How Animals Heal Us

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

‘Weaving humor, empathy, pathos, and so, so much more, Griffiths shows that animals are braided throughout the human psyche. An absolute fountain of fact, culture, and raw animal power!’ Carl Safina

‘Jay Griffiths' courage and energy are formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and literary flair. Her work isn't just good - it's necessary’ Philip Pullman

© Jay Griffiths 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Fascinating . . . A tribute to our nonhuman companions . . . [How Animals Heal Us] expounds in the most joyful detail all the ways in which creatures great and small can improve our lives . . . [this] book is designed to ensure we never take our animal friends for granted again
Observer
[An] engaging ode to the animal kingdom . . . Griffiths goes beyond the familiar accounts of faithful hounds rescuing their owners or comforting the lonely, to explain in sometimes quirky detail how and why animals are so good at making us healthier and happier
Financial Times
Evocative and heart-warming, this brilliantly researched book is joyful, generous and wise in equal measure, and always written with spirit and flair
John Lister-Kaye, author of 'At the Water's Edge: A Walk in the Wild'
Marvellous, urgently important and compellingly readable . . . A surging, deeply resonant hymn to the joys of entanglement with the more-than-human world
Charles Foster, author of 'Cry of the Wild'
A wonderful book to read, extremely touching, learned, wise beyond words and absolutely fascinating . . . . . . [How Animals Heal Us] articulates what so many of us believe; that animals are more than friends and pets and servants . . . they actually make us well just by being near us . . . A fabulous and important book
Joanna Lumley
Animal magic in Jay Griffiths’s uniquely beautiful voice. Facts have never been so lovingly told
Laline Paull, author of 'The Bees'

A song to our deep relationship with our animal friends, showing the many things we
could learn from them

Katherine May, author of 'Wintering'
Humbling, inspiring, and so beautifully written, this is an utterly compelling exploration of our relationship with animals, and their extraordinary power to heal us
Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Green Party
Griffiths’s genius is to reveal the familiar as wondrous, strange, miraculous. Incredible and heart-wrenching, this gift of a book will shift your relationship to animals
Ben Rawlence, author of 'The Treeline'
Reading Jay’s book is like reading a pure praise poem to the more than human world, a poem filled with love, respect and joy. It thrums with wit, wisdom, understanding and research. But mostly the joy of being connected to life, from the smallest insect to the great whales
Jackie Morris, 'The Lost Words'

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