Congratulations, tax-payers! You spent $40,000,000 so monkeys could run on treadmills.
Congratulations, tax-payers! You spent $40,000,000 so monkeys could run on treadmills.
The Federal Government took in a mind-boggling $1.48 trillion in taxes during the first half of the fiscal year, setting a new record. Astoundingly, it still managed to run a $461,000,000,000 deficit. That the Federal Government taxes too heavily and spends too easily is certainly not a revolutionary proposition. But in the midst of budget discussions that tend to revolve around buzzwords like “human services,” “defense,” and “healthcare,” it is easy to forget that behind those monolithic blocks of spending are individual, often wasteful, line-items. And these line-items, when taken together, can make for a seriously bloated budget.
Take, for example, the $40,000,000 we are spending to watch monkeys run on treadmills.
Earlier this month, the Southwest National Primate Research Center giddily announced that they received $40,000,000 of tax-payer money from the National Institute of Health. The Southwest National Primate Research Center is no stranger to tax-payer funding, either; they received $8,000,000 of your money in 2015, and have received close to $70,000,000 in Federal grants over the last ten years. According to the happy recipients, that money will go towards the “continue[d] operation of its facility[…]to continue its research in aging, regenerative medicine, experimental physiology and genomics and infectious diseases.”
That all sounds very scientific, doesn’t it? ‘Infectious diseases;’ no one likes those. And ‘aging, regenerative medicine’ sounds like it might be something we could get onboard with. Obviously the Center is engaging in some high-level experiments.
Apparently, not so much. Senator Jeff Flake is something of a watchdog on issues of spending, and he has examined the Center’s documents and looked into their practices. What he found is more than a little troubling, considering that tax-payers are footing the Center’s bills.
As Flake’s investigation notes, “[e]ach of the twelve little monkeys was put into a ‘transparent rodent exercise ball.’ The balls of monkeys were then placed onto a standard human NordicTrak treadmill. The treadmill was started at a low speed and gradually increased to 1 mile per hour.”
That…doesn’t exactly sound like earth-shattering science. Nor does it sound especially pleasant for the monkeys: Flake’s investigation noted that the animals were vomiting and defecating on themselves during their exercises, and at least one animal died.
Indeed, caring for their subjects does not seem to be a high priority for the Center. The Southwest National Primate Research Center was cited for fourteen violations of the Animal Welfare Act in only two years, and was fined almost $30,000.
The Southwest National Primate Research Center can point to no great medical advances from its monkey-treadmill research; it can demonstrate no groundbreaking findings. Instead, it seems that the $40,000,000 it has just received — and the $70,000,000 they have received over the last ten years — have gone to little more than animal cruelty, lawbreaking, and lining the pockets of the Center itself.
Of course, if you are concerned that cutting the funding from these experiments with monkeys on treadmills might stifle the advance of science, fear not — the National Institute on Aging is already spending $600,000 of tax-payer money to study the same thing.
