What's really interesting is that study was made and the distribution of social drinkers, nice drunks, mean drunks, etc, roughly matches that of the humans.
Jaguars actually eat the leaves of b. capii, which acts as a MAOI in the Ayahuasca brew.
While there is some discussion that the harmala alkaloids in b. capii might also be slightly psychoactive in high doses, the actual main compound in Ayahuasca is DMT, which is certainly very psychoactive, but not bioavailable when consumed orally without a MAOI. Unless the jaguars have figured out how to combine the two and/or brew ayahuasca, I strongly doubt that's their intention and that they'd get comparable effects.
I think the idea stems from the BBC show Weird Nature showing a jaguar eating yage leaves in episode 6, "Peculiar Potions".
I'm not really sold on how well that content was researched.
Sure. In my opinion, however, the overall context of the image does imply the jaguar enjoys similar effects to those clearly requiring the presence of DMT, as that is what is most people commonly associate with ayahuasca.
It's a bit of a "look at all those animals getting high, this jaguar is even talking to machine elves in the 19th dimension" kinda thing, where - if I remember correctly - they actually consume the leaves for digestive purposes.
Again, the leaves do have an effect, e. g. they apparently act as an SSRI (that's how common antidepressants work) and we can't be absolutely sure about their effect on cats (catnip certainly has some effect on cats we don't readily enjoy), so I can't dismiss the notion of jaguars seeking them out for that reason as well.
I remember reading that the Sami people used to drink the piss of a reindeer that had eaten fly agaric/fly amanita mushrooms since even though they're poisonous, most of the poison gets left in the reindeer while the nice hallucinogenic stuff passes through. Wikipedia put it a bit differently:
Patrick Harding describes the Sami custom of processing the fly agaric through reindeer.
I remember reading about this too (cannot remember where exactly. It was a long time ago) and how that practice helped shape the idea of Santa's flying reindeer.
I thought it may have been a more accurate and respectful transcription of the First Nations language the word came from, as opposed to the simplified colonial-era anglicisations, though it being Spanish orthography makes sense.
I was going to recommend the movie this is from, "Animals are Beautiful People"! It's an older Disney produced documentary from the 70s I think. They put a comedic twist on the narraration and add plenty of cartoon sound affects throughout the film
I imagine it's either there's a chemical in the new fungi that specifically makes the rams high but not us or there is something in there that doesn't affect them but is toxic to us
Based on a cursory Google search with the terms "bighorn sheep"+"Psychoactive fungi" it would seem they are referring to rumors of a psychoactive lichen that have not been formally identified.
-secondly, you don't want to eat Amanita Muscaria aka fly agaric mushrooms unless you have thorough knowledge of what you're doing. It contains a hepatotoxic compound (hence the deer piss reference in someone else's comment) -and it should not be confused with the Psilocybin containing mushrooms AKA magic mushrooms. They do different things in the brain—The more you know 🌈 🌟
There’s an urban legend that koalas spend their entire lives drunk because the eucalyptus leaves they subsist on ferment inside them, though maybe that’s just because they look a bit dopey.
(Bad example if they mean wallaby, opium is an invasive species and they only eat it out of desperation. A better one would be the chronically addled eucalyptic meth head that is the koala)