One of nature’s wonders – drunkenness

One of the many reasons why I’m a vegetarian and strong believer in animal rights is because I… One of the many reasons why I’m a vegetarian and strong believer in animal rights is because I believe that most large animals are, like myself, kind, simple creatures who want only loyal companionship, a warm home and an occasional opportunity to hump a female of the species.

In other words, it is wrong to kill animals because they are so basically similar to you and me. Recently a 2-year-old black bear at a Washington state campground has illustrated this point in a way that the average college student can easily understand.

Last month, park rangers at Baker Lake Resort, 80 miles northeast of Seattle, found a large black bear asleep on a campground during the late-morning hours. When they approached the bear, they discovered that the surrounding area looked a lot like Atwood Street on a Sunday morning.

“[We] wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around,” park worker Lisa Broxson told Reuters.

Broxson and her co-workers discovered that the bear had used its teeth and claws to break into several campers’ coolers, chewed open and drank 36 cans of beer. Then the little bear passed out.

So, just in case you have always wondered how many beers it takes to get a 2-year-old black bear totally messed up, the number is 36, which makes the bear a total pushover by the standards of most Pitt News staffers.

Now, I know what you are probably thinking: “Oh no! That witty, knuckleheaded bear from those Labatt Blue commercials finally fell over the edge. Poor guy.”

Wrong — this bear’s tastes are strictly domestic.

Apparently, the bear finished off a few cans of Anheuser-Busch beer but then switched over to Rainier, a Seattle-brewed ale, for the majority of his drinking binge, leaving many available cans of Busch aside.

Park rangers used a trap baited with a box of donuts and two cans of beer to eventually catch the beer-connoisseur bear — which is incidentally the same package my mom gives my dad as a peace offering after an argument — then relocated him to a habitat where alcohol would be less available.

But humans and bears are not the only creatures who enjoy getting royally sloshed.

According to the British Broadcasting Corp., researchers at McGill University in Montreal have completed a study examining how alcohol affects the social lives of green Vervet monkeys.

“The parallels between the Vervets’ behavior and human behavior are striking,” said Frank Ervin, a professor of psychology at McGill’s Institute for Studying Crap That Doesn’t Need to Be Studied. “A cage full of drunken monkeys is like a cocktail party. You have one who gets aggressive, one who gets sexy, one who thinks everything’s funny and one who gets really grumpy.”

The test monkeys were kept in cages and allowed to choose between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and researchers found that overwhelmingly the monkeys, like many people would, chose the booze.

And, finally, according to the Ananova news service, last month a woman in the Swedish town of Karlshamn was attacked by a wild moose, which was found intoxicated on the juices of wild-growing berries, some of which naturally ferment into alcohol at hot temperatures. (Before any of you buy a field guide, there are no such berries growing in Schenley Park.) Wildlife authorities have advised citizens to avoid large, wild animals until the fall, when the berries stop fermenting.

After reading these anecdotes, I hope that the next time you think about ordering a steak or buying a leather belt, you ask yourself, “Can I, as a booze-drinking, debauchery-loving resident of Oakland, really deny another creature a future opportunity to get polluted, maybe assault a total stranger, then pass out in the woods?”

I hope you decide, “No, I can’t.”

E-mail Nick Keppler at pnk6@pitt.edu.