Never get into a drinking competition with a hamster.

“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.