Opening a potentially very heavy week of nightly evening news with a lighter story is a wise move- and that’s certainly what the team at The Feed appeared to be doing by having a story about cane toad licking addicted dogs kick off its Addiction Week.
As cartoonish as this story may sound on paper (The Simpsons anyone?), the results can be deadly serious for the dogs. Whilst it’s hardly an epidemic we need to bring the DARE to Resist crew over from America (and from the 80s), it’s still a serious problem for any north Queensland dog owner, and an absurd one at that. Still, online program guides have a child heroin addict story listed in place of this one (set to air later in the week), so maybe we did off lightly after all.
On a lighter note though, or at least on less of a ‘oh god my pet could be tripping balls right now’ note, would you call regular consumption of chillies an addiction? The chillies in question are comparable to riot quad-grade capsicum spray. In what is surely one of the more bizarre games of one-upmanship of our times, a small group of chili cultivators are selectively growing specific strains of chili pepper with Scoville heat units in ridiculous numbers. What this means, is that you can get chillies that are so hot that you throw up, pass out and potentially hallucinate. To the dedicated, these peppers are a challenge (worth filming for YouTube naturally) and another step before the next “world’s hottest chili”. Addiction is a weird term to define, but there is certainly something not normal about this level of dedication to abusing your own body.
And what would a Monday night The Feed be without Celebrity Chin Wag with Lee Lin Chin? Having Australian’s most stylish journalist counting down her ‘favourite’ celebrity addictions was a golden touch to very excellent episode of TV.
Review Score: FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Feed airs Monday-Thursday, 7:35 (repeated 10:30) on SBS2
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