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@erynne

A random aside, horses love the taste of beer, as it essentially resembles pre-digested barley / wheat / hops, their preferred feedstock. Horses also have an extremely high alcohol tolerance, even accounting for their comparative size (3-8x the weight of an adult male human), as their gastrointestinal tract is specialized in digesting grains and plant matter and breaking it down through fermentation, while their livers are similarly specialized to rapidly metabolize the resultant alcohol products into usable energy before it can actually enter the bloodstream and affect them neurologically like it does to humans or animals less specialized in digesting grains – like dogs or bears.

It’s uncertain if horses can even get drunk: for reference, the average horse has about 12-15 gallons of blood in their body, compared to 1-1.5 gallons for humans. By doing some questionable calculations, to get a horse legally impaired at a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08% – without accounting for the increased efficiency of their liver and intestinal tract – a horse would need to consume more than 12 beers an hour – versus more than 1-2 beers an hour for an adult human. A ballpark estimate for how much they would actually need to get drunk based on their improved digestive tract – probably more like 20-30 beers an hour.

TL;DR: for horses, alcohol is to grain what table sugar is to fruit for humans. To them it’s basically the concentrated essence of Y U M.