Shetland Pony Breaks Into English Bar, Allegedly Gets Drunk

Metro, in a story that will doubtless cause irreparable harm to a Shetland pony named Mocha, reported that the pony in question somehow snuck into a bar in Gravesend, a bit east of London, and got drunk.

The evidence for this appears to be a video in which Mocha walks slowly around a bar, and the assumption is that the pony finished off a few beers left lying around.

The question of whether it’s safe for a horse to drink beer is, amazingly, not an unusual one: Practical Horseman has an interview with a veterinary specialist concerning this very topic. Beer, made from hops and grains, appears to have an appealing flavor to equines, possibly because its raw materials are very similar to the animal’s favorite foods. Interestingly, the equine stomach is uniquely well-suited to alcohol: the magazine notes that horse livers naturally produce large amounts of an enzyme that breaks alcohol down into its constituent parts, including water and carbohydrates, the latter of which are quickly used as energy.

That process means that it takes quite a lot of alcohol to get a horse drunk, much more than even a similarly-sized human. (By the way, the vet interviewed says, “I would not give an overweight horse a steady diet of beer. But one or two beers a week will definitely do no harm.”) But even if horses didn’t have a built-in tolerance for alcohol, they’re still gigantic animals – even a Shetland pony like Mocha, a small breed by domestic equine standards, weighs, according to PetBreeds, about 450 pounds. In other words, it is exceedingly unlikely that Mocha managed to get drunk off of the remainders of a few beers (and the video, to us, seems pretty innocuous). Regardless, a pony in a bar is just what we needed at the end of this week.

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