Herd of Elephants Apparently Passed Out Drunk After Guzzling Village Liquor

A herd of 24 elephants was found in a deep slumber after reportedly guzzling water fermented by the intoxicating mahua flower. The sleeping giants were observed on the outskirts of the Shilipada cashew forest in Keonjhar district in Oshida, India, surrounded by the broken remains of the brewing pots.

"We went into the jungle at around 6 a.m. to prepare mahua and found that all of the pots were broken and the fermented water was missing," Naria Sethi, one of the villagers who had been preparing the brew, told PTI. "We also found that the elephants were sleeping. They consumed the fermented water and got drunk."

After trying, and failing, to wake the elephants, the villagers called the local forest department, who had to beat drums to rouse the animals from their stupor.

The mahua flower is traditionally used in India to produce a sweet, alcoholic liquor. The flowers are fermented in clay pots to produce a spirit with an alcohol content of up to 45 percent.

Katrick Satyanarayan, the chief executive of Wildlife SOS, told Newsweek that cases of elephants drinking the floral liquor have been reported in the past.

"Mahua flowers have a high content of sucrose which elephants enjoy and it is natural for them to be drawn to their sweet smell. These flowers are a favorite among Indian wild elephants as it's a pure, tasty, and powerful source of nutrition. Also, the smell of fermented mahua carries over a long distance and as elephants have highly developed olfactory systems, they can smell it from miles away."

However, there is considerable debate as to whether the animals could ever drink enough of it to actually get drunk.

Lisa Yon, an expert in elephant welfare and associate professor in Zoo and Wildlife Medicine at the University of Nottingham in the U.K., has her doubts. "This is an interesting report, but to be honest, it doesn't seem very likely that the elephants consumed this liquor and got drunk," she told Newsweek. "Over a great many years–even as early as the 1800s–there have been these anecdotal reports of elephants getting drunk by eating fermented fruit. But there are a couple of reasons which make it quite unlikely that this happened.

"One, given their large body size, the elephants would have to consume an awful lot of the fermented fruit, or liquor in this instance, to actually get drunk. Two, it's unlikely that elephants would select rotten fruit – they prefer to eat fresh fruit. I would suggest that similarly, the elephants would have to have consumed a large volume of the alcohol for it to affect them – it doesn't seem likely."

Satyanarayan echoed these thoughts. "While mahua flowers are sweet in their raw form, the drink has a pungent odor which may not be as appealing to elephants as they are very selective of what they consume. So, it is unlikely that they get intoxicated from consuming the liquor and so far, there is no scientific evidence of this."

In 2006, scientists concluded that tales of inebriated elephants were unlikely to be true given the vast size of the animals. They reasoned that the elephants would have to eat an extortionate amount of fermented fruit to feel even slightly tipsy.

However, a study from the University of Calgary in 2020 suggested that elephants may not be able to metabolize alcohol in the same way as humans, and therefore would need much smaller quantities, relative to their size, to get drunk. The 2006 study was also in reference to African elephants, which are larger than their Asian cousins.

But even if elephants were extreme lightweights, you would need a lot of booze to knock out an entire herd.

Ghasiram Patra, one of the forest rangers who woke the elephants, wasn't convinced that the sleeping elephants had passed out from a booze-fueled rampage. "Maybe they were just resting there," he told PTI.

Stories of this nature can unfairly damage the elephants' reputation among village residents, and Yon said that this can affect how humans interact with these animals.

"I suspect the biggest threat to the elephants from all of this is that people in the region may be more hostile towards, or less accepting of, elephants nearby in their environment."

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References

Janiak M.C., et al., Genetic evidence of widespread variation in ethanol metabolism among mammals: revisiting the "myth" of natural intoxication, Biology Letters, April 29 2020, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0070

Morris S, Humphreys D, and Reynolds D, Myth, Marula, and Elephant: An Assessment of Voluntary Ethanol Intoxication of the African Elephant (Loxodonta africana) Following Feeding on the Fruit of the Marula Tree (Sclerocarya birrea), Physiological and Biochemical Zoology April 2006 https://doi.org/10.1086/499983