The phrase drunken monkey conjures images of the Far East, martial arts and the likes of Jet Lee or Jackie Chan. But in this case I mean it literally… Spangled Simians.

On the island of St Kitt we see that we are not as far away from our tree dwelling (or in this case beach dwelling) heritage. The island’s vervet monkey population seem to have taken the attitude of ‘monkey see, monkey do’ and have joined holiday makers in getting smashed under the tropical sun.

These monkeys have become experts in scouting unattended drinks from right under our noses, and have developed a complex drinking culture not unlike that of humans. In fact they have become so socially entangled with alcohol that the biggest drinker holds the the rank of alpha male,whilst the others fall anywhere between binge drinkers and recovering alcoholics. It’s interesting to note that the distribution of light to heavy drinkers is roughly the same as our own (8% are tee-totallers, 12% are steady drinkers and 5% are heavy drinkers).

There are few places in the world where you see monkeys acting more human: They lounge drunkenly on deck chairs, stumble down the road clutching drinks, shout abuse at passing rivals and flirt outrageously with the females. Perhaps even more amusingly they end up with mini monkey hangovers, leaving them irritable, slow and hiding from the sunlight (a feeling we all know far too well).

It turns out that this isn’t an isolated case, there are other examples of animals using naturally occurring drugs. Pen-tailed tree shrews have a nightcap of alcoholic nectar before bed, and Swedish moose wait for falling fruit to start fermenting before they get stuck in (these moose even go on a drunken rampage afterwards!). Not only that but we have also now documented both lemurs and dolphins using poison and venom of other animals recreationally. Who knows, maybe our behaviour and desire for alcohol is tucked away in our mammalian genes? Either way I’m sure they love it .

So after all this i was left with a couple of questions:

1) How long will it be until these monkeys work out how to ferment alcohol?

and

2) How long until they can use a cocktail shaker?

Maybe one day i can be relaxing on St Kitts and have a vervet bring me a monkey made Piña Colada in a fresh picked coconut shell… After all, what use is an opposable thumb if you can’t shake up a cocktail or two?

Watch the BBC video here.

The top 10 Drunken Animals by The Drinks Business.

See more on the Dolphins here.

See more on the Lemurs here.

Want to see a Drunk Squirrel?