No joke this. In all, two dozen wild elephants got drunk after consuming ‘mahua’, a traditional country liquor, and slept for hours in an Odisha forest, PTI reports.

This unusual reality came to light after a group of people from a nearby village were moving around the forest where they found a herd of elephants were asleep.” They had devoured the water fermented with the intoxicating flowers and were in deep sleep”, said the report.

These people were villagers near the Shilipada cashew forest in the Keonjhar district. They had spotted a total of 24 elephants, who were apparently drunk and were sleeping near the place where mahua flowers were kept in water in large pots for fermentation.

PTI report quotes a villager called Naria Sethi saying,” We went into the jungle at around 6 am to prepare mahua and found that all the pots were broken and the fermented water was missing. We also found that the elephants were sleeping. They consumed the fermented water and got drunk." 

Forest department personnel, after reaching the spot in the jungle under the Patana forest range, had to beat drums to wake the herd up. The elephants then went deep inside the forest, said Ghasiram Patra, the forest ranger, states PTI report.