LOL-abies

You know that movie Signs? Imagine how much cooler it would have been if, instead of a preachy horror (ish) movie about aliens, Mel Gibson found wallabies making the circles in his fields, just chilling out, playing some hacky sack, listening to Phish. Picture it with me now: maybe one of them has dreadlocks, they’re wearing a lot of tie-dye and hemp. Can anyone say Academy Award? Take that, M. Night. All right, I guess Mel would have to be growing opium poppies and living in Tasmania. But he is Australian, so there’s that. Call it creative license, or something.

“What is she rambling on about?” Yeah that’s right, I can hear your thoughts. Well, I’m getting there. Tasmania, home of Bugs Bunny’s nemesis (didn’t you know that Elmer Fudd was from Oceania? Man, I slay me), is also a huge producer of legal opium (used for painkillers like morphine). Australia produces about fifty percent of the world’s legally grown opium. Awesome.

Wallabies, which are like little kangaroos (that is the official scientific classification), have been wandering into fields of these poppies, ingesting a few, and making crop circles. In the words of Tasmania’s attorney general, Laura Giddings, these animals are “getting as high as a kite, and going around in circles. Then they crash.” Aw, sleepy little marsupials.

There are a few instances of other animals having a little “Dorothy Moment” in the poppy fields, like sheep, but wallabies are the most frequent offenders. Can you blame them? I mean, it’s Friday, they ain’t got no job …

(I wrote this for Science Buzz)