“Rum is gone“, Jack Sparrow’s catchphrase in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean shows that rum is a specialty of this sea. Fermented and distilled from molasses, the 17th-century rum conquered not only pirates but also monkeys in the Caribbean.
There is an island called Saint Kitts, famous for a population of wild green Vervet monkeys that are heavily addicted to alcohol. The reason is that these monkeys regularly steal the fermented sugarcane used to make rum.
They like the taste of that sugarcane, so they often consume it so much that they can’t even move their legs, vomit and fight and fight wildly. Some monkeys even stole cocktails from tourists coming to Saint Kitts to drink.
Vervet monkeys on the island of St. Kitts is often drunk
But monkeys really aren’t the best drinkers in the animal kingdom. If ancient books divide drinkers into profane people and wine fairies, the monkeys in the Caribbean are only worthy of profane drink.
The custom is that when people drink alcohol, they curse, be rude, fight and fight. And fairies are those who drink more and more awake. If so, only the rat is worthy of being a wine fairy.
In a series of experiments with hamsters since the 1950s, scientists were surprised by the species’ ability to consume alcohol. They can drink without getting drunk. And 80 degree rum still seems too light for them.
Hamsters can drink 95 degrees of alcohol instead of water
Gwen Lupfer, a psychologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has studied hamsters, said:You just put a bottle of Everclear unsweetened in the cage and they love it.”
If you are a connoisseur of wine, you probably already know how strong Everclear is. Produced in the USA with an American standard alcohol strength of 120 to 190, Everclear bottles of standard alcohol will weigh from 60 to 95 degrees.
The number is close to the critical distillation concentration of ethanol, beyond 97.2 degrees, you will not be able to separate the water from the alcohol anymore because now the evaporation rate of water and ethanol in the distillate has been saturated. equal equal.
When selling bottles of Everclear 190 (95 degrees) on the market, the American manufacturer Luxco also recommends that you dilute it lightly down to the size of vodka to drink. Everclear 190 is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, but as soon as you swallow it down your throat, you’ll feel a burning and burning sensation all over your body.
This type of alcohol is also often used to replace rubbing alcohol, especially for washing food because it is odorless and non-toxic.
Hamsters are of course illiterate to read instructions to dilute a glass of Everclear 190. When given, they will immediately swoop in and lick, each hamster can drink up to 18 grams of this alcohol per day. kg of body weight. It is the equivalent of an adult man drinking a quart and a half of Everclear 190.
Again, the number must be repeated, it is 1 and a half liters of alcohol but 95 degrees of alcohol.
In fact, scientists have known that hamsters like alcohol since the 1950s. At that time, a group of researchers in Texas was trying to train lab rats to drink alcohol.
They used a different breed of mouse than a hamster, and the only way to increase the alcohol intake of these mice was to genetically breed them through each generation to select a offspring from the family of mice with the highest alcohol intake.
The scientists also had to regularly train them, mixing ethanol with sweet food to lure the mice, and then gradually reducing the sugar content until the food was left with only alcohol.
With hamsters, it doesn’t have to be. You can go to the pet store, buy one, and they fall in love with alcohol at first sight, says Danielle Gulick, a scientist who studies addiction behavior at the University of Florida.
Hamsters will happily drink alcohol, as soon as you bring it out to them. Without needing to be bred, transgenic or exercised, the hamster itself is an alcoholic. Especially they can drink without ever getting drunk.
The more they drink, the more awake they become
That was demonstrated in an experiment that Lupfer performed with dwarf hamsters. In this experiment, she and her students tried to get rats drunk to gauge how drunk they were.
Basically, they planned to feed the hamsters meals with a gradually increasing alcohol content to see when they got drunk. Levels of intoxication in rats were compared by Lupfer with intoxicated behavior in humans, ranging from 0 (still able to walk on balance) to 4 (falling sideways and unable to get up).
To gauge these steps, Lupfer let the rats drink wine, then dipped their paws in watercolor and placed them on white paper.
A very creative experiment, but Lupfer failed the first time. The hamsters were fed the highest levels of alcohol, but strangely they remained sober. Lupfer and his students could not distinguish the footprints of mice that had finished drinking from those that had only been given water. Apparently these hamsters don’t know how to get drunk.
To subdue the animals”wine fairy” and forcing them to get drunk, Lupfer had to inject ethanol directly into their veins. As a result, the hamsters got drunk. They tumbled from the very low dose of ethanol injected into their bloodstream.
As it turns out, the key to the problem is that hamsters digest alcohol very well in the liver. If you give them a drink, the alcohol will enter the rat’s digestive tract and go straight to the liver, where this organ begins to help the hamster break down ethanol extremely efficiently.
Tom Lawton, an experienced doctor in Bradford, UK, said that the liver of rats is a great detox machine, so most of the ethanol they drink will not be able to enter the bloodstream.
Hamsters may have acquired the ability to consume alcohol through their evolution – as a hoarder rodent. The rats will go foraging in the summer and autumn and then return to their nests.
In winter, when food is scarce and the weather is more severe, the rats simply lie in their burrows and eat what they have earned. These are usually fruits or seeds, but over time, they will ferment into alcohol.
Either the rats had to break down the alcohol in their food, Lupfer said, or they would die in the cold winter.
But hamsters not only like to eat fermented fruits, they also like to drink alcohol directly. In fact, when scientists put a glass of wine and a glass of water in the cage, the hamster chose the alcohol.
Scientists say they probably drink alcohol to get calories. The calorie content of alcohol is up to 7 kcal per gram, which is roughly the same as 9 kcal/gram from fat. Usually, when given a choice between sugary water that also contains calories and alcohol, hamsters will hesitate. But when choosing between a soft drink with artificial sweeteners and alcohol, the rats never touched the zero-calorie soft drink.
And in the 1990s, in an alcohol withdrawal experiment on hamsters “broken“, scientists had to coax them to drink water one by one, from tomato juice, peach juice, mango juice, sugar water to Ensure Plus nutritional milk chocolate flavor.
The mice actually started drinking less alcohol when offered the sweet and high-calorie alternatives. Ensure Plus chocolate milk becomes the most effective drink to make hamsters give up their love of alcohol.
But with the ability to drink 18 grams of Everclear per kilogram of body weight, hamsters deserve to be the king of alcohol in the animal world. So, if someone in your neighborhood posts a photo of a lost hamster and comes home that day, be sure to close the fridge and wine cabinet doors. Maybe the rat was wandering around looking for something to drink.
Refer to Atlantic
.