You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Get a Hamster Drunk
“You just put a bottle of unsweetened Everclear on the cage and they love it.”
The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller.
Think hoarder.
Think hamster.
“You just put a bottle of unsweetened Everclear on the cage. In the wild, hamsters hoard ryegrass seeds and fruit in their burrows, and they eat this fermenting store as it becomes more and more alcoholic over the winter. In the lab, well, they’re pretty happy with Everclear. Given the choice between water and alcohol, they go for the booze.
