Drunk as a Skunk? 5 Most Famous Soused Animals

(Aug. 31) -- A troop of baboons on a bender has been causing a ruckus in a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, and around the Web due to their unruly behavior. After feasting on the sauvignon blanc grapes fermenting in the sun in Cape Town's wine country every day for the past few weeks, the bacchanalian horde has destroyed property, pelted a child with fruit and killed a Great Dane.

While these baboons are some of the most high-profile lushes in the animal kingdom, they are certainly not the only beasts ever to hit the bottle. Here is a list of five famous drunken animals. Cheers!

1. Boozing Bears

In 2004, a black bear downed three-dozen cans of beer at a campground in Washington State before passing out in a drunken stupor. The bear began his binge with cans of Busch that he found in a camper's cooler but soon switched to Rainier, a local brew. The next day, park officials relocated the bear, but only after baiting it with doughnuts, honey and more of the Rainier.

2. Plastered Pachyderms

Elephants have been known to break into casks of rice wine in east India, often with tragic consequences. At least twice in the past decade, herds of inebriated elephants have toppled electricity poles while rampaging through villages. In 2007, fallen live wires electrocuted six members of a herd of 40 drunken Indian elephants. Just goes to show that drinking and stampeding simply don't mix.

3. Bombed Bovines

Why add red wine to your boeuf bourguignon when you can give it directly to the cow? Sezmu Meats, a cattle farm in Canada, feeds its cows one liter of red wine each day to enhance the flavor of the beef (that's about the same as one glass of red wine for a human). According to Janice Ravndahl of Sezmu Meats, the tipsy cows "moo at one another a little more and seem more relaxed," Vancouver Press reported.

Teams of scientists are now studying whether red wine might reduce methane emissions from cows, or whether the resveratrol in the wine could aid in the cows' heart health. Yet, despite the potential benefits, environmental advocates say that wine-fed beef is far from a sustainable choice, since wine is a processed and unnatural addition to a cow's diet.

4. Tippling Tree Shrews

Not all animals get drunk off man-made alcohol. Deep in the Malaysian rain forest, the bertam palm produces a beer-like nectar with a 3.8 percent alcohol content. And who goes to drink at this intoxicating font? Seven minuscule mammals, including the pen-tailed tree shrew. These animals are so small that the two or three drinks they take each night are equivalent to about nine drinks for a human. The animals don't get sloppy drunk, but they're certainly hooked to the tasty brew -- a benefit to the palm, as these critters are the palm's main pollinators.

These tiny drinkers may even offer an evolutionary explanation for human addiction. Pen-tailed tree shrews are related to the creatures that would later evolve into primates. Their attraction to the alcohol in the bertam palm serves them well, because along with a buzz they get a high-energy meal. Human alcoholism could, in part, be an exploitation of this natural adaptation.

5. Liquored-Up Lorikeets

Another potentially alcohol-producing plant, another drunken mess of an animal. That's at least one theory behind the hundreds of lorikeets spotted passing out around Darwin, Australia, earlier this year. As AOL News reporter David Moye noted, nobody was quite sure what was causing the mysterious feints and lack-of-coordination, with some even theorizing that a virus was behind the odd behavior. But journalist Petra Spiess had another theory. "Usually, when birds get drunk, it is from eating fruit that has fermented," Spiess said. "They can't tell the fruit has fermented, and they get drunk. It's not good, because a drunk bird is a dead bird. Alcohol is a poison, and being drunk puts a bird at an evolutionary disadvantage."