Of elephants and alcohol, a cautionary tale for the curious tusker.
I've seen it written that it is the smell of the fermentation that attracts them rather than the alcohol but I am not so sure.
I think eles just do like the booze, illustrated by some sad cases like the baby down in the Government detention centre who was regularly fed whisky for the entertainment of his mahout; less sad, when we performed the blessing to ask the spirits to help Poon Larb let Tong Suk drink it was the homemade whisky that the babies trunks were stretching towards, spirit ceremonies invariably involve whisky (the spirits like the spirits too) and adults eles will take shot when allowed - I try not to interfere but nowadays I'm responsible for the digestive well-being of the eles so frown quietly upon the practice, though in small measures it doesn't seem to do much harm, probably the equivalent of sherry in a trifle.
As a young no-nothing Field Officer in Chitwan I'd feed Naragaj a shot or two of an elephant camp party and he certainly seemed to enjoy that, but given the amount it must take to get an elephant drunk, perhaps it is just the odd sensation of spirits on the trunk and in the throat that amuse?
Do they drink to get drunk? Perhaps, from the pure home-made whisky in the ancient logging camps to the camp in Pattaya where every mahout is drunk by 9am, to late nights with the mahouts in our camps (though the Anantara camp is now 'almost dry' - the camp over the hill is where the drinking goes on, several of you out there will remember the morning after a T.E.C.C. camp party) their 'masters' certainly do.
Alcohol seems to be a universal in every mahout culture. If those idiot humans enjoy it why shouldn't we? - well, read below big fella.
...a recovering alcoholic before he should have been weaned, now safely in the hands of the Government.
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FOUR wild elephants drunk on beer were electrocuted when they stumbled into a power pole and brought it down on top of themselves in northeast India.
Elephants are known to have a taste for the rice beer brewed by tribes across northeast India.
A herd of up to 25 elephants rampaged in a remote area in the West Garo Hills district earlier this week, forcing villagers to run for cover and leave their freshly brewed beverage behind, BBC News online reported.
After drinking the village dry, the elephants ran into a power pole, bringing it down.
Their trunks bore the brunt of the shock from the high-tension wire and four elephants were killed instantly, the website said.
Elephant expert Kushal Konwar Sharma, an Assam lecturer, said elephants frequently drank rice beer and caused devastation when they became intoxicated.
Wildlife officials said that in the last two years elephants had killed at least 180 people in Assam and Meghalaya, and more than 200 elephants had been killed by angry villagers in the last six years.
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