While horses love licking frogs to get high, they also enjoy locoweed, a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug. For equines, locoweed has the same effect that nicotine has on people: It is extremely addictive and can be very harmful to their health, potentially leading to death. During the harsh winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in pastures. Horses are initially attracted to it because of its taste, but they surely love the extra perks as well!
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Capuchin Monkeys And Hallucinogenic Millipedes
Both capuchin monkeys in South America (one of mankind’s closest relatives) and lemurs in Madagascar have learned to get high off insects. Several species of millipedes squirt out a poisonous compound when agitated. Lemurs and monkeys have discovered that not only are they able to ward off parasitic insects by covering themselves in the liquid, but they also get a great narcotic buzz. However, consuming millipede poison does not go without risk. It is filled with cyanide, a compound that is deadly to pretty much everything. Yet for these monkeys, the amazing mind-altering effects seem to outweigh any fear of death.
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Jaguars and Their Hallucinogenic Version of Catnip
Jaguars are the junkies of the jungle. Looking for a high, these big cats will seek out the roots of the banisteriopsis caapi plant and gnaw on them until they start to hallucinate. Caapi root contains a variety of powerful MAOIs (chemicals akin to those found in antidepressants), which heighten the animal’s senses and make them extremely high. Some scientists believe that humans learned how to use the root by observing jaguars getting high off of them.
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Bighorn Sheep Suck Rocks for Lichen
Completely unique to rocks in the remote Canadian Rockies is a fungus-like organism: yellow-green lichen. Despite the fact it contains absolutely no nutritional value and is extremely dangerous to access, bighorn sheep will risk their lives to taste it. Once they reach the lichen, the sheep will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it—and in the process get very high.
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Shroomin’ Reindeers
Santa didn’t make it to your house last Christmas Eve? Well, it could have been because all his reindeer were high on amanita muscaria mushrooms. Like most wild herbivores, reindeer have a very firm constitution that allows them to eat all manner of nasty plants and fungi without getting sick. Many strains of hallucinogenic mushrooms are toxic to human beings, but not toxic to reindeer. Oddly enough, humans feed the reindeer mushrooms and collect their hallucinogenic urine for later consumption.
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Wacky Wallabies
In the summer of 2009, farmers in Tasmania unmasked the culprit behind a batch of crop circles. Aliens? Hardly. The crop-stompin’ was sourced back to something far more logical—stoned marsupials. Wallabies were caught eating opium poppies grown for medicinal purposes, which made them carve out crop circles as they hopped around high as a kite. The country produces half of the world’s legally-grown opium. “They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away,” said retired Tasmanian poppy farmer Lyndley Chopping, to the Australian Broadcasting Network. “They’d come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock.”
(Photo: Martin Zwick/Getty Images)
Hopped Up Hummingbirds
Some hummingbirds feed on the nectar of the datura flower and get quite a buzz from it. The flower is extremely toxic and its strength varies with plant age. A book published in 2009, Pharmacology and Abuse of Cocaine, Amphetamines, Ecstasy, and Related Designer Drugs, found that datura’s combined deliriuma and physical discomfort make it the least-liked psychotic agent for humans—but at least hummingbirds enjoy it.
(Photo: Hart_curt/Creative Commons)
Pen-tailed Treeshrew
The pen-tailed treeshrew spends its evenings in Southeast Asia drinking the fermented nectar of Bertram palm trees. With an alcohol content of nearly four percent, the nectar is quite potent. On any given night, the rodent has a 36 percent chance of being drunk by human standards, yet it shows no outward signs of being intoxicated.
