Animal Addicts | The Fix.
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By Daniel Genis
12/02/14
How monkeys, elephants, dolphins and cats get high, and how it could change the war on drugs.
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All too often, it’s a result of our interference in their lives. Years ago, a fellow NYU student I knew, dated a dashing junkie. She also lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where heroin was easy to get. Every morning, he’d stop in after copping to take his shot. A kind-natured addict, he would leave the end of the injection to plunge into my friend’s pet cat.
After the eventual break-up, the cat was introduced to withdrawal. It was so uncontrollable that the girl had to call her ex-boyfriend to dose the animal, leading to a brief re-kindling. When the relationship ended for good, she insisted that he take the cat that he was responsible for addicting. But not all cases of animal substance abuse have people involved.
In this instance, the pet was put on drugs without its knowledge, although it purred from the heroin with a heartiness beyond my experience with clean cats. However, there are many examples of animals in their natural habitats that deliberately seek out substances for inebriation. And in almost every case, they are the same substances mankind has used for centuries.
The case of fermented fruit is the best known one. Video footage shows a variety of African animals putting their rivalries aside to enjoy the Marula fruit when it’s fermented. Drunken elephants pal around with tipsy monkeys; even an ostrich stumbles away with the promise of a serious hangover. But this being nature, there are much stranger methods employed by animals to get high.
Australian wallabies, so cute and fuzzy, seek out poppy plants to indulge in the opiates within. Dogs who live by cane fields learn to harass certain toads that inhabit them until they release their glandular bufotenin, a form of the hallucinogen, DMT. This is the same psychoactive substance enjoyed by humans who lick toads and drink ayahuasca.
And it turns out that dolphins eat the poisonous pufferfish for its psychoactive venom—to become inebriated on the small portion of poison. The dolphins are careful, as well. They bite off as much as they need and not enough to hurt themselves. And then they pass the fish around the pod to share the experience—much like teenagers with joints in stairwells. People who eat Fugu sushi, sometimes at the risk of death, also enjoy the numb feeling caused by the tetrodotoxin. They even have to sign releases before having this meal.
In the 19th century, circuses often exhibited chimpanzees dressed in clothing similar to human fashion. The animals demonstrated their “evolution” by smoking cigars and drinking whiskey. As far as we know, they enjoyed this, but it was clearly a behavior taught to them by their keepers. The drug testing done on animals over the last century has also shown that brains other than homosapien can benefit from the euphoric effects of substances from MDMA to cannabis to DMT and methamphetamine.
Cocaine has proven most alluring to the nervous systems of rats who can neglect themselves in favor of the drug. The oft-repeated story of rodents starving themselves to death for cocaine actually depends on the trauma that the rat has lived through. Happy rats are less susceptible to debilitative addiction—very much like humans.
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Animal Addicts | The Fix.
