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.
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