Phytotherapy in zoo animals

Summary

Phytotherapy is one of the oldest medical disciplines and was traditionally based on empiricism (Reichling et al., 2008). Nowadays, its use as an additional integral component of evidence based medicine is well accepted in human medicine (Finkelmann, 2009). Herbal remedies are generally characterised by a broad therapeutic index. They consist of multicomponent mixtures and act as multi-target drugs with pleiotropic effects. In Switzerland, veterinary phytotherapy has been relaunched in 2006 as a subunit of the Swiss Medical Society for Phytotherapy (SMGP-vet). Since 2012, the certificate of qualification in veterinary phytotherapy has been approved by the Swiss Veterinary Association (GST/SVS). Historically, one of the common approaches to gain insight into the medical effects of plants was self-medication. In non-human animals, self medication remains a controversial subject, because evidence is mostly anecdotal.
A few experimentally verified cases of self-medication support the theoretical expectation that animals can and do make specific foraging decisions that function specifically to remediate illness (Huffman and Caton, 2001; Villalba et al., 2006; Singer et al., 2009). In zoological medicine, this concept has first been implemented by primate keeping institutions. Permanent access to selected medicinal plants suggested self medication and helped maintain the health of certain primate species (Cousins, 2006).