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How Animals Heal Us: The perfect book for the animal lover in your life
‘A moving, essential book . . . Nobody writes about Nature with more beauty and grace than Jay Griffiths’ Brian Eno
From celebrated author Jay Griffiths comes a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animals
Pet-owners and animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge.
We meet a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life, lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers, dolphins and whales rescuing people in danger, and dogs who can smell cancer and phone the Emergency Services.
Animal sounds, from insects to birdsong and the purring of cats, are directly medicinal and their presence can heal the pain of loneliness. Animals, including donkeys, can be natural therapists for the hurt psyche, alleviating trauma, fear and depression.
In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. Wolves may be teachers of ethics; monkeys and dogs can object to unfairness and bees take collective decisions. Animals are irresistible medicine for a healthy culture, animating the arts with spectacular vitality and verve, as poetry knows.
Open-hearted, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.
‘A wild and vital treasure trove of stories, woven together with Griffiths' s characteristic exuberance and joyfully untamed mind’ Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Opening
From celebrated author Jay Griffiths comes a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animals
Pet-owners and animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge.
We meet a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life, lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers, dolphins and whales rescuing people in danger, and dogs who can smell cancer and phone the Emergency Services.
Animal sounds, from insects to birdsong and the purring of cats, are directly medicinal and their presence can heal the pain of loneliness. Animals, including donkeys, can be natural therapists for the hurt psyche, alleviating trauma, fear and depression.
In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. Wolves may be teachers of ethics; monkeys and dogs can object to unfairness and bees take collective decisions. Animals are irresistible medicine for a healthy culture, animating the arts with spectacular vitality and verve, as poetry knows.
Open-hearted, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.
‘A wild and vital treasure trove of stories, woven together with Griffiths' s characteristic exuberance and joyfully untamed mind’ Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Opening
- GenresNonfictionNatureAnimals
364 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 5, 2025
18 people are currently reading
292 people want to read
About the author
Jay Griffiths
32 books135 followersJay Griffiths was born in Manchester and studied English Literature at Oxford University. She spent a couple of years living in a shed on the outskirts of Epping Forest and has travelled the world, but for many years she has been based in Wales.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 19, 2025
Every few years, a book comes out that, without realising it, we’ve all been waiting for. It draws together new threads of perception, new information and ideas that transform our understanding of the world we’re living in. When we’ve read it, it acts as a marker and a beacon, illuminating the world of thought as it changes around us. This is one of those books, a seminal work, as well as a gloriously human, empathic, personal – and often funny – one.
And a lot is changing around us, the intellectual climate as much as the physical. Research over the last thirty years has demonstrated the cognitive and communicative powers of our fellow creatures, demolishing the perception that their actions are based simply on ‘instinct’ – whatever that might be. ‘The brute creation’ has suddenly become our shared community, as Saint Francis realised seven centuries ago, not only a resource for human learning and understanding but an opportunity to share solace and love. Our faith in modernity is also fracturing - the narratives of triumphant globalism, world peace, the abolition of poverty and prejudice and the triumph of science are all failing us, bearing bitter fruit. As a result we are more willing than ever before to explore the once-discarded wisdom of indigenous and folk perceptions concerning community, well-being and the good life. And aren’t health and healing central to our concerns now, when more and more often our communities are described as ‘broken’ and our way of life as ‘sick’?
The author tells us about animals that heal us, through empathy, understanding and love, showing us ways to heal the wounds we have suffered and become better humans. Jay Griffith’s meticulous research across decades and continents brings forward more than six hundred examples of creatures engaging with us – unsolicited and unconditional - to help make things better. There is nothing dry in her storytelling, though; links to academic research and case studies are available via footnotes without compromising the joy and relish of every tale. Humour and empathy bubble constantly up to the surface. It’s a book that makes you want to turn back again and again, to catch a particularly warm and understanding turn of phrase, or enjoy once more a passionate and moving account. No-one could read this book without treasuring the stories of Straws, the cat that was midwife to the dying, Digby the therapy and rescue dog from Devon and Somerset Fire Service, or the pod of dolphins who surrounded a would-be suicide miles off the coast of California, enabling an almost impossible rescue. There are hundreds of similar tales here, each demonstrating the gifts we human animals are given by other animals.
Jay Griffiths’ voice is ever-present and essential to the story. She is clearly someone who has suffered herself both in health and spirits, and shares honestly with us how she has been restored by the undying love and empathy of animals – her beloved cat Otter, the dogs and puppies of friends, donkeys and apes and birds. These experiences have helped he realise that, as indigenous communities have always known, the entire world community is one, and living well for all of us Is essentially about love.
Animals not only heal, reassure and empower us with their unconditional love, but offer us the opportunity to love them too. If there is a heaven, they hold the keys for all of us. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it two centuries ago:
“He liveth well, who loveth well
All things both great and small.”
Meic Llewellyn.
And a lot is changing around us, the intellectual climate as much as the physical. Research over the last thirty years has demonstrated the cognitive and communicative powers of our fellow creatures, demolishing the perception that their actions are based simply on ‘instinct’ – whatever that might be. ‘The brute creation’ has suddenly become our shared community, as Saint Francis realised seven centuries ago, not only a resource for human learning and understanding but an opportunity to share solace and love. Our faith in modernity is also fracturing - the narratives of triumphant globalism, world peace, the abolition of poverty and prejudice and the triumph of science are all failing us, bearing bitter fruit. As a result we are more willing than ever before to explore the once-discarded wisdom of indigenous and folk perceptions concerning community, well-being and the good life. And aren’t health and healing central to our concerns now, when more and more often our communities are described as ‘broken’ and our way of life as ‘sick’?
The author tells us about animals that heal us, through empathy, understanding and love, showing us ways to heal the wounds we have suffered and become better humans. Jay Griffith’s meticulous research across decades and continents brings forward more than six hundred examples of creatures engaging with us – unsolicited and unconditional - to help make things better. There is nothing dry in her storytelling, though; links to academic research and case studies are available via footnotes without compromising the joy and relish of every tale. Humour and empathy bubble constantly up to the surface. It’s a book that makes you want to turn back again and again, to catch a particularly warm and understanding turn of phrase, or enjoy once more a passionate and moving account. No-one could read this book without treasuring the stories of Straws, the cat that was midwife to the dying, Digby the therapy and rescue dog from Devon and Somerset Fire Service, or the pod of dolphins who surrounded a would-be suicide miles off the coast of California, enabling an almost impossible rescue. There are hundreds of similar tales here, each demonstrating the gifts we human animals are given by other animals.
Jay Griffiths’ voice is ever-present and essential to the story. She is clearly someone who has suffered herself both in health and spirits, and shares honestly with us how she has been restored by the undying love and empathy of animals – her beloved cat Otter, the dogs and puppies of friends, donkeys and apes and birds. These experiences have helped he realise that, as indigenous communities have always known, the entire world community is one, and living well for all of us Is essentially about love.
Animals not only heal, reassure and empower us with their unconditional love, but offer us the opportunity to love them too. If there is a heaven, they hold the keys for all of us. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it two centuries ago:
“He liveth well, who loveth well
All things both great and small.”
Meic Llewellyn.
October 13, 2025
Very well researched and well written book. Lots of examples that are fascinating and good links to proper research.
The sections which were based more on folklore and people's beliefs were less interesting to me: I wanted proper facts and not stories about how some peoples have believed x animal had special abilities etc.
Recommended.
The sections which were based more on folklore and people's beliefs were less interesting to me: I wanted proper facts and not stories about how some peoples have believed x animal had special abilities etc.
Recommended.
September 4, 2025
awwwww 😭 i just know I’ll be talking about this book for decades to come. The mix of data from both the social and natural sciences mixed with beautiful, lyrical prose makes How Animals Heal Us a truly special and sacred text. I loved it - 4.5/5
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews