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That may be true once you have experience with alcohol, but I think you overestimate the ability of people with less experience to notice. Also, with strong enough alcohol it can easily be too late by the time you've actually tasted it if you don't handle liquor well. I'm quite a bit bigger than the size of the median twelve year old and a single sip of 190-proof Everclear from a flask a friend handed me with no more explanation than "Try this." was more than enough to knock me out within ten minutes. Fortunately it was in company that proved trustworthy (at least, I have no reason to suspect anything untoward happened after I passed out on the couch), but that experience was a bit of a wakeup call for the risks involved.
So you didn't notice the extreme dryness and burning as it touched your lips, nor the extremely uncomfortable warming/drying feeling on your tongue and mouth and throat, and you managed to swallow it not expecting these things, and somehow it was enough to knock you out when a "sip" is certainly less than an ounce and an ounce of Everclear is about 1.6 standard drinks (a standard drink being e.g. a 12oz can of 5% beer)?
I did notice those symptoms but as it was my second drink of alcohol ever, I didn't recognize what those symptoms meant.
We are probably using "knock out" differently in this case. It's not that I fell unconscious due to alcohol poisoning, but just that alcohol (and other depressants) makes me very sleepy and in this case I sipped it, then started feeling extremely tired, laid down and fell asleep.
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Most people without experience in alcohol get repulsed by a sip of beer or wine when they are tricked into trying the "stuff adults are drinking" by a cheeky aunt/uncle/cousin. Almost no one, particularly in college or late HS, gets drunk on accident. They get more drunk than they intended because that is just how humans work. They eat more than they intend at Fogo de Chao as well. If a single sip of everclear (which is almost impossible to sip by the way) makes you pass out, even if you are 95 lbs, that is a metabolic problem. That is still less than 2 shots of vodka, which any 12 year old would just end up going crazy and running around like a wildman if they drank. Dogs have weaker livers than humans WRT alcohol and 40 lb rescues can drink whole cans of beer without passing out.
This comment was a hell of a ride. Now I'm just imaging 12 year old vikings running around drunk on vodka.
Why do you know this???? lol
That dog livers are less tolerant of alcohol? I learned that in a neurochemistry class in college where we were discussing which animals were best bio-equivalents for drug testing.
The other part is the result of drunk college kids feeding beer to dogs, which I was not a part of, but certainly saw the after affects of.
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