Pharmaceutical Journal
Haynes believes reindeer deliberately seek out the mushrooms to escape the monotony of dreary long winters. "They have a desire to experience altered states of consciousness.
"For humans a common side-effect of mushrooms is the feeling of flying, so it's interesting the legend about Santa's reindeer is they can fly."
Fly agaric is found across the northern hemisphere and has long been used by mankind for its psychotropic properties. But its use can be dangerous because it also contains toxic substances. Reindeer seem to metabolise these toxic elements without harm, while the main psychoactive constituents remain unmetabolised and are excreted in the urine. Reindeer herders in Europe and Asia long ago learnt to collect the reindeer urine for use as a comparatively safe source of the hallucinogen.
Another hallucinogen used by wild animals is the African plant iboga (Tabernanthe iboga). It has been reported from Gabon and the Congo that boars, porcupines, gorillas and mandrills will dig up and eat the powerfully hallucinogenic roots.
In the Canadian Rockies, wild bighorn sheep are said to take great risks to get at a rare psychoactive lichen. In scraping it off the rock surface they can wear their teeth down to the gums.
On the prairies of the south-west US, horses and other grazing mammals can become addicted to hallucinogen-containing plants known generically as locoweed. These plants, mainly species of Astragalus and Oxytropis, are normally avoided, but animals that try them can come back time and again for a repeat fix. Symptoms include altered gait, aimless wandering, impaired vision, erratic behaviour and listlessness.
In South America’s rain forests, jaguars have been filmed behaving in a kittenish manner after gnawing the bitter roots and bark of yage (Banisteriopsis caapi), a hallucinogenic vine that is also used by native tribes in ritualistic ceremonies. Some anthropologists believe that man first learnt to use the drug after watching jaguars.
Mention of this big cat leads finally to perhaps the best known recreational drug used by animals — catnip (Nepeta spp). About two-thirds of adult domestic cats are susceptible to its effects, as are several other species of cat, including lions.
This is one of those articles worth remembering just so you can tell about it at the Christmas dinner table or something.
