The Second Book of General Ignorance (7 page)

The biggest boozer after man is the Pen-tailed tree shrew of Malaysia.

Ptilocercus lowii
, a rat-sized animal with a tail shaped like a quill pen, gets through nine units of alcohol a night (the
equivalent of nine single whiskies, five pints of beer or five 175-millilitre glasses of wine).

Its staple diet is nectar from the flowers of the Bertram palm, which ferments as a result of natural yeasts in the plant’s spiky buds. This brew weighs in at 3.8 per cent ABV (alcohol by volume) – about the strength of a decent pale ale – and the Pen-tailed tree shrew spends an average of two hours a night sipping it.

The nectar of the Bertram palm is among the most alcoholic of any naturally occurring food. German researchers from the University of Bayreuth were first alerted to the presence of alcohol in the plant by its wafting, yeasty aroma, and what looked very much like a foamy ‘head’ on the nectar.

Analysis of the tree shrew’s hair revealed blood-alcohol levels that would be dangerous in most mammals, but it never gets drunk. If it did, it wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. Being small and edible makes for a tough enough life, but being small, edible and permanently confused would be fatal.

The Pen-tailed tree shrew has somehow evolved to break down the alcohol without becoming intoxicated, and it may also have benefited from the so-called ‘aperitif effect’. First noted in humans, this is the fact that alcohol stimulates the appetite, so we eat more. The higher an animal’s calorie intake, the more energy it has and the more likely it is to survive. As the Pen-tailed tree shrew appears to have discovered, the smell of fermentation in a fruit indicates that it has reached its peak calorific level.

The first record of humans drinking alcohol dates from 9,000 years ago, when brewing was invented in Mesopotamia. But the Bayreuth research suggests we may have inherited the taste for it from our pre-human past. The common ancestor of shrews and man was a small mammal that lived between 55 and 80 million years ago. The closest living match to this nameless creature is thought to be the Pen-tailed tree shrew. If
we can work out why it likes alcohol so much (and why it never gets drunk), we may reach a better understanding of why humans like to drink, how we can do it without becoming legless, and maybe discover a hangover cure along the way.

In the oldest surviving work of literature on earth – the 4,000-year-old
Epic of Gilgamesh –
Shamhat, a temple prostitute, tames Enkidu, a hairy wild man raised by animals, by taking him to bed for a week and plying him with seven jars of beer. The result that is he starts to wash, puts on clothes for the first time and abandons his former animal friends, ‘having acquired wisdom’.

African tourist brochures often tell of elephants blundering around drunk after eating the fermented fruit of the marula tree, but it’s a complete myth.

The marula tree (
Scelerocarya birrea caffera
) is a member of the mango family and elephants do indeed love its plum-sized yellow fruit. And it’s not just the elephants’ favourite – warthogs, monkeys, antelopes, giraffes and zebras all enjoy eating both the fruit and the bark of the tree.

In fact they like the fruit so much that none of them leave it lying on the ground long enough to allow it to rot and start to ferment. Elephants like their fruit fresh and visit the trees often to check whether their lunch is ripe. They are so eager that they will sometimes push the tree over to get what they want. Even if elephants liked rotten fruit, there’s none on the ground because it’s all been eaten by other species.

A study by Steve Morris of the University of Bristol calculated that, even if there
were
rotten fruit on the ground and the elephants
did
eat it, they would have to consume about 1,500 marula fruit, all at the same time, to get tipsy.

The myth can be traced back to a wildlife movie called
Animals Are Beautiful People
(1974) by the South African film director Jamie Uys (1921–96). His scenes of elephants, warthogs and baboons getting drunk on marula fruit were almost certainly staged. All Uys’s other films were comedies, and one,
Funny People
(1978), was a spoof show similar to
Candid Camera
or
Beadle’s About
.

The Bristol University study suggested that any odd behaviour by elephants around marula trees might be due to another form of ‘intoxication’ altogether. The bark is host to the grubs of the Lebistina beetle, traditionally used by the San Bushmen to poison their arrows.

Elephants can get drunk – but only by drinking alcohol. They can detect the pleasant smell of ethanol (pure alcohol) up to 10 miles away. In 1999 a herd of elephants broke into thatched huts in a village in India and polished off several vats of fermenting rice wine. They then went on a drunken rampage through the other huts, killing four unlucky villagers.

People have been eating marula fruit, which is rich in vitamin C, for 10,000 years. The tree has many other uses. The wood is used for carvings, the inner bark is made into rope and the skin of the fruit into substitute coffee. The bark also contains antihistamines (used to cure dysentery,
diarrhoea and malaria), and caterpillars (which are collected and eaten roasted).

Marula beer is the favourite drink of the people of Swaziland. Drinkers claim it doesn’t give you a hangover but, in 2002, the Swazi authorities banned it, citing a huge increase in drink driving, street brawls and absenteeism at work.

Amarula Cream, a sweet liqueur distilled from the fruit, is a speciality of South Africa, where it is served as an after-dinner
digestif
. It has a picture of an elephant on the label.

It’s not tigers or hippos.

According to
Scientific American
in 2009, the world’s most fearsome land mammal is the Honey badger (
Mellivora capensis
). The
Guinness Book of Records
also lists it as ‘the most
fearless
animal in the world’.

Honey badgers live in Africa and Asia in vacant burrows abandoned by other creatures such as aardvarks, and they aren’t badgers. They’re called that because they bear a superficial resemblance to regular badgers (
Meles meles
) and because they love honey. Badgers and Honey badgers are unrelated members of the weasel family,
Mustelidae
, the largest group of carnivores. It includes ferrets, polecats, minks and wolverines, but the Honey badger is a one-off: the only species in the genus
Mellivora
, which means ‘honey-eaters’.

Honey badgers use their large and powerful claws to ravage termite mounds, rip through the wire round chicken coops and, especially, tear beehives apart. They are led to the hives by honeyguide birds, which call out when they find
one, and take their share when the Honey badger has eaten its fill.

One of the things that makes the Honey badger such an indomitable adversary is its very loose-fitting skin: if it’s caught from behind it is able to twist around inside its own skin and fight back. As a result, they have few predators and will attack most animals when provoked, even humans. They have fought or killed hyenas, lions, tigers, tortoises, porcupines, crocodiles and bears. They eat venomous snakes, which they grab in their jaws and devour in fifteen minutes. They also eat young Honey badgers: only half the cubs survive to adulthood.

Legend has it that a Honey badger’s attack methods are below the belt. The first published record of this was in 1947 when a Honey badger was allegedly observed to castrate an adult buffalo. They are also said to have emasculated wildebeest, waterbuck, kudu, zebra and man. In
Top Gear
’s 2009 Botswana special, Jeremy Clarkson reported: ‘The honey badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.’

In Pakistan, they are called ‘Bijj’ and are said to take away dead bodies from graves. Such is the animal’s terrifying reputation that, during the Iraq war, British troops in Basra were accused of having unleashed a plague of man-eating bear-like beasts to terrify the locals. They turned out to be Honey badgers, which had been driven into the city by the flooding of marshland.