7 Species That Get High More Than We Do
Almost everyone loves drugs. Whether it's a cigarette break after a high-powered business meeting, a cold beer after a hot day on the job or a half-ounce of heroin injected directly into the scrotum to ease the stress of writing Internet comedy, people love their intoxicants.
But that's not a human invention. Experts have found that animals also seek out a quick chemical high from plants, bugs and, well, wherever they can find it. Here are seven animals that love the magic of intoxication even more than we do.
#7.
Elephants Are Angry Drunks
Drug of Choice:
Liquor and opiates.
Throughout history, elephants have been worshiped as gods, lauded for their wisdom and memory, and made into mascots for the Republican Party. Like people, elephants are very complex, social animals. This means they exhibit a lot of humanlike behavior. They nurture their young, mourn their dead and love to get absolutely fucked up.
Seriously.
In October of 2007, six young elephants charged into an Indian village, broke into their beer supply, got drunk, uprooted an electrical pole and died horribly. In 2002, another squadron of alcoholic elephants rampaged through a different village, killing six people.
No, we're not making that up. We have video. Below is the elephant equivalent of a raging kegger, complete with dry-humping at 1:12.
How Common Is It?
Alcoholism in elephants is an increasing problem in India and Africa. Being, generally, clever as fuck, it hasn't taken elephants long to realize that--because of increasing occurrences of interaction with us--where there are people, there's liquor.
We at Cracked don't want to be accused of inciting a panic, but our sources suggest that these raids aren't isolated events. It's only a matter of time before the elephantine hordes descend upon mankind like a plague of tusked, four-ton locusts with a penchant for rice wine and forced sexual congress.
#6.
Horses Love the Locoweed
Drug of Choice:
Spotted locoweed, a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug.
Apparently locoweed is to horses what nicotine is to people: an extremely addictive drug that kills them slowly over the course of several years. During the lean winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in some pastures. Horses first seek it out for its nutritious goodness, but keep coming back for its psychoactive effects.
Long-term users exhibit signs of depression, weight loss and behavioral instability.
But it does make them look cool.
How Common Is It?
Because it is so dangerous to herds, ranchers are constantly on guard for signs of locoweed use. But, like marijuana, locoweed grows everywhere and is virtually impossible to fully eradicate. Educational literature distributed to warn horses of the dangers of locoweed has, so far, been ineffective.
They just don't listen.
#5.
Bighorn Sheep Suck Rocks for Lichen
Drug of Choice:
Narcotic lichen.
In the vast wilderness of the Canadian Rockies lives a unique species of yellow-green lichen that will fuck you right up.
The lichen are extremely rare (it can take decades for them to grow over a single rock) and only grow in very inhospitable regions of the Rockies. Despite the fact that it is dangerous to get at and contains no nutritional value, the sheep will risk life and limb to get some.
Once they reach the lichen, they will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it. Experts describe the disturbing scene as, "... like the earth itself was a dealer, forcing the sheep to suck its dick for the next hit." The Cracked staff qualifies as experts, right?
How Common Is It?
Not very. Narcotic lichen is rare and only grows in some desolate parts of the Rockies. Barring the creation of some sort of sheep-based drug cartel, addiction rates should remain low.
#4.
Reindeer Love 'Shrooms
Drug of Choice:
Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
Let's talk about urine for a moment.
The body does not actually metabolize psychedelic mushrooms, so most of the psychoactive compounds get washed out with the user's pee. If you collect that urine and drink it, you will trip almost as hard as if you'd eaten the mushrooms yourself. Many native Alaskan tribes stretch out their supply of mushrooms this way. The priests eat the 'shrooms and the followers drink their urine.
"There's probably a better, less urine-themed way to get high..."
How does this tie into reindeer? Like most wild herbivores, reindeer have a very firm constitution that allows them to eat all manner of nasty plants and fungi without getting sick. Many strains of hallucinogenic mushrooms are toxic to human beings, but not toxic to reindeer. Native shamans noticed this when they observed the deer seeking out poisonous mushrooms, eating them and then capering about like characters in a Disney cartoon.
One of those really trippy, uncomfortable Disney cartoons.
Being the practical sort of fellows that primitive shamans were, the priests started collecting reindeer urine and drinking it to get high. But the piss train didn't stop there. The reindeer discovered that they could get the same high off of human urine. Thus was born...
THE CIRCLE OF PISS:
1. Reindeer eat mushrooms and pee.
2. Humans collect the pee and get high.
3. Humans pee, and reindeer drink their own people-filtered-urine to get high again.
4. The reindeer pee, and the circle begins anew.
How Common Is It?
Sadly, the glorious human/reindeer urine exchange is less common today than it once was. Experts speculate this may be due to the decline in mystical shamans and the invention of drugs that can get you high without forcing you to drink reindeer piss.
Somehow it just never caught on.
The deer, however, still love to get fucked up on poisonous mushrooms.
God! That horse picture is so creepy!
ReplyWhen I see a large wild cat, I am afraid because it's dangerous, but I strangely want to hug the cat and feel it's warmth and its soft fur. Good thing I'm more afraid than anything.
Replyi wonder if Evans has read The Botany of Desire.
ReplyI'd like to raise a practical question...Where does Bear Grylls figure into the Circle of Piss?
ReplyQueen bee's don't command the colony. This is an anthropomorphism, assuming bees follow the same hierarchal structure of human societies, which they don't. There is no one bee "in charge".
ReplyThanks for clearing that up. It's very important to know.
Duh the bee's wouldn't call her the queen then would they? She would be known as the fat easy bee who "pumps em out"
As #7 states, the Elephants with this kind of behaviour are young. When going through puberty, their hormones make them attack anything and often hump Rhinos, breaking their backs. They have to be controlled by the older Elephants, but well these are often killed by humans, thus we have to deal with the grey douchebag tanks.
Reply"Of course the risk of agonizing death has never stopped anyone from getting high..."
ReplyYou said a mouthful there, brother.
I hate to be that guy correcting a Cracked article, but since it's about my beloved drugs... amanita muscaria mushrooms and psychedelic mushrooms are two totally different things.
ReplyAlso the urine is MORE potent than the original aminita muscaria mushroom because, as the article states, the active chemical is not broken down by the body, but the poison is metabolized into the active chemical. The shaman would eat the poison mushroom because he was the most qualified to endure a "bad trip" then his urine would be passed around the village because it had been purified. For a given value of pure.
"Chronic alcoholics indulge their vice at the cost of their own legs."
ReplyHOLY CRAP! You were serious!!!!
I have always wanted to know if I could try Amanita muscaria mushrooms and see how fucked up I could get.
ReplyI clicked this article just 'cause it had that picture of the cute gray pony. I was rewarded with even more cute animal pictures. SQUEE! Sorry... just had a hit of millipede...
ReplyJust got to be a buzzkill and mention: Amanita mushrooms aren't shrooms, shrooms generally refer to psilocybin mushrooms..
ReplyHonestly, try Amanitas, then proper shrooms, and tell me if you can't tell the difference.
Shut the f**k up.
I was expecting a pink elephant reference from Dumbo on #7.
ReplyAll I wanted to do after wathing that jaguar video was rub its belly.
ReplyWay to make bees cute for me. Now I have to learn to fear them the hard way again.
ReplyNot sure which was funnier, the elephant video or the jaguar one.
ReplyThat reindeer is the happiest looking animal I have ever seen.
Replyidk, ayahuasca is a lot more pleasurable than AM. and that jaguar looked happy as s**t
ugh i know i want one
when my parents told me as a kid that father christmas's reindeers could fly i never believed them, but now i finally know the truth they was flying but only coz they was f**king tripping off shrooms they never tell you that as a kid hahaha d; )
ReplyIt's that magic dust!
Actually a lot of modern Christmas traditions can be traced back to mushroom festivals. Do a google search for the psychedelic secrets of Santa claus
Holy s**t. I just have to say, a HALF OUNCE of heroin, injected (or taken any way, for that matter) will kill anyone, even users with a high tolerance. I mean... holy f**k. Honestly, most people do a fraction of a gram, and there are 28 grams to an ounce. No one probably cares, but it was just such a glaring error to me I couldn't help it. Granted, this is powder heroin. I'm not sure how tar heroin works, but I imagine it's pretty much the same.
ReplyFor the record, I haven't touched anything in years. And you really don't want to. I'm not going to deny that I liked the feeling, but it is NOT worth it. Some people can do fine with just doing it every once in awhile, but most people will turn it into a habit. The benefits do not out weigh the risk, in my opinion. Ok, enough of my PSA. On to read the article...
Tar heroin works the same way as powder heroin *that is, one would break off a chunk, dissolve it in water stir and shoot). It's basically powder mixed with moisture. My old dealer used to blow into balloons filled with power do that the moisture on his breath mixed with it. Tar is more condensed and therefor potent, and the ingredients that aren't opioid more readily dissolve in water, which is also thickened slightly, to about the consistency of blood, so the immediate negative effects of shooting are negated.
And around here, regular ol' heroin costs about 150 a gram, half a gram is a f*****g s**t ton to inject. If you inject 2800$ worth of drugs you'd better get so fucked up you die
Sad to see that Pen-tailed tree shrews didn't make the cut. Though I think they don't actually get intoxicated, despite every member of the species sucking down the equivalent of ten to twelve glasses of wine a day as their primary food source.
ReplyYeah, that's less amusingly intoxicated and more simply badass, maybe.