DRUNKEN ELEPHANTS

With the advent of YouTube a video of inebriated elephants swaying, stumbling and staggering has been making the rounds on the Internet. These huge creatures supposedly got this way by having a happy hour feast of fermented fruit from the African marula tree. Also shown are comical clips of wasted warthogs, giraffes, ostriches, monkeys and other smaller animals staggering around after eating their share of the forbidden fruit.

These scenes were culled from Beautiful People, an award-winning documentary made by South African producer Jamie Uys in the early seventies.  Such was the fascination with this film that the few who wondered whether these scenes might have been staged, were soon drowned out by the applause.

Even though I met Jamie Uys at the time I did not think it appropriate to ask him the big question: “Was it all real?” Like others in South Africa I was only too happy to see a fellow Afrikaner rise from obscurity as a Math teacher and trading post owner to becoming a world-renowned movie maker. Other notable films included The Gods Must be Crazy  and its equally successful sequel.

Jamie died in 1996 at the age of 74. If anyone did ask him the question no one has come forward with the answer. Unless we can find someone who is still alive and knows the real answer we are free to speculate and extrapolate.

It seems unlikely that world’s largest living terrestrial animal, weighing around ten tons with an average intake of 500 pounds of vegetation and 50 gallons of water per day, can fail the breathalyzer test after eating this fruit in any quantity.

One expert puts it this way: “Assuming that fermenting marula fruit would have an alcohol content of 7 percent, it would require 7.1 gallons of marula juice to come up with a half-gallon of alcohol. Producing a liter of marula wine requires 200 fruits. So an elephant would have to ingest more than 1,400 well-fermented fruits to start to get drunk.”

Note also that elephants like to eat their fruit fresh from the tree and, most importantly, hardly digests it before leaving them in their droppings for other creatures to feed on. (Check out the bottom right picture where a dung beetle is toiling away on fresh elephant excrement containing several unprocessed maroela fruits).

So the general consensus of the cynics (including me) is that not only the elephants but the other animals were all darted with tranquilizers to make them groggy. Game rangers who often use this method to tag and study animals or to transport them to greener pastures believe that this is neither inhumane or painful. The biggest harm done in Uys’ case is probably that he started a myth that got new legs with the advent of the electronic era.

In fairness, Jamie Uys did not invent the story. He simply perpetuated the myth. There are travelers' tales dating back to 1839 reporting Zulu accounts that “elephants gently warm their brains with fermented fruits.”  .

By the way, like game ranger Lyson at Ngala in South Africa depicted in this montage, I  have also tried the marula fruit on occasion but never acquired a liking for its tangy taste. I do, however, like Amarula, a very popular liqueur  made from this fruit but not in quantities that leave me wasted.

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