A few months ago, I attended a talk given at the Wellington Humanists about consciousness. In the middle of the talk we were shown a short, 5 minute segment of a documentary piece that shows animals, from elephants all the way down to caterpillars, getting drunk after eating fermented marula fruit.
Recently someone shared with me an article from the March 2025 issue of the “Brooklyn Tattler”, a monthly magazine for the residents of Brooklyn, Wellington. The article in question was written by someone from the Brooklyn Wellness Hub, a group of “natural” health practitioners local to the area. The obvious nonsense that I was being shown was part of a list of tips for growing vegetables and fruit in your garden, and it advised readers to:
Four Papua New Guinea women, believed by fellow villagers to have used sorcery to cause a fatal road crash, were tortured with hot metal rods to confess, then murdered and buried standing up in a pit (Stuff, 25 January).