A liquor shop at Block Chowk in Ranchi’s Ormanjhi area got a visitor no one was expecting on a recent afternoon: a monkey that wandered in off the street, moved past the shelves, and made its way straight toward the bottles. What started as a mildly unusual sighting quickly turned into a story that spread well beyond Ranchi, as videos of what followed began circulating online and drawing attention from viewers across the country.
Biscuits Didn’t Work. The Monkey Stayed.
According to reports from the scene, shop workers noticed the animal almost immediately and tried the two most obvious tactics to get it to leave: shooing it away, and offering it biscuits as a distraction. Neither worked. The monkey showed no interest in being redirected and remained inside the shop, apparently far more interested in what was on the shelves than anything the staff were offering as a substitute.
From Curiosity to a Broken Bottle
What happened next is what turned this from an odd but forgettable incident into a viral story. Reports indicate the monkey picked up a vodka bottle, broke it open, and drank from it. The exact circumstances, how the monkey managed to open the bottle and roughly how much it consumed, haven’t been independently verified, and no shop employee or forest official has offered a precise, on-record account of that part of the sequence. What is clear from the footage that followed is the outcome: the animal became visibly drowsy.
A Deep Sleep on the Liquor Cartons
Rather than leaving or continuing to explore the shop, the monkey climbed onto a stack of cartons kept inside the store and settled in for what videos show was a genuinely deep sleep. Customers continued to arrive at the shop as word spread, and several people stopped to record the animal lying among the boxes, visibly out cold while ordinary business carried on around it. Those videos are what eventually pushed the story onto social media timelines well outside Jharkhand, with viewers reacting with a mix of amusement and, in some cases, concern for the animal.
A Rescue Team Was Called In
The incident didn’t end with the monkey simply waking up and wandering back out on its own. According to reporting on the incident, a rescue team was brought in to safely remove the animal from the shop, a detail that matters more than it might first appear. An intoxicated wild animal inside an enclosed commercial space is not simply a funny scene; it’s a situation with real risk on both sides; risk to the disoriented animal from panicked customers, sudden movement, or an attempt to physically drive it out, and risk to bystanders from an animal whose reactions, while sedated by alcohol, are far less predictable than usual. Specific details about which agency or team handled the removal have not been widely reported, but the presence of a dedicated response, rather than shop staff simply waiting it out or forcing the issue themselves, points to at least some recognition on the ground that this wasn’t a situation to be handled casually.
Why an Incident Like This Isn’t Just a Laugh
Videos of animals behaving in unexpectedly human ways tend to spread fast precisely because they’re funny, and this one is no exception. But incidents involving wild animals and alcohol carry a genuine welfare dimension that’s easy to scroll past in favour of the punchline. Alcohol affects the nervous systems of non-human primates in broadly similar ways to how it affects humans, impairing coordination, judgment, and awareness of danger. A monkey that has consumed enough alcohol to fall into a deep sleep on a stack of boxes is, for the duration of that effect, considerably more vulnerable than usual, to traffic if it wanders outside afterward, to defensive reactions from frightened people, or simply to whatever hazards exist in an unfamiliar indoor space it wouldn’t normally be exploring so carelessly.
This isn’t an isolated species-level quirk, either. Human-wildlife overlap in towns and cities across India regularly puts monkeys in direct contact with food, drink, and packaging that was never meant for them, and open shopfronts, including liquor stores, are exactly the kind of accessible, ground-level space where that contact happens. A monkey that has learned to associate an open shop with something worth investigating doesn’t necessarily distinguish between a fruit vendor and a liquor counter.
A Story With No Confirmed Harm, and a Quiet Reminder Underneath It
As of the available reporting, there’s no indication the monkey suffered lasting harm, and the removal appears to have gone smoothly enough that it didn’t become a bigger incident. That’s a genuinely fortunate outcome, and it’s worth being clear that this was, first and foremost, a strange and mildly amusing few minutes at a small-town liquor shop rather than a wildlife emergency.
Even so, stories like this are a useful, low-stakes reminder of something easy to overlook: open storefronts in areas with resident monkey populations are an invitation, whether shopkeepers intend it or not, and what an animal finds once it wanders in isn’t always as harmless as spilled snacks or scattered paperwork. A closed door, a barrier at ground level, or simply faster intervention the moment an animal is spotted near shelving can be the difference between a story people laugh about online and one with a genuinely bad ending for the animal involved.
- Sources: Times of India, LatestLY, Business Today
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