Elephants Raid Crops, Get Drunk On Corn Wine With Farmers In Self-Isolation
By Dave Basner
March 20, 2020
Coronavirus has caused a lot of changes to the world and everyday life. It's true not just for humans, but animals as well. Household pets are confused to see so much more of their owners. Meanwhile, with no visitors to Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, caretakers allowed the penguins to walk around and explore some of the attraction's other exhibits. They aren't the only animals taking advantage of some of the recent changes, a pack of elephants in China did too.
Usually, the pachyderms wouldn't be able to get close to the farms in the Yunan province because of all the people working in the crops, but with just about everyone practicing social distancing, there was no one to stop a group of 14 elephants from raiding a local farm.
While most of the animals went for the food growing in the fields, a pair of males stumbled upon a stash of corn wine and ended up drinking most of it. In fact, they chugged so much of it that they fell asleep in a nearby tea garden. Someone was able to photograph the scene. Conservationist Parveen Kaswan then tweeted out the pic.
Meanwhile few #elephants decided to use alcohol to sanitize trunks in Wunnan, China. They were raiding crops somehow found wine. And the look after drinking too much. As a fact elephants are fond of alcohol, they are good at finding that also, especially Handiya in tribal belts. pic.twitter.com/K77fYuiFqr
— Parveen Kaswan (@ParveenKaswan) March 18, 2020
Kaswan explained that elephants actually enjoy alcohol and seek it out in the form of extra ripe fruits or they look for areas where people make liquor. They even mark the spots where they find it so they can go back for more later.
When they were all sober. In tribal belts people hide country made alcohol but somehow elephants find it. They mark the houses also where they found that last time. If they see drunk people they get irritated also, since it was not shared with them. All credits in pics. 11/3/20 pic.twitter.com/ESYtPsrd68
— Parveen Kaswan (@ParveenKaswan) March 18, 2020
According to Kaswan, elephants also don't like drunk humans but not because they can be annoying, rather it's because when an elephant sees or smells someone who is intoxicated, they know there was booze around and it wasn't shared with them.
Kaswan went on to point out that there are now only 250 elephants left in all of China. Sad news since they used to walk all over the country but are now nearly extinct locally.
Photo: Getty Images