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This ‘Drunk Animals’ clip, which has over a million views on YouTube, is one of the highlights of the 1974 nature documentary, Animals are Beautiful People. But a study published in the March/April 2006 issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, a publication most people probably don’t reference after watching the short clip, asserts that claims of elephants getting drunk off rotting fruit from marula trees in Africa are, and always have been, untrue.

It was a sad, sad moment when I first read the 2005 National Geographic article, Elephants Drunk in the Wild? Scientists Put the Myth to Rest, which highlighted the 2006 study. But now that the ‘Drunk Animals’ clip is becoming an internet sensation I thought it would be right mention that though elephants may resemble beautiful people when you get drunk enough, they might not be as likely to pick up the next round as this clip leads you to believe.

“People just want to believe in drunken elephants,” Steve Morris, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England and a co-author of the study, told NatGeo, adding that anecdotes of elephants found drunk in the wild go back more than a century.

Here are a few claims researches say debunk the drunken elephant theory:

1. Elephants are picky. They regularly push trees over just to be able to get the ripest fruit. It’s unlikely that an elephant would eat any fruit if it were rotten.

2. Elephants are too fond of marula fruit to let it sit and rot before eating it.

3. Animals flock, fly, or run to ripe marulas to take part in the gorging, leaving few fruits lying around long enough to ferment.

4. Elephants regularly visit and revisit the same marula trees, checking the fruits and the bark for palatability and devour the fruits when they are ripe.

5. Food takes between 12 and 46 hours to pass through an elephant’s digestive system, which is not enough time for the fruit to ferment in their stomachs (a claim put forward by some believers).

6. It would take about a half gallon (1.9 liters) of ethanol to make an elephant tipsy. Assuming that fermenting marula fruit would have an alcohol content of 7 percent, it would require 7.1 gallons (27 liters) of marula juice to come up with that 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.

But if you were hoping to rationalize your binge drinking with the ‘it’s only natural’ argument, not all hope is lost. The study only deals with elephants, who, as we all know, are the prudish geniuses of the animal kingdom and therefore aren’t as likely to require booze as other animals such as monkeys, which are also featured in the clip and are small enough to become plenty drunk off the marula fruit.

[Via: National Geographic]