“You just put a bottle of unsweetened Everclear on the cage and they love it,” says Gwen Lupfer, a psychologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has studied alcohol consumption in hamsters. They regularly down 18 grams per kilogram of body weight a day, the alcoholic equivalent of a human drinking a liter and a half of 190-proof Everclear. In the wild, hamsters hoard ryegrass seeds and fruit in their burrows, and they eat this fermenting store as it becomes more and more alcoholic over the winter. In the lab, well, they’re pretty happy with Everclear. Given the choice between water and alcohol, they go for the booze…

And they can drink a lot before getting drunk. When Lupfer was studying dwarf hamsters, she and her students rated the animals’ drunkenness on a literal wobbling scale. They scored the hamsters from zero, for “no visible wobbling,” to four, for “falls onto side and does not right self.” (They had previously, unsuccessfully, tried to track the hamsters’ walking by dipping their paws in watercolor—they couldn’t tell the drunk and sober hamsters’ paw prints apart.) The hamsters never averaged above 0.5 on the wobbling scale—even at the highest oral doses. But when Lupfer and her team instead injected the ethanol directly into the hamsters’ abdomens, the animals didn’t do so well. They started wobbling and falling over at much, much lower doses.