page_title: Curare
section_title: Hunting Uses
hierarchical_section_title: Curare / History / Hunting Uses
context_page_description: Curare is a common name for various plant extract alkaloid arrow poisons originating from Central and South America. Curare is active only by an injection or a direct wound contamination by poisoned dart or arrow. These poisons function by competitively and reversibly inhibiting the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which is a subtype of acetylcholine receptor found at the neuromuscular junction. This causes weakness of the skeletal muscles and, when administered in a sufficient dose, eventual death by asphyxiation due to paralysis of the diaphragm. It is harmless if taken orally because curare compounds are too large and highly charged to pass through the lining of the digestive tract to be absorbed into the blood. For this reason, people can safely eat curare-poisoned prey.
context_section_description: Curare was used as a paralyzing poison by many South American indigenous people. Since it was too expensive to be used in warfare, curare was mainly used during hunting. The prey was shot by arrows or blowgun darts dipped in curare, leading to asphyxiation owing to the inability of the victim's respiratory muscles to contract. In particular, the poison was used by the Island Caribs, indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, on the tips of their arrows. In addition, the Yagua people, indigenous to Colombia and northeastern Peru, commonly used these toxins in their blowpipes to target prey 30 to 40 paces in distance.
  Due to its popularity among the indigenous people as means of paralyzing prey, certain tribes would create monopolies from curare production. Thus, curare became a symbol of wealth among the indigenous populations.
  
  In 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh mentioned the arrow poison in his book Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (which relates to his travels in Trinidad and Guayana), though the poison he described possibly was not curare. In 1780, Abbe Felix Fontana discovered that it acted on the voluntary muscles rather than the nerves and the heart. In 1832, Alexander von Humboldt gave the first western account of how the toxin was prepared from plants by Orinoco River natives.
  During 1811–1812, Sir Benjamin Collins Brody experimented with curare (woorara). He was the first to show that curare does not kill the animal and the recovery is complete if the animal's respiration is maintained artificially. In 1825, Charles Waterton described a classical experiment in which he kept a curarized female donkey alive by artificial respiration with a bellows through a tracheostomy. Waterton is also credited with bringing curare to Europe. Robert Hermann Schomburgk, who was a trained botanist, identified the vine as one of the genus Strychnos and gave it the now accepted name Strychnos toxifera.
caption: Curare darts and quiver from the Amazon rainforest.
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