UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, MAY 2014We are all familiar with the human drunk, and with the full range of her or his behaviors. These can range from the merely entertaining to embarrassing, damaging, and even death-eliciting consequences. But are there comparable outcomes in the animal kingdom? An Associated Press story published in 2002, for example, relates elephants marching through villages in Assam in search of illicit stills, which they broke open to quaff home brew. They then ran amok in a drunken rampage, even killing villagers. Similarly, numerous accounts of inebriated mammals and birds relate the consumption of either fermenting foodstuffs (such as bread dough) or alcohol-laden fruit, followed by apparently drunken comportment. This anecdotal and often humorous literature is, however, very difficult to interpret scientifically.
Are there any real data demonstrating alcohol intoxication in the wild? And are there any evolutionary expectations for animal physiology and behavior if low-level exposure to booze is an inevitable consequence of a fruit-based diet?
Animal inebriate
By many anecdotal accounts, drunkenness would seem to occur frequently in the animal kingdom. Cavorting groups of inebriated baboons, sozzled chimps falling out of trees, and birds too drunk to fly have all been described by naturalists, interested bystanders, and a more voyeuristically oriented popular media. Many stories hint at behavioral similarity of the drunken beast to inebriated humans. And sometimes the observers might have been drinking themselves, based on the tone of the reports. Most suggestive is a widely distributed sequence from the film “Animals are Beautiful ...
