As part of the Elemed project, our association has funded the PhD thesis defended in 2022 by Jean-Marc Dubost at the National Museum of Natural History, titled “Animal Self-Medication and Traditional Medicine: From Asian Elephants’ Selection of Medicinal Substances to the Human Pharmacopoeia”
This thesis is the result of two years of fieldwork in Sayaboury Province, Laos, conducted under the guidance of the IRD and supervised by Sabrina Krief, a professor at the MNHN and a specialist in self-medication among chimpanzees.
Drawing on the close-knit relationship between village elephants and their mahouts in a district of northern Laos, Jean-Marc Dubost highlighted the fact that many of the herbal remedies used by mahouts in Laos to treat their elephants are derived from their observations of the animals’ self-medicating behaviors in the forest. The mahouts also use these same elephant medicinal plants to treat themselves in their own household. This sharing of medicinal knowledge between elephants and humans led our doctoral student to further develop the concept of multispecies cultures and heritage.