Rats in India are charged for eating cannabis confiscated by police 0:43
New Delhi (CNN) --
North Indian rats have been accused of eating hundreds of kilograms of cannabis seized from traffickers and stored in police warehouses.
"Rats are small animals and they are not afraid of the police," a court in the city of Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, said after hearing that local police were unable to provide nearly 200 kilograms of confiscated cannabis that was to be used as evidence in a recent case.
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Court documents say police had been asked to provide 386 kilograms of cannabis, but the prosecution told the court that more than 700 kilograms of marijuana stored at various stations in Mathura could be affected by rat infestation.
Mature marijuana plants at The Dispensary in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 23.
(Credit: Andre Malerba/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
And this isn't the first time rats have attacked, supposedly.
The judge investigating the case cites the Mathura police as blaming rodents for the destruction of a total of more than 500 kilograms of cannabis that had been seized in various cases and stored in the city's Shergarh and Highway police stations.
The court then established guidelines for the police to auction off or dispose of the cannabis.
"There is a threat of rats in almost all police stations. Therefore, necessary measures must be taken to safeguard the confiscated cannabis," the court document said.
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However, accounts of the exact sequence of events that followed the rats' alleged use of cannabis seem a bit hazy.
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In statements after the trial, Mathura City Police Superintendent Martand Prakash Singh told CNN that the cannabis had been "destroyed by rains and floods" and not by rats.
"There was no reference to rats in the (report submitted to the court) (...). The police only mentioned that the seized cannabis was destroyed by rains and floods," he said.
If the rats are, in fact, guilty as charged, they may now take it easy.
A 2016 study by the University of British Columbia found that the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana made lab rats sluggish.
The researchers trained 29 rats to perform an experiment in which they had to choose between a simple task and a more difficult one to win a treat.
The rats used to choose the more difficult, and more rewarding, task, but after being given marijuana, the same rats chose the easier task.
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