Tuesday, September 29, 2015

A raccoon as a breathalyzer deception device???


This sounds like an episode worthy of M*A*S*H at its most madcap - yet apparently it really happened.  I should think the guilty party (pun intended) will go down in US Navy history . . . or, at least, San Diego Police Department and Military Police history!




Peter

5 comments:

shugyosha said...

Well, that's xbradtc's place. He does post interesting things.

Take care.

Mike_C said...

Spew alert please! Nearly aspirated the pastry I was eating when I read the first few lines at the link.

A quick pubmed search revealed the existence of a mouse breathalyzer (and the same group has also published their invention of a rat breathalyzer, but raccoons, nada. Interestingly (which I believe is academic-ese for "I find this amusing, but probably no one else cares"), some Canadians report post-mortem findings on a raccoon that went crazy (pardon the esoteric medical terminology :-) after ingesting ethylene glycol. They conclude: This report highlights the importance of including ethylene glycol toxicosis on the list of differential diagnoses for abnormal mentation and seizures in free-ranging raccoons. Yep. Good to know.

Anonymous said...

I sent the link on to a friend of mine with the question,

"How hard do you have to squeeze the raccoon to create enough airflow for the breathalyzer?"

His reply is "ask a bagpiper"

Al_in_Ottawa

dirty dingus said...

As someone who lives a few miles from Camp P - and cycled through there on Saturday - allow me to inject a hint of scepticism into this.

First question. Given that Camp Pendleton in in California and hence on Pacific time, why is the report giving an EDT time?

Second question. Where did the raccoon come from. They aren't non-existent but they sure are rare.

Anonymous said...

Dirty Dingus asks:
"Second question. Where did the raccoon come from. They aren't non-existent but they sure are rare."

Raccoons come from mama raccoons. This one apparently lived in the park like lots of other indigenous wildlife in California. Though I suspect the raccoon was probably not on welfare like the other park residents.