How Animals Heal Us Event with Jay Griffiths - Tuesday 25th November 2025

Join us in the bookshop to hear Jay Griffiths in conversation with Dan Richards about How Animals Heal Us.

6.30pm on Tuesday 25th November at Golden Hare Books, 68 St Stephen Street, EH3 5AQ.

Buy a copy of How Animals Heal Us and receive free entry to the event, or choose our Ticket-Only option for £6 (which can be used towards a purchase of the book at the event).

We will send an email to confirm your booking - please be sure to check your junk/spam folder!

About How Animals Heal Us 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.

About Jay Griffiths Jay Griffiths is the author of many books, such as Wild: An Elemental Journey, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, Tristimania and Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time. She won the Discover award for the best first-time author in the USA; the inaugural Orion award and the Hay Festival International Fellowship. She has broadcast and written widely, on subjects such as Radiohead and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work has received widespread accolades, including from Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, Don Paterson, John Berger, Philip Pullman, KT Tunstall and Nikolai Fraiture.

About Dan Richards Dan Richards is an acclaimed non-fiction writer specialising in art, travel and adventure. His first book, Holloway – co-authored with Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Stanley Donwood – was published by Faber and became a Sunday Times bestseller. Dan’s second book, The Beechwood Airship Interviews took a journey into the creative process, headspaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s celebrated artists and craftsman including Bill Drummond, Dame Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers and Stewart Lee. Outpost, his third book, is about far-flung shelters and eyries, isolation and wilderness. Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark was published in 2025.