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Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles
It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."
As someone who has smoked a lot of opium in northern Afghanistan and the High Pamirs, I just have to ask: why are these wallabies hopping around? Opium is about the most soporific drug I could think of.
This makes that show Rocko's Modern Life make a LOT more sense.
is the desire to alter your consciousness with drugs a naturally occurring one?
Ever seen a cat around catnip? Lemme put it this way: The question you're asking doesn't occur to them, they just know they love catnip.
And why the hell didn't I give marijuana a try when I was in college?
I hear ya man, especially since where I went to college it was about as close to legal as you can get in the States. When the penalty is a ticket less severe than for double parking, how much enforcement do you think there would be? But nooooo, I had to actually study and be a good student in college...
The enemies of Democracy are
Screw having a picture of the animal, I want to see the crop circles.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I wouldn't call it a natural desire, because the animals aren't born with it. But most every animal that has experienced consciousness alteration wants more of it. Birds eat fermented fruits and berries and get so drunk they can't fly. Most dogs love beer. Many pets like the effects of marijuana. But my all time favorite drunken animal story is the one about the derailed corn train and the drunken bears. A trainload of corn derailed in the Rockies, where cleanup was next to impossible. After the corn fermented, bears would come from miles around to eat the fermented corn, and get so drunk they'd pass out on the tracks. So the railroad company buried the corn. And the bears dug it up. The company sprayed it with nasty tasting stuff. The bears didn't care. Finally, they covered it in diesel fuel and burned it. The bears ate what was left.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Dude, you want pot, move to CA, get your medical marijuana card and go to town.
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There are huge numbers of examples of animals consuming intoxicants in nature:
* Hummingbirds will drink the sap of daturas and brugmansias, which contain deleriant tropanes, inducing extremely potent hallucinations.
* India has problems with elephants and alcohol. Elephants will consume fruit that has fermented, and then, in their state of intoxication, cause massive amounts of damage to towns and power lines.
* Most amusingly (to me), my aunt has a farm, and every night the ducks are corralled in the barn. Every morning when she goes to let them out, they're quacking and pressed up against the door. An explosion of ducks happens when she finally lets them free, and apparently they race for a shady patch across the field and fight viciously over there. She could not figure out why this was the case, so after hearing that cattle were frequently in that area, I suggested she check the cow dung for mushrooms. Sure enough, those ducks were bolting out to fight over a morning dose of magic mushrooms.
There is a problem with wallabies eating poppy crops in Tasmania. The real story is that the plants are very immature and there is no alkaloid in them. There are circular patches being made in the crops, but this is due to the normal feeding behaviour of wallabies and not because they are bouncing around in circles stoned. No wallabies are falling to the ground stoned. The farmers are setting up patches of preferred feed plants outside the poppy fields to prevent it happening in the future, as Tasmania is one of the leading exporters of opium for medical use, and they want to diminish the impact on revenue.
I didn't smoke because I wanted to maintain my memory.
Now that I am over 40, it turns out I'm loosing my memory anyways.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on