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National Geographic just ruined my weekend

Elephants Drunk in the Wild? Scientists Put the Myth to Rest

Almost anyone who has read a travel brochure about Africa has heard of elephants getting drunk from the fruit of the marula tree.

The lore holds that elephants can get drunk by eating the fermented fruit rotting on the ground. Books have been written asserting the truth of the phenomenon, and eyewitness accounts of allegedly intoxicated pachyderms have even been made.

But a new study to be published in the March/April 2006 issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology tells a very different story.

Steve Morris, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England and a co-author of the study, says anecdotes of elephants found drunk in the wild go back more than a century.

“There are travelers’ tales from about 1839 reporting Zulu accounts that ‘elephants gently warm their brains with fermented fruits,’” Morris said.

But there is nothing in the biology of either the African elephant or the marula fruit to support the stories, he asserts.

“People just want to believe in drunken elephants,” Morris said.

YOUR DAMN RIGHT THEY DO! I don’t believe this horseshit. I just wanted to believe in drunken elephants. God! I don’t know what to think about anything anymore. First Ana Nicole, then this. I’ve had it. Goodbye cruel world.

Haha that’s more like it! Okay, since I found this graphic to go with my little story here I am now happy again. Yay! So they aren’t drunk on gogi fruit or whatever the hell it was, they are DRUNK WITH POWER! That is so much better.