Are you tired of this B.S.?

Rats on cocaine love Miles Davis, and other dumb animal research paid for with tax dollars

In Defense of Animals group spotlights inquiry into the sex habits of hamsters

Taxpayers may feel kind of blue when they discover their dollars went to fund a study to determine rats like to bop to the music of Miles Davis while hopped up on cocaine.

The study, which was performed at Albany Medical College, drew jeers from the animal rights group In Defense of Animals and landed it on its top ten list of Real Ridiculous Research.

The research found that sober rats don’t really like music that much. After the silence, the rats liked Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” more than Miles Davis’s iconic jazz tune “Four.”

But when the rats were given doses of cocaine, their tasted shifted and they gravitated toward the jazz.

The studies, which were funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, were aimed at analyzing the links between pharmacology and neurology in drug abuse.

“These experiments... show that your tax dollars and animals’ lives are frivolously wasted on research that adds nothing to medical progress and tells us nothing we care to know — or didn't know already,” In Defense of Animals wrote in its introduction to the list.

Albany Medical College protested its spot on the list of ridiculous research.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to find medications that can help diminish drug cravings in humans,” Jeffrey R. Gordon, spokesman for the medical school, told The Pulse.

The group, which only focused its ire on National Institutes of Health experiments that involved research on animals, had issues with a few other studies, including one about the sex habits of hamsters.

Lehigh and University of Minnesota researchers found that putting hamsters on a diet didn’t increase their appetite for the opposite sex.

The animal rights group dubbed the study another example of wasteful tax dollars spending and “white-coated welfare.”

A Lehigh University spokesperson begged to differ.

"This study is part of a line of research that seeks better understanding of behaviors essential to survival, including seeking food and reproduction,” university spokesman Jordan Reese told Lehighvalleylive.com. “How the brain regulates these behaviors is relevant, for example, to understanding the effects of commonly prescribed drugs, including those used to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and related drugs used to control appetite.”

Other studies that made the group’s list included the effect of lemon scent on monkey erections, contagious yawning in chimpanzees and the role of single mothers in the prairie vole community.

How much money is wasted in similar studies when the real need is for research aimed at real diseases: MS, cancer, Lou Gehrig's, etc. Self inflicted problems such as drug addiction should come way down the list of importance.