Last week, Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit sold a book called Zoobiquity, about heretofore unrecognized similarities between animal and human pathologies, by UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers. The prevailing bidder on the book was Knopf, where it will be edited by Jordan Pavlin. According to Ms. Pavlin, the project came out of Ms. Natterson Horowitz’s work at the Los Angeles Zoo, where she served as a consultant in an effort to help a tamarin monkey suffering from heart failure. Ms. Natterson-Horowitz came away from that experience wondering what other conditions typically associated with humans show up in the animal kingdom. In the course of her research, she found cases of breast cancer in jaguars, self-mutilation among horses, substance abuse among birds addicted to narcotic berries and brain cancer in a variety of primates. Two sources said the book sold in the high six figures.
