Every year on 12 August, World Elephant Day brings people together to celebrate elephants and draw attention to the challenges facing their survival. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting one of Southern Africa’s most enduring wildlife stories: do elephants really get drunk after eating fermented marula fruit?
It is a wonderfully entertaining image—elephants stumbling through the bush after one marula too many—but the science is considerably more complicated.
Stories of elephants becoming intoxicated after eating marula fruit have circulated in Southern Africa for generations. The tale reached a global audience through the 1974 documentary Animals Are Beautiful People, which showed wildlife apparently staggering after consuming fermented fruit.
Although enormously entertaining, the scenes have long been questioned, and the film should not be treated as scientific evidence of what happens naturally in the wild.
The marula tree has been colloquially dubbed “The Elephant Tree” because of the African Elephant’s great affinity for the fruit it bears. Between the months of December and March, certain areas in southern Africa see this tree burst with bright yellow fruit.
Marula trees fruit during Southern Africa’s summer months and are found across several parts of the Africa’s Eden region, including Zambia’s South Luangwa and Botswana’s Chobe area. Elephants are strongly attracted to the fruit and also browse the trees’ leaves, branches and bark.
Marula is culturally and economically important across the region. Its fruit is eaten fresh and used to produce juices, preserves, traditional beer and commercially distilled drinks.
Simone from Jackalberry Camp came across this pile of elephant dung filled with marula on a trip through the Chobe area
A widely cited 2006 study concluded that wild elephants would be unlikely to consume enough naturally fermented marula fruit, quickly enough, to become visibly intoxicated. The researchers also noted that elephants generally eat fruit from the tree rather than waiting for large quantities to ferment on the ground.
Later genetic research raised an interesting complication: elephants may metabolise ethanol differently from humans. However, this does not prove that wild elephants become drunk from marula fruit. More recent scientific analysis continues to describe the story as a persistent myth rather than an established natural behaviour.
In short, elephants may be physiologically affected by alcohol, but there is still no convincing evidence that naturally fermented marula regularly causes drunken behaviour in wild populations.
Researchers have proposed several possible explanations for unusual behaviour around marula trees, including natural feeding behaviour, competition for fruit and exposure to compounds associated with the tree or insects living in its bark. None has been conclusively shown to explain the popular stories of stumbling elephants.
It would seem that the real reasons for the stumbling elephants are more complex and less fun than the story of the drunken elephants. In any case, the videos circulating on the internet of the befuddled behemoths are entertaining and quite endearing.
So, do elephants get drunk on marula fruit? The most accurate answer is that the story remains far more myth than proven fact. While elephants certainly relish marula fruit, there is no compelling evidence that wild herds routinely become intoxicated from eating it.
The legend may be irresistible, but the reality is even more remarkable. Across the Africa’s Eden region—from Chobe and the Kavango-Zambezi landscape to South Luangwa and beyond—elephants continue to shape the landscape, cross borders and create some of Africa’s most unforgettable wildlife encounters.
This World Elephant Day, let’s celebrate the real giants behind the stories. And if elephants are not, in fact, enjoying sundowners in the African bush, then we all might as well be doing it for them!
