One Christmas Eve many years ago, I cooked a big meal with friends at my flat. The Christmas cheer was fortified or perhaps jet propelled by various bottles of wine, liquor, and clear stuff in bottles conspicuously void of label. Later in the evening, I noticed that my cat had climbed up onto the kitchen table. When I observed more closely, I saw that she was pressing her paw into the puddle of red wine at the bottom of the glass and licking her paws clean. Really clean. Surgically clean. I noted this down for comedic purposes. But what I had witnessed was nothing short of evolutionary instinct.
Animals drinking seems so unnatural. And sure, put into a human context, and it’s ridiculous. Some towns have bear mascots that drink beer. Vervet monkeys on Caribbean islands steal cocktails at bars and guzzle them nearby. And evidently a common scene to come across in Sweden is a drunken elk stuck in a tree. They get into that fix because they are trying to reach more of the fermenting apples which made them drunk in the first place.
And the reason for all of this is ethanol. We humans enjoy it in rum and whiskey, but abundant amounts of ethanol have existed in every Earth ecosystem for over 100 million years. This has given the animal world a lot of time to develop a taste for it. Those vervet monkeys have been driven out of the forests by a decline in their favorite ethanol-rich fruit source. To get their fix, they invade fields of sugar cane, which sometimes ferments. Having developed a taste for the sweet and fermented, they now resort to going after tourists’ fruity cocktails. It’s all about survival.
A survival which might be based on how well they hold their booze. Fruit bats eat ethanol-rich fermenting fruit, but it’s possible they have developed a stronger resistance to alcohol to keep from getting too tipsy. (You try flying through a dark cave while drunk on fruit.) Hamsters hold their booze disappointingly well. (‘I can drink like a hamster’ loses something on the way to idiomatic braggadocio.) And the pen-tailed treeshrew has one of the animal kingdom’s higher tolerances to booze, which explains why pen-tailed treeshrews 1. are always the other animals’ designated drivers and 2. still exist. That is, getting drunk isn’t a great idea evolutionarily speaking. We have five beers and lie on the couch with a slice of pizza and an episode of Modern Family (for example). But animals can’t get drunk in a world surrounded by predators – they wouldn’t last long. Animals crave alcohol’s calories and bemoan its buzzy side effects. We do the polar opposite.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are animals that don’t hold their booze. Beer is used to get moths and flies drunk so they can be killed off. When zebrafish were given alcohol in research studies they became more reckless, ignoring robot facsimiles of their main predator – the heron. This is similar to when your mild-mannered accountant friend has a few beers and throws an elbow at a rugby player at the pub. The zebrafish is nature’s drunken accountant, neither of whom are likely to survive long.
Some of the drunkest animals on earth – besides the ten-toed, donut-loving homo sapiens – are our relative primates. Chimps, apes, and spider monkeys all show a tendency to go for overripe, fermented fruit. Macaques not only drink like us, they act like us too. Macaques who live alone ingest more alcohol than those with a family unit. They also have a tendency to sway, fall, and puke after partaking too much. Give that macaque a few episodes of Scrubs and a frozen pizza and you have just summarized my 20s (read: 30s). But primates’ ability to find and take in ethanol may be one reason we are even around.
The idea behind the drunken monkey hypothesis is that for tens of millions of years, our primate forefathers would sniff out the aromatic ripening fruit in areas scarce with food. Our ancestors’ ability to sniff out this ethanol-rich food meant more calories – riper fruit is denser in calories and more developed sugars. This all meant more energy. Our ape ancestors were able to digest this riper fruit better than the smaller monkeys who ate the unripe fruit in the tree canopies above. Indeed, studies have identified a mutation in an alcohol-digesting enzyme from around 10 million years ago – right around the time our pre-human ape grandparents came out of the trees to look for food on the ground.
So, we survived because of booze. The downside of this, if that’s how you want to see it, is that this conceivably led to our tendency to abuse alcohol. Oh well, life’s a give and take. We survived; but we gorge on ethanol until we’re incoherent, aggressive, and drawn towards stupid decisions (see also: human, nature of). So the next time you send a text message of ill-choice when you’ve had a few, blame our drunken monkey ancestors. But remember, they’re why you’re here.
As for my cat, her evolutionary pull to the ethanol on my kitchen table didn’t end well. After a few paws of the grape, she started a fight with one of my guests, jumped onto the counter and stole some olives. Then she puked on my kitchen floor and spent the rest of the night rubbing her face against mine and telling me how much she loved me. She spent Christmas morning half under covers and in the afternoon tried with all her linguistic gifts to pronounce ibuprofen. Classic evolutionary tale.
Today we celebrate our drunken monkey ancestors and our drunken monkey contemporaries by drinking something sweet and fruity, just like they would want. The Planter’s Punch was likely developed in the late 18th century in Jamaica or Barbados and would have been a light, refreshing drink for people working all day under the hot sun. It’s the cocktail our primate ancestors would have made themselves if only they’d had the ingredients and opposable thumbs.
The Planter’s Punch:
- 2 oz dark rum
- 1 oz lime juice
- ½ oz simple syrup
- 1 oz orange juice (optional)
- 2 dashes Angostura bitters
Pour all ingredients into a container with ice. Shake it. Then strain into a tall glass over fresh ice. Garnish with lime, mint, pineapple or cherry. Drink to my cat. Drink to the ubiquity of ethanol and its role in our existence. And drink to our ancestors, who looked on the ground for fruit and instead found God.