There are plenty of boozers in the animal kingdom. Shaking hands with a lion and joining your own search party sounds like fantastic ideas, from moose who hoof down fermented apples and get trapped in trees to garden squirrels who get wasted on gone-off pears, and, of course, those crazy naked apes that drink till they swallow spiny catfish.
However, there is a mammal species that occupies a rather high place on the crank scale the hamster. There are 19 species of hamsters in the Cricetinae subfamily, which includes all hamsters. They are popular as pets and found all over the world. They have also become a regular subject for scientific inquiry during the course of scientific discoveries, some of which are directly related to their liking for alcohol.
Dr. Tom Lawton, a critical care consultant with the Bradford Institute for Health Research, discussed the modest hamster’s drinking abilities in an enlightening thread published on Twitter. “I realized previously in a chat with @microlabdoc [Dr. Christine Peters] that not everyone knew of the hamster’s tremendous capacity for alcohol,” Lawton wrote. “They enjoy it so much that they would rather drink 15% ethanol than water and can withstand levels that would kill a person.”
The science is in place to crown Lab Booze Hounds hamsters. While rats may induce to drink by genetic engineering or conditioning, hamsters will drink the hard stuff as soon as they given the chance will. Another study from 1962 found that most confined rodents investigated were obtaining roughly 88 percent of their liquid consumption from the alcoholic choice, confirming the hamsters’ preference for alcohol over drinking water.
The caloric content of alcohol, which is not far from fat, may explain this, as chubbier hamsters are more likely to endure harsher winters. It is also likely that hamsters’ hoarding lifestyle plays a role, since food accumulation may start to ferment in their underground larders, exposing hamsters to a strong libation.
Furthermore, despite the fact that hamsters can consume an astounding amount of alcohol — the equivalent of an adult male ingesting roughly 21 bottles of wine, according to Lawton – they appear to have a rather high tolerance. This was proved in a 2015 research that developed a “Wobbling Scale” for hamster intoxication measurement. The scale pretty well performed what it said on the tin, detecting intoxication by observing the hamsters’ increasingly shaky behavior until they were falling on their sides and unable to get back up. During a strange haze that occurs between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, this is undoubtedly a relatable condition.
The hamsters’ remarkable tolerance for alcohol is due to their large, extremely effective livers, which can filter out alcohol and minimize the quantity that circulates in the blood. When ethanol was delivered straight into the circulation of hamsters, bypassing the liver, this resulted in behavior that was off the charts on the Wobbling Scale. There are numerous synonyms for drinking and being drunk, but perhaps one of them should be “completely hamstrung.”
