Firstly, may I recommend profusely Robin Lane Fox’s brilliant “Thoughtful Gardening“, subtitled, “Great plants, great gardens, great gardeners“.
The book is fascinating to anyone interested in gardens, but also I reckon the book will be of enormous interest to people with more than a mere passing interest in the classics, politics and psychopharmacology.
Why psychopharmacology?
Suddenly, out of the blue, on page 120, Lane Fox provides an account of his “badger experiment”.
“Prozac is supposed to cure gloom and isolation, especially as the years pass. If an ageing badger is socially miserable, why not cheer him up? At dead of night, I did it. I crushed Prozac in the food mixer and spooned into lumps of crushed peanut butter which fellow sufferers tell me is the supreme badger-attractor. I put sixteen heaps of the mixture at intervals around the lawn. The next morning they were all gone. I feel half ashamed and half proud about what happened next. Two days later I returned late at night from work and, with due astonishment, found a badger trotting down the road off which my drive runs. I caught him in the headlights and, obligingly, he swung right up my drive. How fast can a badger run on Prozac?“
I would humbly submit that there are two very interesting observations to be made from this for any human psychopharmacologist. Firstly, it can be assumed that fluoxetine, a drug that boosts serotonin (a chemical in the brain), is postulated to have the same mode of action in the badger as in the human and other animals. This, one assumes, is through being a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. The second element of this first observation is the speed with which the prozac has a possible effect in the badger. Experiments from rats suggest that fluoxetine can have had an almost instantaneous effect in the rat, which is rather at odds to the onset of its antidepressant effects in human (typically 4-6 weeks). Secondly, why exactly was the badger rushing out in front of a car’s headlights? One hopes that it was merely a lifting of the badger’s mood. More sinister is the hypothesized effect of this class in drugs in actually promoting suicidal behaviour, which remains an extremely controversial area of neuroscience. I am not saying for one moment the pellets caused this badger to behave as it did, please note.
Book: Robin Lane Fox, Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens, Great Gardeners
Available on the UK Amazon here.
Dr Shibley Rahman is a non-practising academic, research physician and research lawyer by training.
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
