Throwback Waste Of The Day: Monkeys Throw Poop, And $600K

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours),

Topline: In 2012, a study published by Agnes Scott College and Emory University concluded that chimpanzees that know how to throw their own feces have stronger communication skills than those that do not.

The National Institutes of Health must have used similarly primitive communication skills when deciding to award the study three federal grants worth $592,000 in 2011. The money would be worth $849,000 today.

That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses. 

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.   

Coburn’s Wastebook 2011 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $7 billion, including the cash wasted on the NIH’s monkey business.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Key facts: Using MRIs of 78 chimpanzees, the study examined the neurological behavior that leads a monkey to “patiently wait” and throw “feces or wet chow” at zoo visitors.

Researchers found that poop-throwing differs from other chimpanzee behaviors because it is not “nutritive in form … It is difficult to imagine that human caretakers would overtly reward a chimpanzee with food immediately after they had just been soiled with feces by the very same ape.”

As lead researcher Bill Hopkins told Wired Magazine, “I’ve never in my life seen a chimp be given a banana for throwing s**t at someone.” 

Instead, chimpanzees throw their feces because they enjoy seeing humans’ reaction. Zoo visitors observed by the scientists would “negotiate with the chimpanzees to put down the projectile, or they will try to trick the ape by stopping, then dashing rapidly past the ape enclosure.”

Feces throwing was thus labeled as a form of “successful intraspecies communication” because it caused a reaction from humans. In fact, monkeys that engaged in the behavior were found to have more highly developed left brain hemispheres.

Thanks to taxpayers, the study resurfaced in 2017 to help journalists analyze a viral video of monkeys throwing their poop at a grandmother visiting a zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Summary: It’s much easier to excuse a monkey’s crude behavior than the money spent on NIH studies with questionable value to taxpayers.

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