [Cooke, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

When the animal has become too bulky by continued over-feeding, it goes down to the banks of the river, and examines the reeds which have been newly cut; as soon as it has found a stump that is very sharp, it presses its body against it, and so wounds one of the veins in the thigh; and, by the flow of blood thus produced, the body, which would otherwise have fallen into a morbid state, is relieved; after which, it covers up the wound with mud.

What reads as a tragic tale of a self-harming hippo with weight issues was in fact a portrayal of the ancient art of bloodletting—a procedure used in the treatment of an array of ailments for almost three thousand years. If you were a feverish Greek or a bubonic medieval Brit, then your doctor’s top-line treatment would be to puncture a vein and drain some of your blood. If you were very lucky, leeches might be used instead of a sharp wooden stick. Bloodletting was practiced by the Egyptians but, according to Pliny, that other famous resident of the Nile, the hippo, had showed the way. “The hippopotamus was the first inventor of the practice of letting blood,” he claimed, not once but twice, in his encyclopedia.

We may scoff at Pliny, but the truth is that this big amphibious beast has pioneered a pharmaceutical fashion, one that’s practiced in our time (and, crucially, one that actually works).

The liquid the ancients observed seeping from the hippo’s hide does look remarkably like blood; it completely fooled me the first time I saw it. But it isn’t blood—nothing like it. Instead, this crimson goop is produced by special glands tucked underneath the animal’s thick skin. For many years it was thought to act like a sort of sticky red sweat to keep the hippo cool. Scientists have recently discovered it does something much more remarkable.

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