First there was Fat Boy, the pony that fell in a pool after getting drunk on fermented apples. Then there was the squirrel that was so wasted on aged pumpkins that it couldn’t climb a tree. But in the annals of substance-abusing wildlife, nothing quite matches the latest reports on the behavior of the humble wallabies of Tasmania.
A routine budget hearing on the island has conjured up images of a marsupial version of Trainspotting with the revelation that packs of the wallabies have been abusing the island’s thousands of acres of legal opium poppy fields.
“We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” the island’s attorney general, Lara Giddings, told her colleagues yesterday on Thursday.
PHOTO: AP
Nor does the problem end there. Even smacked-up animals, it seems, cannot break free of the physical law that demands that what goes up must come down.
“Then they crash,” Giddings said. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
Tasmania is the world’s biggest producer of opium grown legally for the pharmaceutical market. About 500 farmers grow the crop on 20,000 hectares of land, producing around half the raw opium for morphine and other opiates.
Giddings was answering questions about the security of the island’s poppy stocks, which are estimated to be among the safest in the world. However, she noted that 2,280 poppy heads had been stolen over the last financial year. And wallabies are not the only miscreants.
Rick Rockliff, field operations manager for Tasmanian Alkaloids — one of the two Tasmanian companies licensed to take medicinal products from poppy straw — said that deer and sheep that munched the poppies had been known to “act weird” afterward.
“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” Rockliff told the Mercury newspaper.
He said growers did their best to stop the local livestock invading the fields as there were worries over the contamination of meat from animals that ate the drug crops.
“There is also the risk to our poppy stocks, so growers take this very seriously. But there has been a steady increase in the number of wild animals and that is where we are having difficulty keeping them off our land,” he said.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
BARRIER BLAME: An aviation expert questioned the location of a solid wall past the end of the runway, saying that it was ‘very bad luck for this particular airplane’ A team of US investigators, including representatives from Boeing, on Tuesday examined the site of a plane crash that killed 179 people in South Korea, while authorities were conducting safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air died in Sunday’s crash. Video showed the aircraft, without its landing gear deployed, crash-landed on its belly and overshoot a runaway at Muan International Airport before it slammed into a barrier and burst into flames. The plane was seen having engine trouble.
RSS