January 11, 2011 • 42 mins
Human beings aren't the only organisms with a predilection for mind-altering substances. In fact, the natural world is filled with bingers and boozers. Listen in and learn more about junkie animals.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
This is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And Julie,
I'm I'm I'm kind of worried about some cats out there. Um,
not my cat, My cat is straight edge, but a
(00:26):
number of these animals are addicted to a certain substance. Yeah,
I know, it's a big problem. I'm gonna say that.
You know, I'm just gonna reveal right now that my cat,
Owen is a victim of it. Yeah. He might even
be at home glassy eyed right now. Yeah. Sometimes I'm
known on the street is the nip or or CN
but more commonly known to humans as catnip. That's right,
(00:50):
it's a big problem. Yeah, and uh, I think most
people have observed this, uh uh this uh, this potentially
problematic behavior in them as if not you're in your
own cat, uh, in your friends cats or just cats
on the street. Uh, they'll they'll generally, you'll you'll you'll
either supply it to them or they'll obtain it in
the form of an actual living plant growing in some
(01:13):
some dirt, or it's a powder or it's been uh
you know, somehow meshed into a toy or I've actually
seen it, uh, somehow processed into like a solid ball,
like like a like a like a jawbreaker, and then
they just go nuts for it. And there's just there's drooling,
there's there's rolling around on the floor, right, or sometimes
(01:33):
the cute little stuffed bunny that it's in is torn apart.
It's just it can get pretty ugly. It's which is
kind of cruel. Like imagine if you uh, I mean,
imagine if if people were administering you know, dangerous drugs
or or very addictive drugs to humans in a similar capacity.
Like here you go, here's your heroine, but it's in
a baby doll. You're gonna have to tear the baby
(01:54):
apart to get to it. You know, that would be
kind of weird. Wow. But but it's not not a
we're kidding of it. But it's it's not a dangerous substance.
I mean unless the cat I guess, tries to drive
a vehicle afterwards or something, right, Right, and in that
case you just take the keys away from Owen like
I do. But right, it's naturally occurring. Yeah, I can't
blame them for stumbling upon it and saying, wow, this
(02:17):
this ment like herb is really delicious. Yeah. And the
primary um agent at work here is actually a similar
to turpentine, and it's called neptal lactone rolls off a tone, yeah, yeah,
also known as the NEP on the street, Yeah, on
the street in cat circles, and uh, you know, it's it's,
(02:40):
like I say, it's hard to sort of to gauge
exactly what it's doing, but it seems to stimulate the
regions of the cat brain that control sex, appetite, and mood, right, right,
And in fact, there's a there's supposed to be special
wiring for cat pheromones in their olfactory apparatus. Is that right? Yeah?
And apparently one third of domestic cats don't react to
cat and ip at all. So as my cat, which
(03:02):
again we keep I'm always impulse buying cat and up
because I'm like, oh, maybe she only wants it when
it's really fresh, so I'll get the planet and she
you know that she has no part of it. You've
tried everything to dose your cat pretty much, yeah, because
it's so amusing when it happens, and and ultimately, um
you know, cats are there for our amusement when they
live in our homes. I think I shared with you
earlier that my cat is twenty six pounds. He's a
(03:23):
main con and actually frightened when he gets dosed, because
you know, you just don't want that type of large
cat pouncing on you. Do they pound that? Does he
pounce when he gets Yeah, I mean he does the
whole like rolls around, drules, glassy odd and then the
paranoid like jumping from from one piece of furniture to
(03:45):
the other until you That's when I get a little
bit nervous and we all sequest ourselves into a small
room until he's done. Now, I've found it interesting that
cats say in Japan um and the Japanese people love
their cats, as most of the videos on YouTube can
attest to um uh well, I mean most of the
(04:05):
I think half the videos on YouTuber cats doing something
weird anyway. But but they have another plan of it
there that's similar called the u matta tabby plant, which
contains um compounds that are similar to something called uh well,
similar to the same nepatela taka tone that I mentioned earlier,
(04:26):
the nep uh and it causes, um, it depends on
where you look. I saw. I saw one account that
was saying that it causes different behavior, making them align
their backs with their paws in the air. But I
looked on YouTube. Yeah, and I looked. But I looked
on YouTube and it was like, it looks like exactly
the same behavior. It's cats rolling around, you know, trying
to get inside the toy that contains this particular substance
(04:48):
and uh or in just rolling around in it and
just you know, totally going weird weird. Yeah, and I
think it's sort of like a psycho sexual response to Yeah.
I mean, we talked about the pheromones, so it's a
little bit creepy when I think about it that way. Now,
the human usage of of these substances pretty interesting as well,
(05:08):
because apparently um uh, the the mattatabi plant has also
been used in traditional Chinese folk medicine for pain control
and as a tonic for ruth and through ruthanis um okay. Well,
and also before Chinese tea became widely available, cat nip
tea was pretty popular, oh like before like green tea
and stuff, because yeah, yeah, before the trade routes were
(05:30):
established and so and so for people would pour themselves
in nice little cat nip tea. Wow. So like I mean,
right now, I'm actually having a mug of green tea,
so you know, there, but for fortune, I would be
sitting here having a cup of cat nip tea just
looking over my shoulder to make sure that the hordes
were not rushing in from the streets to to consume it.
(05:52):
For me, that's exactly right. And you would probably be
wearing like a tricorn hat. But I think the thing
about the cats getting high, it's that it's just it's
not that unusual in nature. We see examples of this
all over the place in much more extreme fashions. Yeah. Yeah,
there are a lot of junkies in the animal kingdom.
(06:14):
I mean, they're not all junkies. Sometimes they're merely um well,
sometimes they're there's it's definitely a case of self medication
injurs too, right, yeah, and then they're bingjurs and then
they're there are cases where the jury is kind of
out exactly what's going on. But but we're going to
talk about some of the more outlandish and interesting cases
(06:35):
of animal drug use in this podcast. So so let's uh,
let's move on to another animal. Well, let's talk about
the drunkards, the dipsomaniacs, specifically Laura Keats. Yes, the little
tiny parrots. And apparently in Australia this is this is
a problem, and of late it's been exacerbated and they're
(06:57):
not quite sure why, but there have been reports of
hundreds of drunk parrots just falling from the sky. Yeah. Yeah,
and that people were handing in birds that had been
found stumbling around the road, eyes gunky and half closed
and unable to fly, and they think that was a
mystery food that they ingested or some sort of virus.
(07:18):
But the birds were treated with meals of porridge and
fresh fruit, and supposedly that left them feeling drowsy and
it caused them to lie down in a in a
sort of hangover state or what those people interpreted to
be a hangover state. But that's actually not too uncommon,
and it's possible that they get ahold of some fruit
that was fermented and they just ate a lot of
(07:40):
it and got very drunk. Yeah. The fermentation process that
we exploit in the production of various alcoholic substances is
of course a natural phenomenon that occurs with with any
number of fruits out there. I mean, the same thing
that turns that can can turn a great into wine
will happen on the vine with with or were on
(08:00):
the branch with a number of different substances. Right, So
it's not exactly like the Lord of keats, We're we're
getting into grain, alcohol or anything, right, right. They just
they just happened to eat this fruit. Um. But obviously
they liked it enough to keep eating it and become
so drunk that they were falling by the sky and
just hanging out on the corners. Yeah. But but like
with this animal with the with the number, it kind
(08:22):
of you're forced to ask the question. It's like, are
they eating the fruit because it's fermented or are they
they're just eating fruit because in addition to getting them wasted,
it's you know, that's where the you know, the meal is,
that's where the stored energy is to continue life right,
right and naturally. And I'm thinking about the moose um
because it's the same situation. The moose that when uh,
(08:46):
particularly in Sweden during the fall, they tend to come
out in the suburbs from the forest and start eating
all of the fruit that's dropped on the ground there,
and of course at that point that fruit has begun
to ferment. And the problem though is that you have
you know, this very large moose getting drunk off of
the fruit there, and then they just start doing all
(09:08):
sorts of crazy things since you know, they're running into
the middle of the street, causing accidents. Um there have
been accounts of them belly flopping into empty swimming pools, yeah,
and attacking people. So it's actually a real problem there.
And if you look at the papers from that time
period during the fall and so we can eat here,
there's it's always like drunk moose attack. You know, drunk
(09:29):
moose came through the window of our house while we
were watching TV. But again that's the same thing. Are
they are they leaving the forest to seek out fruit
because they all of that is in their particular areas
that they've eaten, and so that they know in these
areas people by humans that they're not necessarily going to
eat all the fruit, and so they suspect that there's
(09:51):
fruit out there, or they've learned that over time. It's
also worth noting that but I believe that I mean
a moose, it tends to be a more aggressive animal. Yeah,
I mean as aggressive as a you know, like a
prey species can be. But but like when I was
a kid up in Newfoundland, Canada, there are always accounts
of you know, talking about like the moose charging a
(10:11):
vehicle or you know, or moose like just trampling on
top of a vehicle and or or doing things like
you know, suddenly like plowing through a wall. Right, So
they don't necessarily need to be drunk in order to
exhibit that behavior. But what they have noticed is late
fall here they come in mass out in the neighborhood's
just causing all sorts of craziness. Yeah, and if they're
(10:33):
hanging out at Tico Bray's house, then all the more
potentially get right, he kept his moose pretty regularly drunk,
is that right? Yeah? Yeah yeah, But then this also
leads to a myth out there, and that's that has
to do with elephants. Okay, we should probably put this
myth to rest with with the other myth that elephants
(10:55):
bury they're dead, right right, Yeah, the whole elephant burial
ground graveyard type of thing where you know, where you
just find this place with all these these elephant bones. Um. Yeah,
that's it's not true. Yeah, it's a great idea, I
mean it sounds fabulous, but yeah, I mean it's very
touching and you know, a part of me wishes it
were true. But it's not same thing with drunk elephants. Uh,
(11:16):
they're regularly reported going on booze fueled rampages in India,
but zoologists have calculated that the amount that animals would
have to drink to get drunk um would clear them
of being under the influence um, and that they're just
being a little bit aggressive about their territories and defending
them and so. But but you know, look at yourself
(11:37):
as a someone in the village and seeing like a
herd of forty elephants, bowl elephants no less coming at you,
and you're brewing up some beer, and you know they
they're they're coming towards you. You You might think, oh, they're
after the beer. I mean you know, yeah, sort of
a logical conclusion. Yeah, if you you have some sort
of still going, I guess everything that comes trampling in unannounced,
(11:59):
you know, seasonably interpreted like that. But yeah, it comes
down to like if you've ever been like, oh, like
so and so is a big guy. It takes you know,
he can drink a lot of beer. Well, the elephant
is enormous, so you know, you just extrapolate those uh
those alcohol estimations and uh, you know, it quickly becomes
kind of a pretty pretty big feat to get an
(12:20):
elephant drunk, right right, And I mean even though they
might have uh actually drank from grain alcohol stills that
are out there. Um again, yeah, it's it's gonna take
much more than once available to get them drunk. But
there's also the marula tree in Africa that has again
fruit which becomes fermented that they've noticed elephants eating from,
(12:43):
and the same thing. They would just have to clear
an entire forest denude it of marula trees in order
to get drunk. So sorry, no rampaging elephants here. Well.
Another one that the jury is uh still out on
as far as far as I can tell, is that
jaguars like to chew, bark and and trip out in
(13:06):
the jungles. Yeah, the Amazon, and it's um there's a
tropical vine down there called the Banistera stereopsis cappy, I'll
go with that, yeah, which and it contains these opponent
potent hallucinogens. Uh and and certainly of a if a
human consumes them, they will hallucinate and have this uh
(13:28):
some sort of the psychedelic experience experience that you know,
ties into neurotransmitters that are tied to serotonin production and
different receptors in the brain and and there there there's
always this sort of myth that they are not really
a myth, but their their tales of jaguars consuming the bark.
And one possibility is that they is that the some
(13:53):
of the the alkaloids in the in the in the
vine also sort of clear the animal of parasitic worms. Yeah,
so so it's possible that they are tripping out in
the jungles, but they are, but they may be doing
it just to clear themselves of parasites. So it's like
they're they're trying to get rid of the you know,
(14:14):
human equivalent of say, lice. Yeah, and uh, but they're
just the nice side effect is that they're tripping out there. Yeah,
and it kind of um, it's kind of interesting to
sort of look at it in terms of like people
going to the dentist and getting doped up for dental procedure.
It's kind of like if you were to view that
and not really focused on the dental procedure, and you're like,
these people were going to the strange man who who
(14:36):
dopes them up and then make somebody else drive them home?
It's like, what are they? What are they doing? What
kind of you know, it's but it's tied to a procedure.
So it's the the the tripping that the jaguars do
is seems to possible, seems like it possibly is just
you know, a high product of them, you know, trying
to regulate their parasitic infection. Yeah. I've also read that
it heightens their sense of smell too, which would be helpful. Yeah,
(15:00):
so you know when baking and such. So those those
are the the hootch drinkers of the animal kingdom. What
about our trippers? Oh wait, there's one more um or
that this is this is an example of of of
drinkers that they're they're not no, no, no no, this is
one where they're not really consuming something that occurs naturally.
(15:21):
Um And it's a very you know, unnatural situation. But
you have velvet monkeys on the island of St. Kitts
in the Caribbean and they've been there for about three years,
but because they were brought there by slave traders, so
they're just running all over the place and uh, and
there are resorts there, so there you know, as is
the case when you have you know, Westerners coming into
resorts their alcoholic beverages everywhere generally half you know, consumed,
(15:43):
and the monkeys will just swoop in and uh and
you'll see just monkeys just getting completely wasted. Um, well,
what are or what are some of the other nice
euphanisms for for drunk? Oh, blottot blitzed soust like tight
tight too, that's such a thing. Yeah, within a huming
(16:06):
way that talked about getting tight on absent than doing
knife tricks. I don't know, but I remember first seeing
it in a poem called The Wild Party by Joseph
Moncure March, which is great and it's all about actually
prohibition in grain alcohol and a big party. So well, um,
on the island of St. Gets, you definitely have velvet
(16:26):
monkeys getting tight off of abandoned drinks. But the really
interesting part is that a scientists have really sort of
you know, never really looked at the situation and and
uh and examined like whitch monkeys are drinking, which because
some of the monkeys are not drinking, and then how
much alcohol are the monkeys consuming. And they've found that
the percentage of peetotal or monkeys matches the non drinkers
(16:47):
in our human population, uh, in in similar proportions. Uh
Like in human habits, most most most of people drink
in moderation and then twelve or steady drinkers five percent
just drink everything in sight and uh and the percentages
line up, uh, you know, pretty evenly between us and
(17:07):
the velvet monkeys. So this is just an interesting observation side. Yeah, Um, well,
I wanted to talk about horses too and loco weed. Yeah,
I know, this is something I was not familiar with it.
I'm surprised it hasn't shown up in like a Western
or something I would have seen or yeah. Yeah, And
I think that the term loco weed came actually into
(17:28):
popular use in the late eighteen hundreds, so it's been
around for a long time. And it's a it's a
native plant that grows in the western part of the
United States. Um. But the problem with it is that
horses will eat it early spring late fall when there's
not a other other green plants around, and once they
get a taste of it, they pretty much become addicted
(17:50):
to it. And if they eat it for I don't know,
beyond two weeks and that's their primary part of their diet. Uh,
they can have like some severe neurological damn. Yeah. Some
of the symptoms of local weed poisoning include, you know,
excessive salvation, aimless wandering, lack of coordination, altered gates, chronic
weight loss, vision problems, lethargy um that you and you
(18:14):
also see it like interfering with reproductive uh you know,
properties that you know, have stallions that become infertile, mayors
that don't you know, they don't bring their young to
full terms yep, and walking in circles. Yeah, and that's
the that's again one of the reasons why it's so dangerous,
because they get to the point where they just quit
(18:36):
drinking and eating anything else, mainly because they don't know
how to get to those sources anymore, but also because
they're completely addicted to the loco weed. That's right, I
just said the loco weed, which I think is used
in popular drug vernacular. Yeah. And actually this is interesting
too that the local part of it obviously meaning crazy,
(18:57):
but there there's a secondary meaning of it in Spanish
which relates to wandering, which, if you ask me, that's
kind of what I think. It's probably original tent was
knowing that the loco weed wasn't a big train back
in early nineteenth century. The other thing is that the
horses can outlive this this periodic episode here of of druggery. Um.
(19:24):
And what you do is you keep the horse as
quiet as possible and you administer sedatives along with laxatives
to clean out the system. So immediately I started thinking
about trainspotting. Yeah, now um it. On the on the
sedative of animals consuming something that's harmful for them, it
is is worth noting that you see a lot of
examples in in the wild of of animals that consume
(19:47):
particularly plants that contains some property that is either uh
you know, that is harmful when they try and digest it.
That you also see them like immediately follow up that
meal with the I like, they'll eat some clay and
uh you know, or some sort of river bed kind
of dirt properties to help digestion. So is it kind
(20:08):
of neutralized exactly neutralized the effect. So they'll be. It
basically enables them to eat a meal that would otherwise,
you know, be potentially harmful to them, right. Uh, and
and it would be especially you know, helpful if you're
in a case where you're an animal where you know,
there's a certain time of year revolves around and the
primary food source has some sort of toxic property, so
(20:28):
there nothing else is available, right, but here's this poisonous,
delicious plant, right, and so they'll, yeah, they'll consume it
to help with the digestions. So and you you do.
You see that in numerous species. Okay, so there is
a reason for some of this, right with the horses
and the local weed that just as sort of an accident,
I think of them coming upon this pretty invasive. Sometimes
(20:52):
you eat a lot of different food, and sometimes the
food you eat is is harmful. So yeah, that's right,
sometimes the food eats you. One of my favorite examples
that I've seen actual footage of is lemurs. Oh yes,
this is this is one of the best. Really, um,
possibly because it also includes lemurs, which are just uh
funny to look at anyway. Well, yeah, they've got those
(21:13):
great eyes that are you know, it's like all eyes
all the time, and so, I mean they're a little
intense in the first place. And you know, being residents
of Madagascar there another one of those species is just
great and that it's kind of like evolution kind of
goes off in a bubble and sort of does its
own thing for a bit, right, right, And yeah, Madagascar
they always creates great little creatures like the hiss and cockroach, right,
(21:37):
which was sort of my nightmare remember learning about that. Um.
But anyway, lemurs and caption monkeys which are in South America,
they love millipedes, and particularly after a nice good rain, um,
they'll go out and seek some millipedes and they'll bite
their next it's just you know, kind of cruel, but
(21:59):
they won't necessarily kill them when they do that. But
when it does, the the millipede goes into crisis mode
and squirts out its poison and they'll they'll kind of
drool over it and they'll roll it around in their hands. Yeah,
and they rub it all over their bodies, which I
think is great. I mean there they're like clearly loving
their millipedes. Um. But they do this, we think because
(22:21):
right after the rains there are a lot of parasitic
insects that are around, and this is an actual repellent
to them, Yeah, like a pesticide. Yeah, it's I mean,
it's like anytime you have to put that drop on
the back of your pet's neck. You know, in the wild,
they're you know, they're not gonna apply that. The animals
aren't gonna apply that kind of thing themselves. But here's
this handy millipede with this toxic property, and you know,
(22:43):
at some point that developed the skill of taking that
and using it for medicinal purposes, right right. And of
course the thing that happens is that they get completely high,
like they're off their rockers. And the clips that I've
seen online, I think one of them as animal plant
is pretty funny. Uh. Actually the camera kind of zooms
(23:04):
in and out and so it's got like the psychedelic
look to it. Lemurs just you know, its head is
going from side to side. I mean, it looks like
it's the nineteen sixties. Really. Yeah, because they end up,
so they end up like they end up having to
taste it, because they end up because they lick their fingers.
It's yeah, they start stuffing it in their mouth. Yeah,
(23:24):
And I've I've also seen some arguments. There's a there's
a botanist at the Missouri bar Botanical Gardens in Madagascar
by the name of Christopher Brinckinshaw, and he as he
also proposes that some of the strange expressions you see
on their faces could just because be due to the
horrible taste of the millipede. Yeah. Uh. And he also
(23:47):
throws out there that he's observed a pet lemur uh
exhibit the same behavior with cigarettes. So the lemur steals
a cigarette, drools over it, rubs it all over it's
fur and uh and ahibitally thinks this may also be
a case of where the lemurs trying to protect itself
from parasites, but it recognizes something in the in the
(24:08):
cigarette as being valuable in that regard, like some sort
of chemical compound. Yeah, huh. I wonder on on the
addictive side, if it has the same effect, Like, I mean,
I know that some I've heard of monkeys in captivity
smoking before. Yeah, I wonder. Yeah, I would imagine there
would be an addictive property to rubbing yourself down with
the nicotine. Yeah, I mean, I mean, what is the
(24:30):
nickotine patch? Right? But yeah, why don't they make nicotine loution.
We're thinking about it. No, No, I mean I'm picturing it,
like you know, just somebody who's really into smoke and
just coming home in the afternoon, just like getting a
big bucket, like a big tub of it out like
you know, and uh, lighting a few Yankee candles, turning
(24:50):
on the the onion music, and just slathering down their lavender.
Mental solution. Yeah, well, there's an idea out there. This
presentation is brought to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow. Now,
(25:11):
did you run across any of the reindeer stories in
your research? This is of course, by the time this
comes out, Christmas will be defeated once more. Uh for
another year. But yeah, but right now Christmas is just
a few days away. So it's interesting to discuss um
lapland reindeer and there relationship with hallucinogenic mushrooms. And of
(25:37):
course a number of mushrooms out there in the world
are capable of producing hallucinogenic or psychedelic experiences in the user.
It just is there plenty of that will just kill
you completely dead or make you horribly horribly ill. So
we can't stress enough. Don't eat random mushrooms. Uh, that
you find in the wild. The particular mushroom that these
reindeer running into is um is a flaw i a
(26:00):
Garic mushroom called the aman Amanita muscaria, and this is
a red mushroom with white spots on it. So it's
very you know, super Mario Brothers fairy tale looking type
type mushroom. And uh, there there's this, there's there are
these reports that well there's sort of two versions of
this report. One is that you have like you know,
(26:23):
like a lot of these psychedelic substances that people have
consumed them religiously. Um were four religious practices over the
over the you know, throughout history, and so you have
shaman traditional shaman in the area that would supposedly consume
the mushrooms and then they would urinate and h then
the the reindeer would eat the urine, would lap up
(26:43):
the urine out of the E V L snow or whatever,
and then go just running off, you know, completely spaced out.
And then there's the reverse story. Well that's the thing
that they think that that's where some of the idea
of flying reindeer come from. But then the other then
there's like another side of it, which which is that
they would feed the mushrooms to the reindeer or observe
the reindeer eating the mushrooms, and the reindeer would have
(27:05):
their old experience, and then they would collect the reindeer. You, yeah,
because because a lot of them, because they think that
the the the urine would be like a concentrated version
of the hallucinogens from the mushroom. The circle of life,
isn't it beautiful? Well, I mean it's I guess it's
no weirder than the coffee that goes through the Yeah.
(27:25):
The does it go through a goat? Or is it
go through a cat like creature? Oh? I don't know,
I've heard goats, but it could be both. Yea, Like
this is like this is like this crazy, supposedly great coffee,
right that goes to the digestive system. Yeah, if I'm
I believe it is some sort of cat of some kind,
But it doesn't really not like a traditional cat. Okay,
But but the bean actually goes through and then that
you pick the bean out of the feces, right. Yeah,
(27:48):
It's not an area I've really looked into a lot
because I'm not really interested and someone's a little sensitive
about the coffee. Well, I just I just require that
my coffee not passed through another animals digestion think absolutely delicious,
even even if it's absolutely delicious, Okay, you don't want
to know, right, but but so anyway, that's that's uh,
that's just a great image though if the reindeer, urine
(28:10):
and shaman collecting it for their religious rights. Uh so
take that with you into next Christmas, because as you're
listening to it, it's probably just over a year away.
That's right now, It's less than here. So I mean,
you know, we talked about the stirc call of life.
There are are other accounts of people using animals to
get high. I have to say, um and not. I
(28:33):
don't know I've brought this up before, but if anyone's
ever watched a British news satire show called Brass Eye,
they had this great that that was it's like a
fake new um you know, sort of sort of sleazy
journalistic like news show in Britain that was all about
the breaking headlines and the really important stories, you know,
really uh you know, scandalous stuff. But they had this
(28:54):
one story that was that was presenting this idea that
somewhere in Asia, um in in like Eastern Asia, people
are getting high by there's a loophole in the in
the law that well, the first there's two. There's one
that like where it's okay to deal drugs of a
monkey does it for you, so that's a monkey to
actually transport the drugs. And then the other is that
(29:14):
you can you can it's legal to say smoke marijuana.
You have a dog is smoking it, and then you
have like hooked up like a blood transfusion system between
you and the dog, and they have this like super
like just crazy footage of like some guy using this
apparatus and the dog has like this muzzle with a
with a joint coming out of it. It's a that's nice. Yeah,
(29:35):
it's it's really it's a it's a really creepy show.
Not for the time, really creepy show. But but yes,
and in real life, obviously people get high off of
animals or via animals. I know it's it's I mean,
you may not know about this, but you out there
in the general public, but it happens quite a bit
chicly in Australia where they've got the cane toad, people
(29:57):
actually lick the cane toad. Uh. The reason is that
the venom that the cane shoots at its enemies has
hallucinogenic effects when it's licked or smoked. So uh, and
it's actually not even unique to Australia. There's another toad
species in the United States called Buffo varius, also known
(30:20):
as the Colorado River toad, and on the street the
Signoran desert toad, and that causes the same effect. And
the really interesting thing about this is that the active
chemical in it um and that in the venom venom
is called buff A tennin and uh it's related to
d M t H. Yeah. Now we can again we
can't stress um stress it enough that do not lick
(30:42):
or smoke random reples and amphibians. Yeah, I mean, not
only will you ostracize yourself among your friends and family. Um,
and look silly. It's just not a good idea. And
think of the toady, he's not going to really get
a lot out of it either. It's gonna be very
stressful for him, potentially lethal for you. So yeah, yeah,
so you know, on that note, I don't think I'll
(31:03):
go in to the specifics of how you can actually
extract it, but people do it man like, like they'll actually,
like instead of licking at they'll like extract the substance.
And well, there's a there's a way instead of say,
trying to attack the toads so that it freaks out
and squirts it at you, there's a way to actually,
um manipulate a gland. Now I've told everybody, Well, there's
(31:28):
another example that comes to mind. Um. And this is
something that I originally read about in Burrows Naked Lunch,
and I at the time, I just thought it was
totally made up, because there's a lot of crazy stuff
and Naked Lunch that you know, do not attribute to
being part of reality. Talking cockroaches, oh yeah, talking cockroaches,
or any number of things that that shouldn't be mentioned here.
But there's a scene where they're talking about smoking a
(31:50):
black centipede and and using it for recreational purposes. So
I just assumed that was crazy. It sounds crazy, so
I just thought it was completely fictional. It turns out, um,
in the in parts of the world, you can actually
obtain uh said centipede and uh and smoke it um
if you so desire. And I I met a guy
(32:11):
once who had had been out in like I think Australia,
and he had a friend who was able to obtain
this animal and uh and they had they had tried
this and he had had subsequently a moved to the
United States and tried to to obtain the animal again
for this purpose and through the mail. Yeah, but he
(32:31):
keeps getting seized by customs because they think it's you know,
it's an invasive species. And that's supposed to obviously send
invasive species through the mail, uh, you know, to to
other countries in parts of the world. But he can't
actually you know, explain to customs. Hey, I don't want
to introduce it to the wild. I want to you know,
smoke it. No, I don't think that would go over well. Yeah,
(32:53):
so but again, don't smoke random creatures that you find
crawling around your living around and don't please don't have
a mailed you. We should probably talk about the wallabies.
This is another really cool case and this is a
good one to to close out on. Um if you,
if you, And this is another one in Australia, partially
partially you know, we keep coming around Australia because I
(33:14):
mean Australia Tians have some very uh, interesting toxic properties
in their in their animals. But this is this one
relates to plants um. Australia actually supplies and estimated of
the world's legal opium crop. Right, Yes, this is what's
she used to create the like morphine um and stuff
that stuff of that nature. So because you know all
(33:36):
the other most of the other places in the world
they're growing it illegally, this is the one place where
you're growing they're growing illegally for legitimate purposes. So uh.
You also but you have wallabies in the area and uh,
and the wallabies are are rather enamored by all of
this uh free opium that that apparently is not all
that well defended. That's the thing that got made because
(33:57):
the the wallabies will break in and just munch down
on opium just untill they're in a stupor, and then
they just hop around in circles, uh, creating like little
crop circles until they just completely fall over and crash.
Crop circles explained again. Yes, yeah, it's like you thought
it was aliens. Now there's a much sayer reason. It's
(34:18):
wallabies on opium. It's these little marsupials. Yeah, yeah, that's
so cute. Can you can see them hopping around completely
high in circles. I mean it's not cute. I mean
it's it's it's I mean it's it's it's hard to
get to tour up over you because it's it's hilarious.
But but it's also a case where they would not
this would not be a natural occurrence because this is
(34:40):
like a crop of opium. This is a man made
situation where suddenly there's there's this chance for all these
wallabies to come in and just eat themselves silly. Yeah,
and it's a real problem too. And I do I
mean you do have to wonder do they get addicted? Yeah,
I mean are they just sitting there having the experience
and then a week later inning to break in again? Yeah?
(35:02):
And again It's like I just can't get past, Like
what's the security like at this place? If the wallabies
are breaking through? Are the wallabies just getting super like
advanced and they are they like like abducting like some
of the farmers that worked there, and like disguising themselves,
like doing the sort of a Scooby Doo thing where
one stands on the other one shoulders right right, there's
one wallaby like dressing provocatively in front of the guards,
(35:24):
a little dance. See, I can see them because they
like wallabies and kangaroos. They all have that creepy kind
of human body. Like anytime I go to the zoo
and see them, they always you know, they always look
like weird furry old men splayed in the dust, you know,
and the box. Have you seen boxing the wallabies? I
(35:45):
mean it's yeah, yeah, I mean it's like a no, no,
Well sometimes they do it just as play. But I
believe that there have been um sort of like cock fights,
like I think maybe like you go out for it
like regularly around town. Oh no, actually there is. Um
there's a place in Georgia that has a bunch of
(36:05):
wallabies and kangaroos. Then they box. They've felt like acres
well that they don't not for our pleasure, but they
might do it. They box each other. Not here, Yeah, okay,
because I'm thinking like the old like the old timing
footage you'll see of like a man being brought in
the box of kangaroo. Yeah. See, that's that's that's what
I was thinking about. Anyway, Uh, can you imagine them
(36:25):
on the opium? Yeah, well I guess they'd be slower.
Maybe you could take them. I don't know, I wouldn't
minceuf it. Man. Well cool, well there, uh, there are
some potentially disturbing examples of animals using naturally occurring and
sometimes artificially occurring drugs in their environment to u for
such purposes as fighting um infestations of parasites, for just
(36:51):
you know, eating to survive, and then also recreational use
in some cases. So yeah, I mean, of course we
say that, but we think that's the case. I mean
we could say that with cats at least. Well yeah, yeah,
with cats. Like the the example that I keep coming
back to is when I bought some some growing cat
nep to try and feed my cat, and then she
(37:11):
didn't want it. So I planted in the front yard
and it was there for like a week and nothing
touched it. But then one day I went out and
something had just eaten it down to the dirt, like
just eating the roots of it, and like this, I
think that's a clear case of you know, because cat
cats don't really go around eating entire plants like just
down to the roots system unless there, unless it's this,
unless it's they're getting a real recreational thrill out of it. No, exactly,
(37:36):
So I guess you were their supplier. Yeah, I guess
I was. Uh. If speaking though of different um drugs
and uh and substances of this nature, we have a
number of really cool articles about them on the website
we do. Yeah. I mean so if you if any
particular substance comes to mind and you're curious about it,
throw it into the search bar there on the homepage
(37:57):
and uh, and you'll generally get a nice, fat article
about it. Yeah. In particular, Christen Conger's article, are They're
really hallucinogenic Frougs? Which talked to him more detail about
keen food. Well, hey, I've got a little bit of
listener mail here. And this is another cool one. Uh.
That is in a response to our recent podcast about
(38:19):
music in the human brain. And this comes from Eric,
and Eric says, when I was a kid, way back
in the early eighties, a friend of mine had a
horrible stutter, especially when he tried to talk to a girl.
He gets flustered, and this would only make it worse.
He liked to sing, and when he sung, he didn't stutter.
We thought it was because he was singing a song
he already knew uh you know, he already knew what
(38:41):
he needed to say. But he tried singing a normal conversation. Um,
not all the time, just when he spoke to close
friends and family. The odd thing was when he sung
a response to his question or comment. He still didn't stutter,
despite the fact that he had to think about what
he was going to say when he sung it. He
only sung the family and friends he was our do
get being teased enough fairly quickly he quit stuttering. Now
(39:04):
you'd never know he was ever a stutter. So, um,
that was really interesting because it's an example. I mean,
you actually are the things we discussed in that podcast.
You see examples of of of scientists using using song,
using music to help people regain their speech, right, people
who have had strokes, people of Parkinson's. Yeah, and I
(39:26):
guess it opens up the neural resources. So it would
stand to reason then if you were a stutterer, that
the same thing could happen, right, you would have greater
access to your thoughts and be able to describe them
while singing. I won't do that. Yeah, well, I know
you really want to do the podcast where we only sing,
but really too, Rather please please please um. Another interesting
(39:52):
this also brings to mind neanderthals Um. There's a lot
of discussion about some of the the vocal um um
gear that Neanderthal seemed to have, and some some have
argued that since we don't really see any firm signs
have been having language in in the fossil record, that
they possible that they didn't have language, but that they
(40:12):
used the their vocal abilities for music like just in
communicated through pure music, which which is great. I just
did they have vocal sucks? I mean, did they have
some sort of indication? Yeah, that's yeah, that's the theory,
Like they biologically had the capability for it. So the
theory is that they are. One of the theory is
that they basically use music. They use song like just
(40:35):
you know, I guess it would be kind of like
scat or something, you know, where it would just be
like just non lyrical music to to relay a thought
in the same way that sad music and really a
sad thought. It would just be like this constant aria
going on. If I'm using the correct musical term there. Yeah, yeah,
that's interesting. So yeah, so I think on that it's
(40:55):
it's really kind of a beautiful image of the neanderthal
totally changed the way I think about what they might
have been. I know, right, are yes? Who knew? So? Hey?
If you have any interesting stories about your own animals
uh and their drug habit, or any interesting accounts that
you've come across of the of animals junkies in the wild, uh,
(41:17):
do let us know about it. You can find us
on Twitter and Facebook as below the Mind. We regularly
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about what we're podcasting about and what's coming up and
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click the like button if you do, in fact like us. Indeed,
and if you have any other thought, she can always
(41:39):
deliver with them via email at blow the Mind at
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(41:59):
today Night ins
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
This is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And Julie,
I'm I'm I'm kind of worried about some cats out there. Um,
not my cat, My cat is straight edge, but a
(00:26):
number of these animals are addicted to a certain substance. Yeah,
I know, it's a big problem. I'm gonna say that.
You know, I'm just gonna reveal right now that my cat,
Owen is a victim of it. Yeah. He might even
be at home glassy eyed right now. Yeah. Sometimes I'm
known on the street is the nip or or CN
but more commonly known to humans as catnip. That's right,
(00:50):
it's a big problem. Yeah, and uh, I think most
people have observed this, uh uh this uh, this potentially
problematic behavior in them as if not you're in your
own cat, uh, in your friends cats or just cats
on the street. Uh, they'll they'll generally, you'll you'll you'll
either supply it to them or they'll obtain it in
the form of an actual living plant growing in some
(01:13):
some dirt, or it's a powder or it's been uh
you know, somehow meshed into a toy or I've actually
seen it, uh, somehow processed into like a solid ball,
like like a like a like a jawbreaker, and then
they just go nuts for it. And there's just there's drooling,
there's there's rolling around on the floor, right, or sometimes
(01:33):
the cute little stuffed bunny that it's in is torn apart.
It's just it can get pretty ugly. It's which is
kind of cruel. Like imagine if you uh, I mean,
imagine if if people were administering you know, dangerous drugs
or or very addictive drugs to humans in a similar capacity.
Like here you go, here's your heroine, but it's in
a baby doll. You're gonna have to tear the baby
(01:54):
apart to get to it. You know, that would be
kind of weird. Wow. But but it's not not a
we're kidding of it. But it's it's not a dangerous substance.
I mean unless the cat I guess, tries to drive
a vehicle afterwards or something, right, Right, and in that
case you just take the keys away from Owen like
I do. But right, it's naturally occurring. Yeah, I can't
blame them for stumbling upon it and saying, wow, this
(02:17):
this ment like herb is really delicious. Yeah. And the
primary um agent at work here is actually a similar
to turpentine, and it's called neptal lactone rolls off a tone, yeah, yeah,
also known as the NEP on the street, Yeah, on
the street in cat circles, and uh, you know, it's it's,
(02:40):
like I say, it's hard to sort of to gauge
exactly what it's doing, but it seems to stimulate the
regions of the cat brain that control sex, appetite, and mood, right, right,
And in fact, there's a there's supposed to be special
wiring for cat pheromones in their olfactory apparatus. Is that right? Yeah?
And apparently one third of domestic cats don't react to
cat and ip at all. So as my cat, which
(03:02):
again we keep I'm always impulse buying cat and up
because I'm like, oh, maybe she only wants it when
it's really fresh, so I'll get the planet and she
you know that she has no part of it. You've
tried everything to dose your cat pretty much, yeah, because
it's so amusing when it happens, and and ultimately, um
you know, cats are there for our amusement when they
live in our homes. I think I shared with you
earlier that my cat is twenty six pounds. He's a
(03:23):
main con and actually frightened when he gets dosed, because
you know, you just don't want that type of large
cat pouncing on you. Do they pound that? Does he
pounce when he gets Yeah, I mean he does the
whole like rolls around, drules, glassy odd and then the
paranoid like jumping from from one piece of furniture to
(03:45):
the other until you That's when I get a little
bit nervous and we all sequest ourselves into a small
room until he's done. Now, I've found it interesting that
cats say in Japan um and the Japanese people love
their cats, as most of the videos on YouTube can
attest to um uh well, I mean most of the
(04:05):
I think half the videos on YouTuber cats doing something
weird anyway. But but they have another plan of it
there that's similar called the u matta tabby plant, which
contains um compounds that are similar to something called uh well,
similar to the same nepatela taka tone that I mentioned earlier,
(04:26):
the nep uh and it causes, um, it depends on
where you look. I saw. I saw one account that
was saying that it causes different behavior, making them align
their backs with their paws in the air. But I
looked on YouTube. Yeah, and I looked. But I looked
on YouTube and it was like, it looks like exactly
the same behavior. It's cats rolling around, you know, trying
to get inside the toy that contains this particular substance
(04:48):
and uh or in just rolling around in it and
just you know, totally going weird weird. Yeah, and I
think it's sort of like a psycho sexual response to Yeah.
I mean, we talked about the pheromones, so it's a
little bit creepy when I think about it that way. Now,
the human usage of of these substances pretty interesting as well,
(05:08):
because apparently um uh, the the mattatabi plant has also
been used in traditional Chinese folk medicine for pain control
and as a tonic for ruth and through ruthanis um okay. Well,
and also before Chinese tea became widely available, cat nip
tea was pretty popular, oh like before like green tea
and stuff, because yeah, yeah, before the trade routes were
(05:30):
established and so and so for people would pour themselves
in nice little cat nip tea. Wow. So like I mean,
right now, I'm actually having a mug of green tea,
so you know, there, but for fortune, I would be
sitting here having a cup of cat nip tea just
looking over my shoulder to make sure that the hordes
were not rushing in from the streets to to consume it.
(05:52):
For me, that's exactly right. And you would probably be
wearing like a tricorn hat. But I think the thing
about the cats getting high, it's that it's just it's
not that unusual in nature. We see examples of this
all over the place in much more extreme fashions. Yeah. Yeah,
there are a lot of junkies in the animal kingdom.
(06:14):
I mean, they're not all junkies. Sometimes they're merely um well,
sometimes they're there's it's definitely a case of self medication
injurs too, right, yeah, and then they're bingjurs and then
they're there are cases where the jury is kind of
out exactly what's going on. But but we're going to
talk about some of the more outlandish and interesting cases
(06:35):
of animal drug use in this podcast. So so let's uh,
let's move on to another animal. Well, let's talk about
the drunkards, the dipsomaniacs, specifically Laura Keats. Yes, the little
tiny parrots. And apparently in Australia this is this is
a problem, and of late it's been exacerbated and they're
(06:57):
not quite sure why, but there have been reports of
hundreds of drunk parrots just falling from the sky. Yeah. Yeah,
and that people were handing in birds that had been
found stumbling around the road, eyes gunky and half closed
and unable to fly, and they think that was a
mystery food that they ingested or some sort of virus.
(07:18):
But the birds were treated with meals of porridge and
fresh fruit, and supposedly that left them feeling drowsy and
it caused them to lie down in a in a
sort of hangover state or what those people interpreted to
be a hangover state. But that's actually not too uncommon,
and it's possible that they get ahold of some fruit
that was fermented and they just ate a lot of
(07:40):
it and got very drunk. Yeah. The fermentation process that
we exploit in the production of various alcoholic substances is
of course a natural phenomenon that occurs with with any
number of fruits out there. I mean, the same thing
that turns that can can turn a great into wine
will happen on the vine with with or were on
(08:00):
the branch with a number of different substances. Right, So
it's not exactly like the Lord of keats, We're we're
getting into grain, alcohol or anything, right, right. They just
they just happened to eat this fruit. Um. But obviously
they liked it enough to keep eating it and become
so drunk that they were falling by the sky and
just hanging out on the corners. Yeah. But but like
with this animal with the with the number, it kind
(08:22):
of you're forced to ask the question. It's like, are
they eating the fruit because it's fermented or are they
they're just eating fruit because in addition to getting them wasted,
it's you know, that's where the you know, the meal is,
that's where the stored energy is to continue life right,
right and naturally. And I'm thinking about the moose um
because it's the same situation. The moose that when uh,
(08:46):
particularly in Sweden during the fall, they tend to come
out in the suburbs from the forest and start eating
all of the fruit that's dropped on the ground there,
and of course at that point that fruit has begun
to ferment. And the problem though is that you have
you know, this very large moose getting drunk off of
the fruit there, and then they just start doing all
(09:08):
sorts of crazy things since you know, they're running into
the middle of the street, causing accidents. Um there have
been accounts of them belly flopping into empty swimming pools, yeah,
and attacking people. So it's actually a real problem there.
And if you look at the papers from that time
period during the fall and so we can eat here,
there's it's always like drunk moose attack. You know, drunk
(09:29):
moose came through the window of our house while we
were watching TV. But again that's the same thing. Are
they are they leaving the forest to seek out fruit
because they all of that is in their particular areas
that they've eaten, and so that they know in these
areas people by humans that they're not necessarily going to
eat all the fruit, and so they suspect that there's
(09:51):
fruit out there, or they've learned that over time. It's
also worth noting that but I believe that I mean
a moose, it tends to be a more aggressive animal. Yeah,
I mean as aggressive as a you know, like a
prey species can be. But but like when I was
a kid up in Newfoundland, Canada, there are always accounts
of you know, talking about like the moose charging a
(10:11):
vehicle or you know, or moose like just trampling on
top of a vehicle and or or doing things like
you know, suddenly like plowing through a wall. Right, So
they don't necessarily need to be drunk in order to
exhibit that behavior. But what they have noticed is late
fall here they come in mass out in the neighborhood's
just causing all sorts of craziness. Yeah, and if they're
(10:33):
hanging out at Tico Bray's house, then all the more
potentially get right, he kept his moose pretty regularly drunk,
is that right? Yeah? Yeah yeah, But then this also
leads to a myth out there, and that's that has
to do with elephants. Okay, we should probably put this
myth to rest with with the other myth that elephants
(10:55):
bury they're dead, right right, Yeah, the whole elephant burial
ground graveyard type of thing where you know, where you
just find this place with all these these elephant bones. Um. Yeah,
that's it's not true. Yeah, it's a great idea, I
mean it sounds fabulous, but yeah, I mean it's very
touching and you know, a part of me wishes it
were true. But it's not same thing with drunk elephants. Uh,
(11:16):
they're regularly reported going on booze fueled rampages in India,
but zoologists have calculated that the amount that animals would
have to drink to get drunk um would clear them
of being under the influence um, and that they're just
being a little bit aggressive about their territories and defending
them and so. But but you know, look at yourself
(11:37):
as a someone in the village and seeing like a
herd of forty elephants, bowl elephants no less coming at you,
and you're brewing up some beer, and you know they
they're they're coming towards you. You You might think, oh, they're
after the beer. I mean you know, yeah, sort of
a logical conclusion. Yeah, if you you have some sort
of still going, I guess everything that comes trampling in unannounced,
(11:59):
you know, seasonably interpreted like that. But yeah, it comes
down to like if you've ever been like, oh, like
so and so is a big guy. It takes you know,
he can drink a lot of beer. Well, the elephant
is enormous, so you know, you just extrapolate those uh
those alcohol estimations and uh, you know, it quickly becomes
kind of a pretty pretty big feat to get an
(12:20):
elephant drunk, right right, And I mean even though they
might have uh actually drank from grain alcohol stills that
are out there. Um again, yeah, it's it's gonna take
much more than once available to get them drunk. But
there's also the marula tree in Africa that has again
fruit which becomes fermented that they've noticed elephants eating from,
(12:43):
and the same thing. They would just have to clear
an entire forest denude it of marula trees in order
to get drunk. So sorry, no rampaging elephants here. Well.
Another one that the jury is uh still out on
as far as far as I can tell, is that
jaguars like to chew, bark and and trip out in
(13:06):
the jungles. Yeah, the Amazon, and it's um there's a
tropical vine down there called the Banistera stereopsis cappy, I'll
go with that, yeah, which and it contains these opponent
potent hallucinogens. Uh and and certainly of a if a
human consumes them, they will hallucinate and have this uh
(13:28):
some sort of the psychedelic experience experience that you know,
ties into neurotransmitters that are tied to serotonin production and
different receptors in the brain and and there there there's
always this sort of myth that they are not really
a myth, but their their tales of jaguars consuming the bark.
And one possibility is that they is that the some
(13:53):
of the the alkaloids in the in the in the
vine also sort of clear the animal of parasitic worms. Yeah,
so so it's possible that they are tripping out in
the jungles, but they are, but they may be doing
it just to clear themselves of parasites. So it's like
they're they're trying to get rid of the you know,
(14:14):
human equivalent of say, lice. Yeah, and uh, but they're
just the nice side effect is that they're tripping out there. Yeah,
and it kind of um, it's kind of interesting to
sort of look at it in terms of like people
going to the dentist and getting doped up for dental procedure.
It's kind of like if you were to view that
and not really focused on the dental procedure, and you're like,
these people were going to the strange man who who
(14:36):
dopes them up and then make somebody else drive them home?
It's like, what are they? What are they doing? What
kind of you know, it's but it's tied to a procedure.
So it's the the the tripping that the jaguars do
is seems to possible, seems like it possibly is just
you know, a high product of them, you know, trying
to regulate their parasitic infection. Yeah. I've also read that
it heightens their sense of smell too, which would be helpful. Yeah,
(15:00):
so you know when baking and such. So those those
are the the hootch drinkers of the animal kingdom. What
about our trippers? Oh wait, there's one more um or
that this is this is an example of of of
drinkers that they're they're not no, no, no no, this is
one where they're not really consuming something that occurs naturally.
(15:21):
Um And it's a very you know, unnatural situation. But
you have velvet monkeys on the island of St. Kitts
in the Caribbean and they've been there for about three years,
but because they were brought there by slave traders, so
they're just running all over the place and uh, and
there are resorts there, so there you know, as is
the case when you have you know, Westerners coming into
resorts their alcoholic beverages everywhere generally half you know, consumed,
(15:43):
and the monkeys will just swoop in and uh and
you'll see just monkeys just getting completely wasted. Um, well,
what are or what are some of the other nice
euphanisms for for drunk? Oh, blottot blitzed soust like tight
tight too, that's such a thing. Yeah, within a huming
(16:06):
way that talked about getting tight on absent than doing
knife tricks. I don't know, but I remember first seeing
it in a poem called The Wild Party by Joseph
Moncure March, which is great and it's all about actually
prohibition in grain alcohol and a big party. So well, um,
on the island of St. Gets, you definitely have velvet
(16:26):
monkeys getting tight off of abandoned drinks. But the really
interesting part is that a scientists have really sort of
you know, never really looked at the situation and and
uh and examined like whitch monkeys are drinking, which because
some of the monkeys are not drinking, and then how
much alcohol are the monkeys consuming. And they've found that
the percentage of peetotal or monkeys matches the non drinkers
(16:47):
in our human population, uh, in in similar proportions. Uh
Like in human habits, most most most of people drink
in moderation and then twelve or steady drinkers five percent
just drink everything in sight and uh and the percentages
line up, uh, you know, pretty evenly between us and
(17:07):
the velvet monkeys. So this is just an interesting observation side. Yeah, Um, well,
I wanted to talk about horses too and loco weed. Yeah,
I know, this is something I was not familiar with it.
I'm surprised it hasn't shown up in like a Western
or something I would have seen or yeah. Yeah, And
I think that the term loco weed came actually into
(17:28):
popular use in the late eighteen hundreds, so it's been
around for a long time. And it's a it's a
native plant that grows in the western part of the
United States. Um. But the problem with it is that
horses will eat it early spring late fall when there's
not a other other green plants around, and once they
get a taste of it, they pretty much become addicted
(17:50):
to it. And if they eat it for I don't know,
beyond two weeks and that's their primary part of their diet. Uh,
they can have like some severe neurological damn. Yeah. Some
of the symptoms of local weed poisoning include, you know,
excessive salvation, aimless wandering, lack of coordination, altered gates, chronic
weight loss, vision problems, lethargy um that you and you
(18:14):
also see it like interfering with reproductive uh you know,
properties that you know, have stallions that become infertile, mayors
that don't you know, they don't bring their young to
full terms yep, and walking in circles. Yeah, and that's
the that's again one of the reasons why it's so dangerous,
because they get to the point where they just quit
(18:36):
drinking and eating anything else, mainly because they don't know
how to get to those sources anymore, but also because
they're completely addicted to the loco weed. That's right, I
just said the loco weed, which I think is used
in popular drug vernacular. Yeah. And actually this is interesting
too that the local part of it obviously meaning crazy,
(18:57):
but there there's a secondary meaning of it in Spanish
which relates to wandering, which, if you ask me, that's
kind of what I think. It's probably original tent was
knowing that the loco weed wasn't a big train back
in early nineteenth century. The other thing is that the
horses can outlive this this periodic episode here of of druggery. Um.
(19:24):
And what you do is you keep the horse as
quiet as possible and you administer sedatives along with laxatives
to clean out the system. So immediately I started thinking
about trainspotting. Yeah, now um it. On the on the
sedative of animals consuming something that's harmful for them, it
is is worth noting that you see a lot of
examples in in the wild of of animals that consume
(19:47):
particularly plants that contains some property that is either uh
you know, that is harmful when they try and digest it.
That you also see them like immediately follow up that
meal with the I like, they'll eat some clay and
uh you know, or some sort of river bed kind
of dirt properties to help digestion. So is it kind
(20:08):
of neutralized exactly neutralized the effect. So they'll be. It
basically enables them to eat a meal that would otherwise,
you know, be potentially harmful to them, right. Uh, and
and it would be especially you know, helpful if you're
in a case where you're an animal where you know,
there's a certain time of year revolves around and the
primary food source has some sort of toxic property, so
(20:28):
there nothing else is available, right, but here's this poisonous,
delicious plant, right, and so they'll, yeah, they'll consume it
to help with the digestions. So and you you do.
You see that in numerous species. Okay, so there is
a reason for some of this, right with the horses
and the local weed that just as sort of an accident,
I think of them coming upon this pretty invasive. Sometimes
(20:52):
you eat a lot of different food, and sometimes the
food you eat is is harmful. So yeah, that's right,
sometimes the food eats you. One of my favorite examples
that I've seen actual footage of is lemurs. Oh yes,
this is this is one of the best. Really, um,
possibly because it also includes lemurs, which are just uh
funny to look at anyway. Well, yeah, they've got those
(21:13):
great eyes that are you know, it's like all eyes
all the time, and so, I mean they're a little
intense in the first place. And you know, being residents
of Madagascar there another one of those species is just
great and that it's kind of like evolution kind of
goes off in a bubble and sort of does its
own thing for a bit, right, right, And yeah, Madagascar
they always creates great little creatures like the hiss and cockroach, right,
(21:37):
which was sort of my nightmare remember learning about that. Um.
But anyway, lemurs and caption monkeys which are in South America,
they love millipedes, and particularly after a nice good rain, um,
they'll go out and seek some millipedes and they'll bite
their next it's just you know, kind of cruel, but
(21:59):
they won't necessarily kill them when they do that. But
when it does, the the millipede goes into crisis mode
and squirts out its poison and they'll they'll kind of
drool over it and they'll roll it around in their hands. Yeah,
and they rub it all over their bodies, which I
think is great. I mean there they're like clearly loving
their millipedes. Um. But they do this, we think because
(22:21):
right after the rains there are a lot of parasitic
insects that are around, and this is an actual repellent
to them, Yeah, like a pesticide. Yeah, it's I mean,
it's like anytime you have to put that drop on
the back of your pet's neck. You know, in the wild,
they're you know, they're not gonna apply that. The animals
aren't gonna apply that kind of thing themselves. But here's
this handy millipede with this toxic property, and you know,
(22:43):
at some point that developed the skill of taking that
and using it for medicinal purposes, right right. And of
course the thing that happens is that they get completely high,
like they're off their rockers. And the clips that I've
seen online, I think one of them as animal plant
is pretty funny. Uh. Actually the camera kind of zooms
(23:04):
in and out and so it's got like the psychedelic
look to it. Lemurs just you know, its head is
going from side to side. I mean, it looks like
it's the nineteen sixties. Really. Yeah, because they end up,
so they end up like they end up having to
taste it, because they end up because they lick their fingers.
It's yeah, they start stuffing it in their mouth. Yeah,
(23:24):
And I've I've also seen some arguments. There's a there's
a botanist at the Missouri bar Botanical Gardens in Madagascar
by the name of Christopher Brinckinshaw, and he as he
also proposes that some of the strange expressions you see
on their faces could just because be due to the
horrible taste of the millipede. Yeah. Uh. And he also
(23:47):
throws out there that he's observed a pet lemur uh
exhibit the same behavior with cigarettes. So the lemur steals
a cigarette, drools over it, rubs it all over it's
fur and uh and ahibitally thinks this may also be
a case of where the lemurs trying to protect itself
from parasites, but it recognizes something in the in the
(24:08):
cigarette as being valuable in that regard, like some sort
of chemical compound. Yeah, huh. I wonder on on the
addictive side, if it has the same effect, Like, I mean,
I know that some I've heard of monkeys in captivity
smoking before. Yeah, I wonder. Yeah, I would imagine there
would be an addictive property to rubbing yourself down with
the nicotine. Yeah, I mean, I mean, what is the
(24:30):
nickotine patch? Right? But yeah, why don't they make nicotine loution.
We're thinking about it. No, No, I mean I'm picturing it,
like you know, just somebody who's really into smoke and
just coming home in the afternoon, just like getting a
big bucket, like a big tub of it out like
you know, and uh, lighting a few Yankee candles, turning
(24:50):
on the the onion music, and just slathering down their lavender.
Mental solution. Yeah, well, there's an idea out there. This
presentation is brought to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow. Now,
(25:11):
did you run across any of the reindeer stories in
your research? This is of course, by the time this
comes out, Christmas will be defeated once more. Uh for
another year. But yeah, but right now Christmas is just
a few days away. So it's interesting to discuss um
lapland reindeer and there relationship with hallucinogenic mushrooms. And of
(25:37):
course a number of mushrooms out there in the world
are capable of producing hallucinogenic or psychedelic experiences in the user.
It just is there plenty of that will just kill
you completely dead or make you horribly horribly ill. So
we can't stress enough. Don't eat random mushrooms. Uh, that
you find in the wild. The particular mushroom that these
reindeer running into is um is a flaw i a
(26:00):
Garic mushroom called the aman Amanita muscaria, and this is
a red mushroom with white spots on it. So it's
very you know, super Mario Brothers fairy tale looking type
type mushroom. And uh, there there's this, there's there are
these reports that well there's sort of two versions of
this report. One is that you have like you know,
(26:23):
like a lot of these psychedelic substances that people have
consumed them religiously. Um were four religious practices over the
over the you know, throughout history, and so you have
shaman traditional shaman in the area that would supposedly consume
the mushrooms and then they would urinate and h then
the the reindeer would eat the urine, would lap up
(26:43):
the urine out of the E V L snow or whatever,
and then go just running off, you know, completely spaced out.
And then there's the reverse story. Well that's the thing
that they think that that's where some of the idea
of flying reindeer come from. But then the other then
there's like another side of it, which which is that
they would feed the mushrooms to the reindeer or observe
the reindeer eating the mushrooms, and the reindeer would have
(27:05):
their old experience, and then they would collect the reindeer. You, yeah,
because because a lot of them, because they think that
the the the urine would be like a concentrated version
of the hallucinogens from the mushroom. The circle of life,
isn't it beautiful? Well, I mean it's I guess it's
no weirder than the coffee that goes through the Yeah.
(27:25):
The does it go through a goat? Or is it
go through a cat like creature? Oh? I don't know,
I've heard goats, but it could be both. Yea, Like
this is like this is like this crazy, supposedly great coffee,
right that goes to the digestive system. Yeah, if I'm
I believe it is some sort of cat of some kind,
But it doesn't really not like a traditional cat. Okay,
But but the bean actually goes through and then that
you pick the bean out of the feces, right. Yeah,
(27:48):
It's not an area I've really looked into a lot
because I'm not really interested and someone's a little sensitive
about the coffee. Well, I just I just require that
my coffee not passed through another animals digestion think absolutely delicious,
even even if it's absolutely delicious, Okay, you don't want
to know, right, but but so anyway, that's that's uh,
that's just a great image though if the reindeer, urine
(28:10):
and shaman collecting it for their religious rights. Uh so
take that with you into next Christmas, because as you're
listening to it, it's probably just over a year away.
That's right now, It's less than here. So I mean,
you know, we talked about the stirc call of life.
There are are other accounts of people using animals to
get high. I have to say, um and not. I
(28:33):
don't know I've brought this up before, but if anyone's
ever watched a British news satire show called Brass Eye,
they had this great that that was it's like a
fake new um you know, sort of sort of sleazy
journalistic like news show in Britain that was all about
the breaking headlines and the really important stories, you know,
really uh you know, scandalous stuff. But they had this
(28:54):
one story that was that was presenting this idea that
somewhere in Asia, um in in like Eastern Asia, people
are getting high by there's a loophole in the in
the law that well, the first there's two. There's one
that like where it's okay to deal drugs of a
monkey does it for you, so that's a monkey to
actually transport the drugs. And then the other is that
(29:14):
you can you can it's legal to say smoke marijuana.
You have a dog is smoking it, and then you
have like hooked up like a blood transfusion system between
you and the dog, and they have this like super
like just crazy footage of like some guy using this
apparatus and the dog has like this muzzle with a
with a joint coming out of it. It's a that's nice. Yeah,
(29:35):
it's it's really it's a it's a really creepy show.
Not for the time, really creepy show. But but yes,
and in real life, obviously people get high off of
animals or via animals. I know it's it's I mean,
you may not know about this, but you out there
in the general public, but it happens quite a bit
chicly in Australia where they've got the cane toad, people
(29:57):
actually lick the cane toad. Uh. The reason is that
the venom that the cane shoots at its enemies has
hallucinogenic effects when it's licked or smoked. So uh, and
it's actually not even unique to Australia. There's another toad
species in the United States called Buffo varius, also known
(30:20):
as the Colorado River toad, and on the street the
Signoran desert toad, and that causes the same effect. And
the really interesting thing about this is that the active
chemical in it um and that in the venom venom
is called buff A tennin and uh it's related to
d M t H. Yeah. Now we can again we
can't stress um stress it enough that do not lick
(30:42):
or smoke random reples and amphibians. Yeah, I mean, not
only will you ostracize yourself among your friends and family. Um,
and look silly. It's just not a good idea. And
think of the toady, he's not going to really get
a lot out of it either. It's gonna be very
stressful for him, potentially lethal for you. So yeah, yeah,
so you know, on that note, I don't think I'll
(31:03):
go in to the specifics of how you can actually
extract it, but people do it man like, like they'll actually,
like instead of licking at they'll like extract the substance.
And well, there's a there's a way instead of say,
trying to attack the toads so that it freaks out
and squirts it at you, there's a way to actually,
um manipulate a gland. Now I've told everybody, Well, there's
(31:28):
another example that comes to mind. Um. And this is
something that I originally read about in Burrows Naked Lunch,
and I at the time, I just thought it was
totally made up, because there's a lot of crazy stuff
and Naked Lunch that you know, do not attribute to
being part of reality. Talking cockroaches, oh yeah, talking cockroaches,
or any number of things that that shouldn't be mentioned here.
But there's a scene where they're talking about smoking a
(31:50):
black centipede and and using it for recreational purposes. So
I just assumed that was crazy. It sounds crazy, so
I just thought it was completely fictional. It turns out, um,
in the in parts of the world, you can actually
obtain uh said centipede and uh and smoke it um
if you so desire. And I I met a guy
(32:11):
once who had had been out in like I think Australia,
and he had a friend who was able to obtain
this animal and uh and they had they had tried
this and he had had subsequently a moved to the
United States and tried to to obtain the animal again
for this purpose and through the mail. Yeah, but he
(32:31):
keeps getting seized by customs because they think it's you know,
it's an invasive species. And that's supposed to obviously send
invasive species through the mail, uh, you know, to to
other countries in parts of the world. But he can't
actually you know, explain to customs. Hey, I don't want
to introduce it to the wild. I want to you know,
smoke it. No, I don't think that would go over well. Yeah,
(32:53):
so but again, don't smoke random creatures that you find
crawling around your living around and don't please don't have
a mailed you. We should probably talk about the wallabies.
This is another really cool case and this is a
good one to to close out on. Um if you,
if you, And this is another one in Australia, partially
partially you know, we keep coming around Australia because I
(33:14):
mean Australia Tians have some very uh, interesting toxic properties
in their in their animals. But this is this one
relates to plants um. Australia actually supplies and estimated of
the world's legal opium crop. Right, Yes, this is what's
she used to create the like morphine um and stuff
that stuff of that nature. So because you know all
(33:36):
the other most of the other places in the world
they're growing it illegally, this is the one place where
you're growing they're growing illegally for legitimate purposes. So uh.
You also but you have wallabies in the area and uh,
and the wallabies are are rather enamored by all of
this uh free opium that that apparently is not all
that well defended. That's the thing that got made because
(33:57):
the the wallabies will break in and just munch down
on opium just untill they're in a stupor, and then
they just hop around in circles, uh, creating like little
crop circles until they just completely fall over and crash.
Crop circles explained again. Yes, yeah, it's like you thought
it was aliens. Now there's a much sayer reason. It's
(34:18):
wallabies on opium. It's these little marsupials. Yeah, yeah, that's
so cute. Can you can see them hopping around completely
high in circles. I mean it's not cute. I mean
it's it's it's I mean it's it's it's hard to
get to tour up over you because it's it's hilarious.
But but it's also a case where they would not
this would not be a natural occurrence because this is
(34:40):
like a crop of opium. This is a man made
situation where suddenly there's there's this chance for all these
wallabies to come in and just eat themselves silly. Yeah,
and it's a real problem too. And I do I
mean you do have to wonder do they get addicted? Yeah,
I mean are they just sitting there having the experience
and then a week later inning to break in again? Yeah?
(35:02):
And again It's like I just can't get past, Like
what's the security like at this place? If the wallabies
are breaking through? Are the wallabies just getting super like
advanced and they are they like like abducting like some
of the farmers that worked there, and like disguising themselves,
like doing the sort of a Scooby Doo thing where
one stands on the other one shoulders right right, there's
one wallaby like dressing provocatively in front of the guards,
(35:24):
a little dance. See, I can see them because they
like wallabies and kangaroos. They all have that creepy kind
of human body. Like anytime I go to the zoo
and see them, they always you know, they always look
like weird furry old men splayed in the dust, you know,
and the box. Have you seen boxing the wallabies? I
(35:45):
mean it's yeah, yeah, I mean it's like a no, no,
Well sometimes they do it just as play. But I
believe that there have been um sort of like cock fights,
like I think maybe like you go out for it
like regularly around town. Oh no, actually there is. Um
there's a place in Georgia that has a bunch of
(36:05):
wallabies and kangaroos. Then they box. They've felt like acres
well that they don't not for our pleasure, but they
might do it. They box each other. Not here, Yeah, okay,
because I'm thinking like the old like the old timing
footage you'll see of like a man being brought in
the box of kangaroo. Yeah. See, that's that's that's what
I was thinking about. Anyway, Uh, can you imagine them
(36:25):
on the opium? Yeah, well I guess they'd be slower.
Maybe you could take them. I don't know, I wouldn't
minceuf it. Man. Well cool, well there, uh, there are
some potentially disturbing examples of animals using naturally occurring and
sometimes artificially occurring drugs in their environment to u for
such purposes as fighting um infestations of parasites, for just
(36:51):
you know, eating to survive, and then also recreational use
in some cases. So yeah, I mean, of course we
say that, but we think that's the case. I mean
we could say that with cats at least. Well yeah, yeah,
with cats. Like the the example that I keep coming
back to is when I bought some some growing cat
nep to try and feed my cat, and then she
(37:11):
didn't want it. So I planted in the front yard
and it was there for like a week and nothing
touched it. But then one day I went out and
something had just eaten it down to the dirt, like
just eating the roots of it, and like this, I
think that's a clear case of you know, because cat
cats don't really go around eating entire plants like just
down to the roots system unless there, unless it's this,
unless it's they're getting a real recreational thrill out of it. No, exactly,
(37:36):
So I guess you were their supplier. Yeah, I guess
I was. Uh. If speaking though of different um drugs
and uh and substances of this nature, we have a
number of really cool articles about them on the website
we do. Yeah. I mean so if you if any
particular substance comes to mind and you're curious about it,
throw it into the search bar there on the homepage
(37:57):
and uh, and you'll generally get a nice, fat article
about it. Yeah. In particular, Christen Conger's article, are They're
really hallucinogenic Frougs? Which talked to him more detail about
keen food. Well, hey, I've got a little bit of
listener mail here. And this is another cool one. Uh.
That is in a response to our recent podcast about
(38:19):
music in the human brain. And this comes from Eric,
and Eric says, when I was a kid, way back
in the early eighties, a friend of mine had a
horrible stutter, especially when he tried to talk to a girl.
He gets flustered, and this would only make it worse.
He liked to sing, and when he sung, he didn't stutter.
We thought it was because he was singing a song
he already knew uh you know, he already knew what
(38:41):
he needed to say. But he tried singing a normal conversation. Um,
not all the time, just when he spoke to close
friends and family. The odd thing was when he sung
a response to his question or comment. He still didn't stutter,
despite the fact that he had to think about what
he was going to say when he sung it. He
only sung the family and friends he was our do
get being teased enough fairly quickly he quit stuttering. Now
(39:04):
you'd never know he was ever a stutter. So, um,
that was really interesting because it's an example. I mean,
you actually are the things we discussed in that podcast.
You see examples of of of scientists using using song,
using music to help people regain their speech, right, people
who have had strokes, people of Parkinson's. Yeah, and I
(39:26):
guess it opens up the neural resources. So it would
stand to reason then if you were a stutterer, that
the same thing could happen, right, you would have greater
access to your thoughts and be able to describe them
while singing. I won't do that. Yeah, well, I know
you really want to do the podcast where we only sing,
but really too, Rather please please please um. Another interesting
(39:52):
this also brings to mind neanderthals Um. There's a lot
of discussion about some of the the vocal um um
gear that Neanderthal seemed to have, and some some have
argued that since we don't really see any firm signs
have been having language in in the fossil record, that
they possible that they didn't have language, but that they
(40:12):
used the their vocal abilities for music like just in
communicated through pure music, which which is great. I just
did they have vocal sucks? I mean, did they have
some sort of indication? Yeah, that's yeah, that's the theory,
Like they biologically had the capability for it. So the
theory is that they are. One of the theory is
that they basically use music. They use song like just
(40:35):
you know, I guess it would be kind of like
scat or something, you know, where it would just be
like just non lyrical music to to relay a thought
in the same way that sad music and really a
sad thought. It would just be like this constant aria
going on. If I'm using the correct musical term there. Yeah, yeah,
that's interesting. So yeah, so I think on that it's
(40:55):
it's really kind of a beautiful image of the neanderthal
totally changed the way I think about what they might
have been. I know, right, are yes? Who knew? So? Hey?
If you have any interesting stories about your own animals
uh and their drug habit, or any interesting accounts that
you've come across of the of animals junkies in the wild, uh,
(41:17):
do let us know about it. You can find us
on Twitter and Facebook as below the Mind. We regularly
uptake those feeds with lots of cool um cool facts
about what we're podcasting about and what's coming up and
uh and hey, dropped by that Facebook page and uh
click the like button if you do, in fact like us. Indeed,
and if you have any other thought, she can always
(41:39):
deliver with them via email at blow the Mind at
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