While humans around the world are social distancing in the face of the Covid-19 Coronavirus, a group of elephants in China are keeping the party going.
As reported in Newsweek, a group of fourteen elephants wandered into Chinese village earlier this week in search of food, finding instead a treasure trove of locally-produced corn wine — at least 30 liters (7.9 gallons) worth.
After drinking their fill, the pachyderms were observed passed out in a nearby tea field.
While a 2005 National Geographic study seemed to put to bed the popular legend that elephants routinely get drunk from ingesting fermenting Marula fruit, that didn’t take into account alcohol that has already been brewed or distilled. In 2010, a herd of 70 elephants went on a drunken rampage in India, killing three people.
“Elephants are fond of alcohol, [and] they are good at finding [it],” conservationist Parveen Kaswan noted on Twitter.
According to a 1984 report cited in The Drinks Business, elephants would need to consume “around 10 [liters] of alcohol (of 7%) to start acting drunk.”
Clearly, that corn wine was pretty strong.
