What happens when animals party too hard in the Internet age

Maybe you worry about who will see those party photos on your friends' Facebook pages. Well, ours isn't the only species who may wake up to find our drunken embarrassment plastered all over the Internet:

When Per Johansson of Särö, south of Gothenburg, returned home from work on Tuesday it was dark outside and the rain was coming down hard. Suddenly Johansson heard a bellowing noise from the garden next door.

“I thought at first that someone was having a laugh. Then I went over to take a look and spotted an elk stuck in an apple tree with only one leg left on the ground,” Johansson told The Local.

Johansson took pity on the animal and called for help. He and his neighbors tried to saw the branches to make it more comfortable, but it finally required the efforts of the fire brigade to get it out of the tree. Then, rather than running away like a respectable wild creature would, it lay on the ground:

According to Johansson, it looked very much like the elk was severely drunk after eating too many fermenting apples.

Drunken elk are common in Sweden during the autumn season when there are plenty of apples lying around on the ground and hanging from branches in Swedish gardens.

While the greedy animal was reaching ever higher to reach the delicious but intoxicating fruit, it most likely stumbled into the tree, getting itself hopelessly entangled in the branches.

And from what Johansson could gather, this particular animal had been on a day-long bender.

“My neighbour recognised it as the animal that almost ran into her car earlier in the day. She was pretty sure the elk was already under the influence,“ said Johansson.

The hungover elk finally dragged itself away the next morning and is no doubt trying to hide out as photos and reports of its predicament have gone all over the world.

Of course, readers of this blog know that there is nothing unique about this case. We've seen drunk birds, fruit flies, a deer, baboons, a badger, bees, and elephants. (In fact, there is a whole chapter about drunken and other substance-abusing animals in the book. Have you ordered your copy yet?)

But let's also not forget that the last time we reported on a drunk elk in Sweden, it was no laughing matter. In 2009, a man was jailed for ten days for the murder of his wife and only released when cleared by forensic evidence: hair and saliva found on the dead woman's clothes belonged to an elk. The motive was unclear, but police cited the aggressive tendencies of elk drunk on fermented apples.

Mr. Johansson may have meant to do a good deed, but I hope he is watching his back.

Dead drunk

Ever since 3,000 blackbirds fell out of the sky dead in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, there's been talk of a mysterious "aflockalypse."

Suddenly everyone's noticing mass animal deaths: fish in the Chesapeake Bay, crabs in Britain, starlings and other birds in Louisiana and Kentucky, and more all over the world.

Is it the end of the world? No, say spoilsport scientists, these things happen all the time. The US Geological Survey tracks them in the United States,and collects an average of 163 reports every year, according to the Associated Press.

The reasons behind these mass die-offs vary: sometimes pollution, sometimes disease, sometimes extreme conditions, sometimes even foul play, like the 80 bats in Tucson who were shot to death in December.

And sometimes the reason is bad behavior. Authorities in Romania were concerned that dozens of starlings had died of avian flu. But necropsies revealed that the birds had died because of alcohol poisoning after eating fermented grape residue. Yes: they drank themselves to death. This time, they've got no one to blame but themselves.


Drinking bird by Flickr user Seven Morris.

Bad influences

It's been far too long since we called attention to substance abuse in the animal kingdom. Setting a particularly bad example is a chimp in China with a smoking habit. Yes, he died recently, but:

Zoo spokesman Qondile Khedama said Charlie had become an institution, entertaining thousands of visitors every year with his antics.

For years, zookeepers had been trying to get the chimp to kick the habit, and they discouraged visitors from giving him cigarettes.

But Mr Khedama said he did not believe the addiction had ended Charlie's life prematurely, as he had lived around 10 years longer than the average chimp.

And in Austria, some zoo rhinos were directly responsible for enabling one man's drug habit:

An Austrian zoo has fired a zookeeper after discovering that he had been secretly growing a cannabis plantation in the rhinoceros enclosure he was in charge of. It was a clever scheme because the 59-year-old man had exclusive access to the enclosure at Salzburg Zoo, and the presence of the notoriously irritable one-ton beasts was likely to deter the curious.

But perhaps the most disturbing case reported recently is that of a deer at a resort in China. A few months ago, a waitress offered the animal a taste of some beer, and it was the first step on a descent into alcoholism:

Since then, says Zhang, whenever there is any leftover beer she takes it to feed to the deer.

"It has a growing addiction to beer. To begin with it was half a bottle but now it is several big bottles in a row. Her daily feed is around two bottles of beer."

Zhang adds: "I don't know what her maximum appetite for beers is though we once tried giving her four bottles of beer and she drank them all."

Elsewhere the restaurant's chef is quoted:

"It drinks beer quite often. It does not drink water any more, it only drinks beer."

Some say that drug abusers hurt only themselves, but when people foolishly believe that animals are cute and noble, we run the risk of their behavior being used as a role model, especially by innocent youth. What are our children to think when they see Bambi guzzling beer?

Primate perp roundup

The folks in Florida that we read about last time aren't the only ones having trouble with their resident primates.

In South Africa, baboons are attacking the wine industry, stealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of grapes ready to harvest - and it's only the best for these particular primates:

Growers say the picky primates are partial to sweet pinot noir grapes, adding to the winemakers' woe: Pinot noir sells for more than the average merlot or cabernet sauvignon.

"They choose the nicest bunches, and you will see the ones they leave on the ground. If you taste them, they are sour," said Francois van Vuuren, farm manager at La Terra de Luc vineyards, 50 miles east of Cape Town. "They eat the sweetest ones and leave the rest."

Not just thieves, they're also drunkards:

Sometimes the baboons even get an alcohol kick — by feasting on discarded grape skins that have fermented in the sun. After gobbling up the skins, the animals stumble around before sleeping it off in a shady spot.

Vineyard owners try to drive away the monkeys with rubber snakes and annoying noise, which naturally brings out the monkeyhuggers:

"The poor baboons are driven to distraction," said O'Riain, who works in the university's Baboon Research Unit.

Elsewhere, a more personal attack: a disabled veteran was savaged by his service monkey:

Hamerick says it started when he accidentally stepped on Noah's hand or foot. The capuchin snapped back violently, locking down on Hamerick's thumb.

"I just started pulling. Didn't give a d*** if I pulled my thumb off at the time - if there was anything I could do to stop the fight. I needed to stop it."

But the fight didn't end there - Noah kept swinging and biting. Hamerick says it was worse than war, even though he lost an eye in Vietnam.

"I got hit all over my body. That was a breeze compared to my little fight with him. Cut the vein, tore ligaments out of my wrists. I'm pumping blood all over..."

"I'm looking around and saying 'well, never thought I'd go out this way...I'm sitting there thinking I'm going to die."

So what's the victim's conclusion after this vicious attack by an animal he called his "best friend"? If you've been reading this blog you won't be surprised:

Still, Hamerick says, "He's a great monkey."

Label from some winemakers that believe the monkey lies, from Flickr user rbeiber.

Bad behavior briefs

Zhora, a chimp in Russia, has been sent to rehab to treat his smoking and drinking habit. Some reports imply that this tragedy is all the fault of zoo visitors who, despite the pleas of management and a barrier of three fences, managed to supply Zhora with booze and cigarettes. But as Reuters quotes the zoo director:

"The beer and cigarettes were ruining him. He would pester passers-by for booze."

Let's be clear on who's really to blame here: you can hand a chimp a beer, but you can't make him drink.

And in other news from man's "best friend," no comment is necessary on this report headlined German Man Betrayed to Police by Own Pet Dog:

When officers called at his flat in Euskirchen, near Cologne, the door was opened by an acquaintance of the missing man who was holding the dog.

The acquaintance said he did not know where the owner was.

But when the dog was set down, it led police to the cupboard, where it stood expectantly with its tail wagging.

Officers who opened the cupboard, which was just a metre (3ft 3in) high and 80cm (2ft 6in) wide, found the fugitive "hunched up inside".

In case you're looking for a breed that would be a better partner in crime, the dog was reported to be a Jack Russell.


Smoking and drinking chimp by Flickr user Steve9091.

Fruit flies like a banana, but they like a gin and tonic even better

If this blog called an Alcoholic Animals Anonymous meeting, it would be attended by a pretty wide variety of species, including elk, elephants, and badgers.

You can also find video of drunk squirrels, and if you believe the photos here, our mythical meeting might also attract chickens, woodchucks, otters, rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, goats and ferrets. (The crab, I suspect, is clearly a setup.) If you prefer classier journalistic sources, here the New York Times mentions drunkenness in at least half of those creatures and also cows, monkeys, pigs and lorises.

Mammals aren't the only culprits, either: we've seen in previous posts that bees are worse than college students when it comes to their taste for booze.

Bees are fairly complicated as insects go, though, and you might figure that such a hard-working insect might need to drink to relax more than most. But now research reveals that even fruit flies can become alcoholics. As reported by Science News:

Earlier studies found that alcohol has profound physiological effects on fruit flies, but the new study is one of the first to offer flies the choice to drink. Anita Devineni and Ulrike Heberlein, both of the University of California, San Francisco, devised a fly-sized drinking device reminiscent of the water bottles in hamster cages.

Given the choice between plain and alcoholic beverages, the study found, fruit flies preferred alcohol. They also developed a tolerance, gradually coming to prefer stronger drink. The researchers observed drunken behavior, although in fruit flies, this was pretty much confined to "hyperactivity and loss of coordination," since they were not given access to lampshades to put on their heads or cars to drive into stationary objects.

If you've ever wondered how certain alcoholic beverages become popular and traditional despite how nasty they taste, this study also suggests that this phenomenon extends to much more primitive creatures than ourselves:

Fruit flies accustomed to alcohol continued to drink despite potential harm, the team found. When the researchers laced the booze-food mix with small amounts of the toxic chemical quinine, those flies continued to drink, even though fruit flies normally avoid the chemical. “I was actually pretty surprised when they continued to drink it,” Devineni says.

Remarkably lovely photo of fruit fly from Flickr user Max xx.

Innocent man arrested for murder committed by drunk elk

The post title says it all on this one: A man in Sweden was arrested and jailed for ten days after finding the body of his wife, who had not returned from walking her dog. He has now been cleared of suspicion after technicians found physical evidence pointing to a very different perpetrator, according to the BBC:

Now the case has been dropped after forensic analysis found elk hair and saliva on his wife's clothes.

No motive has been reported, but the following is a warning to shiftless gardeners that your lazy clean-up habits can have dangerous consequences:

The European elk, or moose, is usually considered to be shy and will normally run away from humans. But Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.

Threatening elk look by Flickr user SigmaEye.

Badger on a bender

We've seen inebriated elephants and boozing bees; now we've got a drunken badger, and a report written by a police officer who sounds like he might be fun to have a beer with:

BERLIN (AFP) — German police called to clear a road of a dead badger found the animal in question had in fact gorged itself on over-ripe, fermented cherries and, blind drunk, staggered out into the middle of the road.

"The animal's stomach had turned the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, to put it crudely, drunk as a skunk," said a police statement on Wednesday. "In addition, the badger was suffering from diarrhoea studded with cherry stones."

Prodding the reluctant beast with a stick, officers managed to persuade it to leave the road near the town of Goslar in northwestern Germany and to sleep off his night of excess in a nearby meadow.

"It could not immediately be established whether the badger got into trouble with his wife when he came home in such a state," the tongue-in-cheek police statement concluded.

No word on whether a breathalyzer test was admininstered, although as usual in our stories, the animal went unpunished. Rather than being taken into custody, Reuters reports that the badger was scared away with a broom. (Also no word on whether brooms are standard German police equipment.)

Appropriate beverage by Flickr user Acme.

Boozing bees, part 2: "Not even a college student."

In our last post, we saw the effects of lab-induced drug abuse in bees, which were oddly reminiscent of the effects in humans. But how is that behavior the fault of the bees, you may ask?

Well, they may only get cocaine in labs. But in nature, alcohol is actually their drug of choice.

According to an artice in New Scientist ("Driven to Drink: A Sorry Tale of Bees' Boozy Life," August 8, 1992, p. 14), honey bees drinking fermented nectar have more flying accidents, die younger and are often rejected by teetotalers back at the hive. An Australian entomologist, Dr. Errol Hassan, is looking at bees imbibing both fermented sugar syrup and nectar. The alcohol content can be as high as 10% in these materials and adding fermented syrup or nectar to honey can make it "spiked."

The observation that bees are attracted to alcohol on their own goes back many years, as in this article from the New York Times of Dec 26 1898

The bee, like its human brother, is a frail and temptable creature, whose usefulness depends on absolute abstemiousness... According the credible accounts, the Cuban honey bee, to some extent, has fallen a victim to strong drink. The "workers" find it much nicer to congregate around the sugar mills, where they are always sure to discover sweet juices in ample supply. At first the bees carry on their labors diligently. Then, little by little, they learn that juices from the sugar cane contain alcohol...

Forsaking even the semblance of work, the bees imbibe the intoxicating fluid, and thenceforth the social and mental decline is marked. The sad fact is that the bees get drunk. They fly about in a dazed and listless condition, ambitionless so far as honey making is concerned. Once they have drunk from the fountain of Bacchus, they are moral and physical degenerates.

So researchers are merely taking advantage of their natural tendencies, which they say is exceedingly easy:

Most animals have to be tricked into drinking alcohol, says Charles Abramson of Ohio State University. But a honeybee will happily drink the equivalent of a human downing 10 litres of wine at one sitting.

"We can get them to drink pure ethanol, and I know of no organism that drinks pure ethanol - not even a college student," he says.

But don't try this at home - remember, these are trained professionals. Don't mess with bees!

Substance abusing bees, part 1

Recent research shows that honey bees that are given cocaine dance more - which may not be surprising - but there's more to it than it sounds at first, because remember that for bees, dancing isn't about partying, it's about communication:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they've found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a "round" or "waggle" dance, on a specialized "dance floor" in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they've found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

(Click here for a less restrained look into the mind of bees on coke, from this week's New Yorker.)

Bees have also been used to study the effects of alcohol, and the effect likewise sound awfully familiar.

"Alcohol affects bees and humans in similar ways – it impairs motor functioning along with learning and memory processing," said Julie Mustard, a study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at Ohio State University.

Researchers gave honey bees various levels of ethanol, the intoxicating agent in liquor, and monitored the ensuing behavioral effects of the drink – specifically how much time the bees spent flying, walking, standing still, grooming and flat on their backs, so drunk they couldn't stand up.

...Not surprisingly, increasing ethanol consumption meant bees spent less time flying, walking and grooming, and more time upside down.

You might say that this doesn't count as bad behavior, because it wasn't the bees' choice to imbibe... but come back on Friday.

Partying bee by Flickr user Henrique Vicente.

Elephant Week, Part 2: Delinquency and Family Breakdown

But what are the drunken elephants drinking to forget?

One study suggests that some rampaging elephants are actually taking revenge on humans. But it makes an even more interesting point: Like people, they've become hooligans because of the breakdown of the family, resulting from poaching in the 1970s-80s:

Many herds lost their matriarch and had to make do with inexperienced "teenage mothers". Combined with a lack of older bulls, this appears to have created a generation of "teenage delinquent" elephants...
A study...showed that a lack of older bulls to lead by example had created gangs of aggressive young males with a penchant for violence towards each other and other species.

T-shirt from Cat and Girl, buy it here.

Elephant Week, part 1: Drunkness and Violence

The incident reported last week is only the tip of the rampaging elephant iceberg.

Drunkenness is repeatedly reported as a cause of elephants behaving badly in Sri Lanka and and in India, where they steal fermenting rice beer,these drunken brawls can be fatal to humans. But, like most drunks, they're a danger to themselves as well,like the ones that electrocuted themselves messing with power lines.

However, apparently it's a myth that elephants in Africa get drunk from fermented fruit, in large part because they and their fellow animals are too greedy to let fruit lie around long enough to rot.

Drinking Elephant by Flickr user Valerie Everett