The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they're relative lightweights because they lack the gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty high, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. However to find the real champs, you have to think smaller — really small — think hamster. Gwen Lupfer, a psychologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has studied alcohol consumption in hamsters, revealed that they regularly down the alcoholic equivalent of a human drinking 3 pints of 190-proof Everclear. In the wild, hamsters hoard ryegrass seeds and fruit in their burrows, and they eat the stored fermenting fruit as it becomes more and more alcoholic over the winter. As far back as the 1950s, scientists in Texas found that hamsters could outdrink the common lab rat without blinking an eye. Hamsters have to drink a lot to get drunk. That’s because alcohol goes straight from the gut to the liver, which begins breaking down the mind-altering toxin ethanol. Hamster livers are so efficient at processing ethanol that very little ends up in their blood. Hamsters don’t just tolerate alcohol, though; they prefer it to water — and that might be because they’re drinking for the calories. Alcohol has 7 calories per gram, almost as many as fat does, which clocks in at 9 calories. So, if you happen to run across a hamster that’s shivering in the cold, give it a nip of brandy and that should perk it right up.
