Animals and Psychedelics

by Giorgio Samorini

  W. H. Bergtold added in his own report of 1930: “The inebriation of these birds has been observed in all its stages, from mild instability to a level of uncoordination sufficient to cause them to fall to the ground. It seems that some birds become utterly fearless and perhaps even a little belligerent, since they show no fear of passersby and curious spectators.” Bergtold found it curious that the birds had not learned to avoid these berries, thus demolishing the belief that no animal will feed on harmful substances.

  Siegel had the chance to observe birds engaged in some fascinating, even romantic behavior as he was watching a pair of cedar waxwings drunk on firethorn berries: “Despite their reputation for sleek plumage, never seeming to have a feather out of place, the waxwings were left rumpled and tipsy by the intoxications. Yet they still had the ability to engage in a unique courtship display. The male fluffed his feathers and turned his head away from the female, who did the same. Then the male passed a firethorn berry as a ‘present.’ He offered it to his partner at the tip of the beak and she accepted it. The berry was passed back and forth several times and, eventually, it was eaten by one of the birds at the end of the display.

  “A courtship present stirs the romantic imagination. After all, love and addiction are often viewed as two sides of the same coin, or, for birds, the same berry (Siegel 1989, 60).”

  For three years the ornithologist David McKelvey studied the pink pigeon (Columba meyeri), native to the Mauritian islands and in danger of extinction despite the fact that it has evolved in the absence of predators. McKelvey concluded that the pink pigeon lives in intimate relationship with three different psychoactive plants: a species of Aphloeia called fandamon by the natives; a species of Styllingia of the family of Euphorbiaceae, known as fangam; and a species of Lantana. The pigeons feed on the berries of these three plants and get drunk, in which condition they become totally incapable of doing anything but wander around on the ground in a daze. When the British introduced the mongoose to the Mauritian islands, the pigeons were decimated by this formidable carnivore, which was probably astonished to find such a quantity of feathered prey unable to fly out of harm’s way. The results of McKelvey’s studies indicate that these particular psychoactive berries are physiological necessities to the pink pigeons; for this reason the birds tend to die in captivity, especially if they are taken away from their natural drugs (Kennedy 1987, 256).

  Certain other bird species feed avidly on the seeds of the opium poppy and are notorious scourges of the great opium plantations.

  Sparrows have been observed entering storehouses to feed on hemp seeds, which seem to excite and stimulate them. In fact, many kinds of birds show this partiality for marijuana seeds, and it is related in many different regions of the world that eating them modifies their behavior—that, for example, they “sing” at greater length and with more ardor and are more inclined toward amorous displays. People who raise parrots add a certain percentage of hemp seeds to their animals’ diets to make them more talkative. In Italy many canary owners do the same thing, to stimulate their birds to sweeter song.

  7

  Other “Out There” Animals

  In the Rocky Mountains of Canada, wild bighorn sheep will dare the gravest dangers, teeter-ring precariously on knife-edged outcrops and ledges and scrambling down deep ravines to reach a certain lichen and devour it greedily, although its nutritional value is negligible. This slow-growing lichen, colored in vivid yellow and green, is found on the surface of rocks and boulders. Young ewes frequently wander away from the group to seek out the lichen and consume it in great quantities. This behavior becomes such a stubbornly ingrained habit that the ewes, in their frenzied scraping at the rocks, wear their nipping teeth down to such a degree that they often lose them entirely. Local Native Americans found the probable explanation for this weird phenomenon when they discovered that the lichen was a narcotic—for sheep, goats, and human beings.

  Baboons search for and feed on the red fruit of a tree from the family of Cycadaceae, a behavior not evidenced during times of famine, demonstrating that the consumption of this fruit is not for the purpose of nourishment. After eating this fruit they appear drunk, swaying when they walk and seemingly incapable of moving swiftly—so that they fall easy prey to human hunters. Fatalities directly linked to ingestion of this fruit have never been observed among baboons, although it is mortally poisonous to humans. Instead, the fruit appears to produce a pleasant sensation of euphoria in the animals, who have probably developed a tolerance to its poisonous effects (Marais 1940).

  Australian koalas feed exclusively on the fresh leaves of the eucalyptus plant, a phenomenon well known to native aboriginal peoples as well as zoo curators all over the world. Also known is that this sole food source exerts a narcotic and relaxing effect on koalas; aboriginals believe that the animals are severely addicted. We are presented, to be sure, with an extreme case of double dependency involving all the members of a particular species, in which the elements of nutrition and drug use coincide completely.

  Adaptation and habituation to eucalyptus leaves seems not to be genetically imprinted in koalas but to take place during the first few months of life through nursing and maternal education. This would seem to be proved by the fact that young koalas have been raised successfully on a different diet: cow’s milk, bread, and honey. But crucial to this is immediate separation from the mother after birth.

  There are countless cases in which the psychoactive properties of certain plants have been discovered by human beings through observation of animal behavior. In the forests of Gabon and the Congo, natives relate that they long ago noticed wild boars digging up and eating the hallucinogenic roots of the iboga bush (Tabernanthe iboga, of the family of Apocynaceae). In consequence, the boars become frenzied, leaping in every direction, displaying inexplicable fear reactions and suffering hallucinations. Porcupines and gorillas also intentionally feed on iboga for its effects. It was by observing and imitating these animals that natives deduced, and then experienced, the visionary properties of the plant.

  In the course of my own researches in Gabon, which explored the use of iboga in the Buiti religious cult practiced by the Fang, Mitsogho, Apindji, and other Bantu tribes inhabiting the equatorial forest, I was informed by many different people that various animal species also eat iboga to drug themselves. A Mitsogho shaman, or nganga, told me of iboga use among male mandrills. Mandrills live in widespread communities and adhere to a rigid hierarchical structure. At the top of the ladder is the alpha male, to whom other powerful males submit; these, in turn, dominate yet weaker males.

  When a male mandrill must engage in combat with another, either to establish his claim to a female or to climb a rung of the hierarchical ladder, he does not begin to fight without forethought. Instead, he first finds and digs up an iboga bush, eating its root; next, he waits for its effect to hit him full force (which can take from one to two hours); and only then does he approach and attack the other male he wants to engage in battle. The fact that the mandrill waits like this to feel the full effect of the drug before attacking demonstrates a high level of premeditation and awareness of what he is doing.

  The kava bush (Piper methysticum, of the family of Piperaceae) is scattered widely throughout the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. Natives have long brewed an intoxicating beverage from its roots, which is still consumed by a large part of the population. Various tales regarding the original discovery of the special properties of kava mythologize some observation of the bizarre relation rats (Rattus exculans, to be exact) have to the plant. For instance, in one origin tale from the New Hebrides, a man watches again and again as a rat gnaws on the root of the kava, dies, and later returns to life. Finally the man decides to test the effects of the root on himself and in so doing instigates the people’s use of kava. In fact, not only rats but also swine raid kava plantations to dig up and gnaw at the roots and are afterward clearly intoxicated (Samorini 1995a, 102).

  Marijuana (Cannabis) gro
wers must also contend with animals greedy for their harvest. In the Hawaiian islands, cows and horses must be guarded against, as they are particularly partial to the flowers of the plant. After browsing on them, these animals walk with a rolling, swaying gait. It was also thought for a while by growers on Maui that mongooses were responsible for the destructive raids on fields and warehouses where freshly harvested marijuana was kept because the seeds of the plant were often found in their scat. Ronald K. Siegel, who was called in to investigate, found it to be a surprising premise, as mongooses are such fierce carnivores that under certain conditions they will even kill and eat each other. Hoping to find an explanation for the presence of seeds in their stomachs, he set up time-lapse cameras in fields where mongoose scat had been located.

  “Rattus rattus, or rats!” concluded Siegel. “Under the cover of darkness, rats mischievously stripped the plants for the seeds. At sunrise, a few stragglers, still feeding or perhaps slowed by intoxication, were quickly dispatched by the stealthy mongooses on their morning patrols. With lightning speed the mongooses would seize the rat by the top of the head and audibly crush the cranium. The mongooses ignored the marijuana; the seeds in their scat came from the breakfast rats (Siegel 1989, 153–54).”

  In eastern Europe, lambs break into hemp fields, browse on the plants, and become “merry and mad.” In the 1950s a veterinarian in Greece reported on the progress of a lamb that got high repeatedly on cannabis and that nevertheless developed and fattened perfectly normally (Cardassis 1951, 973).

  In North America deer infiltrate hidden growing sites to graze on marijuana; in South America monkeys do the same.

  Several years ago in California white-tailed rabbits were observed invading specialized gardens where the psychoactive cactus Astrophytum myriostigma was being grown. The rabbits seemed distinctly drunk after nibbling on these cactus plants. Once they sobered up, they returned to browse on the cacti again, becoming newly intoxicated (Entheogen Review 1998, 73).

  Rats will feed on the fruit and aerial parts of Ipomoea violacea (of the family of Convolvulaceae), popularly known as morning glory, but generally avoid ingesting its seeds, which contain elevated concentrations of certain psychoactive alkaloids also found in ergot. These seeds have been sought after by humans since ancient times and are still prized for their hallucinogenic properties. Rats have been observed, on occasion, to swallow a seed—particularly during severe weather conditions—and to consequently experience a state of intoxication characterized by head twitching.

  Siegel once observed a couple of Hawaiian mongooses ignore their usual diet of meat, eggs, and fruit to chew the seeds of some morning glories growing in their outdoor pen. The two animals twitched their heads and wandered in circles, then stayed still for several hours. In the following months, they ignored the seeds entirely. But when one of the mongooses died, its mate returned to the morning glories, chewed its seeds, and became intoxicated. Among the tribal peoples of Mexico, these seeds are often eaten for consolation in times of bereavement; perhaps the surviving mongoose was doing the same (Siegel 1989, 72).

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  Intoxicated Insects

  We indicated in preceding chapters that drugs are used by the lower orders of animals, such as insects and mollusks. This fact—that drug use is encountered in animals consid ered low on the evolutionary scale—is disconcerting to many ethologists and biologists, since the biological chasm between higher and lower orders has been generally considered Intoxicated Insects enormous. This gap has been thought to include the structure and complexity of the nervous system.

  Yet some species of moth with long, specialized proboscises are uniquely adapted to suck the nectar from the flowers of the datura, a plant of the Solanaceae family that is notoriously hallucinogenic for human beings. In Arizona the Manduca quinquemaculata moth lives on a diet of Datura meteloides nectar and in doing so contributes to the pollination of its flowers. Only after countless observations did researchers realize that these moths appeared to be drunk once they had sucked the nectar. Observation of their intoxicated behavior had slipped easily through the cracks—first because it occurs at night, when the datura opens the corollas of its blossoms, and second, because botanists and entomologists who take the trouble to spend their nights on the ground beside datura plants are primarily interested in identifying the pollinating insects and capturing them while they are still inside the flowers.

  But some researchers reported that after the moths suck the nectar of several flowers, “They seem clumsy when they land on the flowers and often miss the target and fall onto the leaves or the soil. They right themselves slowly and awkwardly. When they take to flight again, their movements are erratic, as if they were confused. But the moths seem to like this effect and return to suck more nectar from those flowers (Grant and Grant 1983, 281).”

  The nectar of this type of datura probably contains the same psychoactive alkaloids present in other parts of the plant, which is harvested by human beings for its halluucinogenic properties. The Grants hypothesize that this nectar, intoxicating as it is to the moths, may function as a kind of recompense offered by the plant to the insects that pollinate its flowers. Their resulting behavior, however, can prove extremely dangerous to the moths: to lie, even briefly, in a daze on the ground or to fly slowly and awkwardly is also to fall easy prey to avid predators—other nocturnal insects, reptiles, and amphibians—that have learned to wait under the datura plants for their complacent victims.

  Similar behavior is evidenced by a certain kind of bee that visits the blossoms of the tropical American orchids Catasetum, Cynoches, Stanhopea, and Gongora, which instead of nourishment produce liquid perfume. Eulaema, Euplusia, and Euglossa bees carve scratches into the flowers of these orchids, through which the liquid perfume seeps out. The bees then absorb it through their hind feet. These insects return time and again to the scratches they have cut in the flowers and are consequently clumsy in their movements, which has been interpreted to be the result of a narcosis (Dodson 1962). Other kinds of bees become inebriated after drinking the nectar of certain specialized Umbelliferae flowers. This particular relationship between insects and flowers, in which the plants reward their pollinators with a drug, is probably much more widespread than has heretofore been thought.

  The chemist Paul Lindner (1923), an expert on fermentations, reported that the larva of the carpenter moth (Cossus cossus), stag beetles, and squirrels all greedily drink the fermenting sap of oak trees and get drunk on this sort of natural beer.

  Lennig writes of this that “stag beetles first begin to rustle and click; then they sway and fall off the tree, trying awkwardly to stand back up, now on one leg, now on another—rolling over onto their backs every time—and finally they yield to their drunkenness and sleep it off (Reko 1996, 182).”

  Another drunkard in the insect kingdom is an enormous and extraordinarily beautiful butterfly, the Charaxes jasius (popularly known as the jasio or arbutus nymph), which lives in Italy, among other places, in groves of strawberry trees. The jasio has “tailed” wings and a horizontally silver-striped body. It is attracted by anything that ferments and produces alcohol, especially rotting fruits that have fallen to earth. To better observe this gorgeous lepidopteran, entomologists place small glasses of beer or wine in its immediate neighborhood. Before long the butterfly, attracted by the odor of alcohol, makes an appearance and hurls itself on the liquid to plunge its proboscis (a kind of tubular tongue kept rolled in its mouth, which, when unfurled, acts as a straw) into it. Proof that the jasio gets drunk on the alcohol it sucks up is provided by its subsequent slow and staggering flight (Delfini 1998).

  Some species of ants host a particular kind of beetle in their colonies, providing it with food and care. In exchange, their guests allow the ants to lick secretions produced in the beetles’ abdomens and released through two furry tufts called trichomes. According to Siegel, “the ants may become so overwhelmed by the intoxicating nature of these secretions that they become tempora
rily disoriented and less sure of their footing.” Myrmecologists—entomologists who specialize in the study of ants—have only recently become aware of this strange relationship because of the modern observational instruments now available to them. In the case of the yellow ant, Lasius flavus, and the Lomechusa beetle, worker ants appear to become completely uninterested in their domestic tasks, instead devoting themselves exclusively, and for long periods of time, to sucking secretions from the beetles’ abdomens. The ants also raise the beetles’ larvae, cradling them in the incubating chambers constructed for those of their own species. In times of danger, when they must hastily carry the larvae to a safer place, they rescue the beetle larvae before they tend to their own. It is not rare to find hundreds of Lomechusa beetles lodged in a single ant colony, an imbalance that leads swiftly to low productivity and a ruinous decline of the colony as a whole.

  Siegel says: “Excessive intake of the intoxicant can cause such mania in the colony that female ant larvae become damaged in such a way that they develop into useless cripples rather than reproductive queens. Accordingly, ‘Lomechusa-mania,’ a case of severe addiction, can contribute to the decline and fall of the ant society (Siegel 1989, 73).”