Elephant beats heroin addiction with detox
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When the crime world and animal world collide, strange things happen. In China, an elephant was fed bananas spiked with heroin. In Brazil, drug runners kept a large caiman, possibly to dispose of enemies.
Reuters, reporting today out of Beijing, tells the tale of an elephant who beat its addiction:
A once drug-addled elephant fed heroin-laced bananas by illegal traders will return home after emerging clean from a three-year detox program on China’s tropical island province of Hainan. The 4-year-old bull elephant, referred to alternately as ‘Big Brother’ or ‘Xiguang’ in state media reports, was captured in 2005 in southwest China by traders who used spiked bananas to control him. After police arrested the traders and freed Xiguang a few months later, the elephant was confirmed to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms and sent to a wild animal protection center in Hainan for rehab, Xinhua news agency said. A year of methadone injections at five times the human dosage had helped wean Xiguang off his addiction.
Associated Press, reporting Wednesday out of Rio de Janeiro, tells the tale of the drug dealer and the type of caiman known as a jacarei alligator:
Brazilian police say they’ve literally taken a bite out of crime. Officers raided the home of a drug dealer’s mother-in-law on Wednesday and found two alligators, one of them about 6 feet long, said police inspector Ronaldo Oliveira. Police speculated that traffickers used the jacarei alligators to help them dispose of bodies and to torture captured members of rival gangs, though they gave no evidence of anyone being eaten or tortured. Oliveira said the woman didn’t know the animals were in her house and she was not arrested. The alligators were turned over to the Rio zoo. Police also arrested three men while seizing several guns and a small quantity of drugs during the operation in the Coreia shantytown, Oliveira said.
It’s hard to say what’s more surprising -- the bit about disposing of bodies or that the drug dealer’s mother ‘didn’t know the animals were in her house.’
-- Steve Padilla
