14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, we humans aren't the only ones on this earth with a soft spot for the occasional booze-up. Every now and again, seemingly more sensible creatures make the mistake to drink a little more than they should and end up seriously intoxicated.
It happened in Germany earlier this year, when a house cat spent seven weeks straight trapped in a wine cellar and went through $44 (nearly €40) worth of wine while waiting to be freed.
After the binge, the cat was hungover for three days
Huffington Post tells us it was sometime in July that the feline, named Aljosha, went missing without a trace from its home in the town of Würselen.
Owner Claudia von Büren searched high and low for it, even papered the town with dozens of flyers, but failed to retrieve her beloved pet cat.
Then, one day about seven weeks after its mysterious disappearance, Aljosha returned home all on its own. It didn't take Claudia very long to figure out the cat wasn't feeling well, not by a long shot.
The feline was rushed to a local veterinary clinic, where it was revealed that what was troubling poor Aljosha was a hangover, and a really bad one at that.
“He was more dead than alive when I picked him up. We went to the vets straight away, where they diagnosed him with alcohol poisoning,” Claudia von Büren told the press in an interview.
By the looks of it, the cat spent all the seven weeks that it was missing trapped in a wine cellar. During this time, it cracked open and drank three bottles.
One was a Mosel Saar Ruwer worth $22 (€20), another a dry Alfer Burggraf worth $5.5 (€5) and then the third bottle was a $16.5 (€15) Mosel Riesling.
To sober Aljosha up, vets had to put the feline on a drip for three days. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the inebriated cat eventually started feeling better and was allowed to go home with its family.
Alcohol is quite dangerous for animals, experts warn
Now that word of Aljosha's misfortunes got out, experts feel compelled to warn that, while we humans can enjoy the occasional glass of wine without worrying too much about it, the fact of the matter is that, to animals, alcohol can prove deadly.
That's why it's important that we take care of our pets and make sure they don't gen themselves in trouble. “His misfortune highlights the need to keep our pet cats indoors, where there is less risk of ending up trapped where they don’t belong,” the Humane Society of the US commented on this incident in a statement.