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Animal Intoxicants
Another fascinating passage from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, from page 116:
According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgil in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans of Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “jaguar eyes.”
On this topic, there is a book I have been meaning to get for a really long time which seems to be exclusively about animal usage of psychedelics. It’s called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness. Has anyone read it? Why do you think animals would want to alter their consciousness like this?
November 8th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Oh, somewhere around here I have a story saved about a dog ‘addicted’ to psychadelic toads…
November 8th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Oh I think I’ve seen that! Link me if you find it!
November 8th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
The book on animals and psychedelics by Giorgio Samorini is slim but a great read. He draws heavily on Siegel’s work, but brings much of his own research to bear as well. Including a hilarious anecdote about picking psilocybe mushrooms in Italy and being attacked by goats after they saw what he was picking (they devoured the bag of them he’d collected).
Why would animals do this? I wonder if our cultural taboos, legal system, and our narrow view of consciousness in animals are the only reasons we need to ask the question…
November 8th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
That said, I think there’s some very interesting conclusions about the evolutionary process that will come from this research, which I’m currently too wiped out to speculate on!
November 8th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
As much as outdoor cats enjoy getting high on catnip they don’t let it prevent them from hunting for themselves and caring for their kittens, even though it’s available for indulgence all the time.
November 8th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
This is an absolutely fascinating and undertold story. I have often wondered if when my dog is feeling unwell and has a “salad”, that is starts eating various green plants we come across during our walks, is he just randomly eating something green or purposely chosen something endowed with healing qualities.
In hindsight it seems perfectly obvious that his actions are not random. This post enforces my belief. Almost my nothing my dog does is without reason, purpose or design. He almost never acts randomly, now that I think about it. How absurd of me to think that before. I must have been rationalizing.
This reminds me of that post Tim made some time ago about his disappointment with an academics particular approach to reasoning. I think this example falls into that professor’s idea. Before I felt one way - now I am immediately enlightened and feel differently. I cannot go back to the old way - it seems preposterous. And though this idea of my dog eating healthful foods might change in the future I did take the instantaneous step the Professor talked about.
How’s that for some interconnectedness of all things?
November 9th, 2006 at 12:17 am
You’d be right, Gary- a lot of animal studies have been done that show numerous species medicate..off the top of my head, sheep and most of the great apes, probably more.
November 9th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Tim:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6376594
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/30/toad_licking_dog/
November 9th, 2006 at 2:11 am
Same as us? I mean, as a kid, I didn’t need a reason to spin around in place until I fell over. Besides, it’s healthy — people who can’t dream go nuts and die.
I like the idea that the will to alter consciousness is instinctive. It’s probably fairly recently in history that we started to think up reasons for why we do everything.
November 9th, 2006 at 11:36 am
I’ve read Samorini’s book as well. I’ll second the regret on how tiny the book is. It’s a sad note on our times that there’s not more material on the subject. Currently my copy is sitting within a warehouse a country away, and my memory of it has faded quite a bit. One anecdote that’s stuck in my mind though was that rabits showed a very individual take to mescaline containing cacti. Some loved it and would always be counted on to grab any they could find. Others totally shunned it, and wouldn’t go near the stuff after their first experience.
November 9th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
You know what I think is kind of fucked up though? When stoners “smoke out” their animals via second-hand smoke.
November 9th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
No question about that for me as well. On the flip side, I also remember seeing a documentary about people who roamed their town looking for pot smokers to hand over to the cops. I found that distasteful, but the mind boggling part came from the squad’s habit of giving beer to their dog after getting back from their drug abuser watch.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
[…] Speaking of the internet and how it reveals elements in the collective consciousness of humanity, an old article of mine (2005) is suddenly receiving a large amount of visitors from the website StumbleUpon, an article I wrote about intoxication in the animal kingdom. Another link on the subject I collected comes from Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire.” […]