Essential Oils and Self-Medication: How Cats Know What They Need | The Feline Wellness Summit with Caroline Ingraham

 Welcome to the cat dad show. My name is Scott Colby. And today I'm going to share with you a clip of my interview with Caroline Ingraham. She is a renowned expert in animal self medication and aromatic medicine. And in this clip. I asked her the question. What does it mean for cat to self medicate and how can cats use essential oils to support their health?

Caroline was a special guest for my feline wellness summit. If you would like to listen to the entire interview with Caroline, as well as interview with 20 other feline wellness experts, just go to feline wellness summit. com. You can grab a free ticket, but for now, enjoy this clip with Caroline.

Okay, it's like with any animal self medicating in the wild or domestic animals still have that ability, um, that it would take them tens of thousands of years to lose such an important survival instinct.

So, um, Animals have an innate ability to select remedies to bring themselves back into health. And that's all mediated by taste and smell. Yeah, in, when we're talking about essential oils, then that's, you know, the cats work by inhaling aromatic molecules, which is the correct dose for them. Yeah, anything, um, anything more would be too strong.

because of their enzymatic physiology. So, uh, basically because they're, um, carnivores and not herbivores. So it's all dose dependent on how they're going to work with the essential oils. But, um, self medication is really, um, animals knowing which plant extracts to select and how much and at what dose and for how long to bring themselves back into health.

So to bring homeostasis back to the body.

Yeah, that that's so fascinating. I know we're going to dive in more into this topic.

The Connection Between Essential Oils and Animal Health

What first drew you to explore this kind of connection between essential oils and animal health?

Um, I, I, you know, I was fascinated how the oils worked on myself and then my father and then my dog.

Um, and this was a long time ago and then I lived in California and I was working, um, I was living around, um, a horse community and I, I found that they would select, uh, oils for specific problems and it, and it was pretty much, you know, to the book that if there was an inflammatory response, they would select, um, either German chamomile or yarrow depending on what was the cause of the inflammatory response, you know, was it an injury?

or operations, and then that's going to be yarrow. If there's anything, itis, that's got stress attached to it, then that's more likely to be German chamomile. And a pattern began to evolve. And then I noticed too that, um, you know, if there was gut problems, then they would select one or two oils from a selection of gut remedies.

So it's, it's basically one size doesn't fit all. So, you know, for example, peppermint might work for, uh, be suited for one horse. Or one cat, um, well, fennel, which has similar effects, might be suited to another cat or another horse. So you're matching the remedy to the individual. So it's very much, um, it will come under the banner of individualized medicine.

You're not just going to, yeah, because one cat's doing really well, for example, on peppermint. Right. Then it's not just saying, oh, give that cat peppermint. The cat is offered a choice of remedies that suits them.

And you're saying the cat will select which remedy they need?

Providing they've been, the plants have been in their evolutionary history, or the, the evolutionary history of their ancestors.

So we hear about cap, um, we hear about poisonings with houseplants and that's because they come from the tropics where the ancestors, um, that were never there basically. So they haven't got the detoxification mechanisms or the, um, detection mechanisms to be able to recognize them. But all essential oil bearing plants were, uh, yeah, there's some of the oldest, um, plants on the planet.

And they were around before the continents divided. And so all animals. would have evolved with essential bearing plants and they learned how to use them for their own health benefits.