Nature Corner: Meet the animals who love getting high as much as people

Welcome to the Nature Corner w/ Matt Trotter:

I believe it to be of the upmost importance that each of us are educated about all forms of life on our planet, seeing as our generation will be the ones tasked with making decisions on it in the not so distant future. I may not have the charms, boundless knowledge or soothing accent of David Attenborough, but hopefully I can spark an interest in the world around us by enlightening you on some of the lesser known weird-and-wonderfuls that nature has up its sleeve.

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For many of us, a big night out with your mates starts with the old tried and tested pre-drinks before venturing out to a bar, club or house party. From there on it is more often than not a blurry montage of further drinking, punching darts, and occasionally dabbling in those extra substances that you wouldn’t tell your parents about. I wouldn’t blame you if you said that this chemically-driven, social culture is one of the things that separates us humans from the other inhabitants of our planet, but in fact you’d be quite wrong. Almost wherever you look in nature there are consciousness-altering chemicals being produced by plants or fungi, along with groups of animals trying to get as fucking lit as they can off them. These are just a few...

The Opium-addicted Wallabies Of Tasmania

Farmers in the opium poppy fields of Tasmania (which produce roughly 50% of the world’s legal opium for the production of powerful painkillers such as morphine and oxycodone), have a serious problem with smack-loving Bennett’s wallabies sneaking into their farms and gorging themselves on the opium rich plant heads, to the point where the crop fields become littered with completely fucked out marsupials that are too buckled to find their feet. Local farmers have even reported that commonly occurring crop circles in the area are caused by the furry little junkies walking around in circles repeatedly until a visible path forms. Truly incredible, opium addicted wallabies stealing the shine of those hard-working extraterrestrials out there.

Jaguars Getting Woke On Yage

Jaguars in the Peruvian Amazon are known to be absolute freaks for the yage vine (also known as Ayahuasca). The plant’s active ingredient, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is also the strongest hallucinogen known to man; known to produce psychedelic experiences involving spiritual breakthroughs and visions of cosmic fairies doing the tango in the far reaches of space. The big cats continue to lick the leaves of the yage until they are pranged out on their backs, embraced in a spiritual handshake with the 8th dimension. Local tribes in the area also ingest the yage believing that it will give them “jaguar eyes”, therefore gaining the jaguar’s hunting ability. Props to the lot of them for even being able to stand up during a mind melting trip like that.

The Shroom Freak Reindeer Of Europe

Yes, there are reindeers in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Siberia that actively forage for and even fight over the potent hallucinogenic mushroom known as Amanita muscaria or more commonly as the ‘fly agaric’. When eaten by humans, the fungus causes users to feel as though they’re 20ft tall as well as inducing feelings of flying. The red bodied, white spotted mushroom looks strikingly similar to the Super Mushroom power-ups in Nintendo’s Mario franchise, which cause Mario and Luigi to go into their Super form of enormous size, enabling them to walk through solid brick. So yeah, a game of Mario as a kid was actually a virtual drug taking simulator. Yew. It seems as if Nintendo and reindeer may be onto the same lead here. Reindeer that are tripping on the fly agaric also piss out shroom-laced urine which the shamans of the Sami people are very fond of, inducing visions of flying reindeer and all that psychedelic shit that comes with it. There is even a widely believed speculation that the story of Santa Claus and his flying reindeer, along with his red and white attire, actually has roots to the ancients tripping balls on the fly agaric. Don’t worry, it’s completely normal if your mind is blown.

So the next time you wake up after a filthy one, with that stale, empty feeling inside yourself as a result of all those consumable sins you indulged in, when you’re drained of all those juices that make you happy; just remember that these animals and thousands more have been indulging in their own little poisons, naturally, and probably feel the same way.