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$4.5 Million for Bobcat Urine
In the latest spending offering from Congress, $4.5 million was included for bobcat urine to spray on alcoholic rats. Arizona gets that for free.
Now bobcat ranching is dangerous enough without trying to extract their urine. I’ll let you in on a little secret that Arizonans have known for a long time. Bobcats are mean before they get drunk, unlike elected officials.
I would have shipped a couple of bobcats to Congress, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the DNC offices for a lot less than $4.5 million to rid the country of alcoholic rats. Might as well send the source rather than just a bottle of the magic elixir.
This pair was regular visitors to the backyard.
Here kitty, kitty, get in the box.
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Published in Domestic Policy
During Prohibition, one euphemism for illegal hooch was “panther piss.” Perhaps “bobcat urine” is a lot more fun than you think.
I don’t get how you people think all this money is wasted. What about those poor kids in Pakistan who don’t know what gender they are?
The mullahs have that one taken care of.
First, “Bobcat Urine” is a pretty good band name. Second, the easiest way to collect it is with a big litter box.
Or with a female bobcat.
Wait, you said urine. Never mind.
So all you need is a bobcat, a cage with a proper drainage design to capture the urine, and a keg from which to fill the bobcat’s bowl. From a distance.
But they sure are beautiful animals…
I disagree. Like Jimmy Cagney, I don’t like rats. Like Edward G. Robinson, I think the rats should be wiped out, see? And don’t give me that moaning sympathy routine because these particular rats have a substance abuse problem. That’s not chemically based or morally neutral. They are, after all, rats. Job retraining programs don’t get far with them.
So if we can at least train bobcats to piss on them, I say, partial justice is better than none.
I dunno; paying people to, ah, inconvenience the bobcats seems less actively harmful than a lot of government programs.
You might even get some humans volunteering to act in loco “bobcatus”.😜
And not a penny for studying the transfusion to humans of tiger blood. Sad.
The last human experiment with that didn’t seem to go very well.
Don’t forget the magnifying glass, matchbook, and tweezers.
Nose plugs. I also left out the nose plugs. For you, not the bobcat.
Everything else aside, if beautiful bobcats liked to hang around your yard, I’d consider that a blessing, a seal of approval… whatever you like.
You should come to Alberta. We wiped out the rats in the 1930s. There is the downside of the weather, but no rats.
Alberta sounds pretty nice. Wealthy from oil and agriculture, well governed. Edmonton’s relatively thrifty light rail plan has been copied or adapted by several US cities, including San Diego and Los Angeles. Wiped out the rats, too? Sign me up.
I find this claim to be quite ludicrous. I’d like a source for this claim, beyond something Rand Paul said. What, precisely, is the study (or are the studies) in question?
I could think of perfectly valid reasons to perform a study that could be described, by a grandstanding semi-Libertarian Senator, as “spray[ing] bobcat urine on alcoholic rats.”
I have no personal professional experience in animal studies. I’m a fan of Jordan Peterson, and have heard him describe the usefulness of rat studies. Rats are pretty sophisticated creatures, with a physiology similar to humans in many respects.
Say you wanted to study the neurological or neurophysiological effects of alcoholism. How would you do so? Well, maybe you’d turn a bunch of rats into alcoholics, and study their behavior and neurology.
Could alcoholism cause chronic neurophysiological changes? What would those be? What effect would they have? I could imagine many effects, and one might be a permanent decline in the fear instinct.
How would you test that in rats? Well, maybe you’d spray bobcat urine in the vicinity of the rats. I would imagine that rats have a powerful fear response to the smell of bobcat urine. (I vaguely remember that Jordan Peterson may have mentioned something about this, actually, though I think that he mentioned cats generally and not bobcats specifically.)
The fear response of the alcoholic rats might be suppressed. Even when not intoxicated, I mean, as it’s pretty obvious to anyone whose gone to college that alcohol intoxication can suppress fear. But to determine that such an effect lingers among alcoholics, even when not intoxicated, could be an important result in research on alcoholism.
Since they’re rats, there’s an added advantage. Once you’re done with the live study, you can kill them and dissect them, to determine if there were any physiological changes in the brain that might cause the (hypothesized) suppression of the fear response. This could have implications for human neurology.
It might even lead to discoveries that would apply to other neurological degenerative disorders, like Alzheimer’s.
This is all speculation, of course.
The only thing that surprises me about this, is that it wasn’t for $4.5 BILLION.
I know that in Newfoundland they use wolf pee to keep moose of the highways. But they just make something that smells like wolf pee. Its quite common idea that animals will avoid areas where predators might be. Unless there is something special about bobcats that I am unaware of, I would think any cat urine would work.
Here is a link to the pdf of Rand Paul’s report on spending in the spending bill.
I presume we’re talking about a university research grant. $4.5 billion would be unheard of for a topic like this. Even $4.5 million is very large for a narrow topic. Of course, I come from the field of ecology. If this money is for a medical project, you’re dealing with a whole nother pay scale. At least it was when it came to IT salaries.
Whichever it is, and whatever its merits (I tend to think along the lines that Jerry is thinking) we have federal agencies that award grants on the basis of competitive merit. Doing it through a special congressional appropriation tends to reward political connections over competitive merit. That’s not to say political connections don’t ever play a role in NFS or NIH grants, but it’s pretty hard to get a grant from those agencies through political connections alone.
I mostly just meant how crazily they were spraying money around in that whole bill. And let’s face it, if they WERE spending $4.5 BILLION on this, it wouldn’t make a significant difference to the total.
In the early 90s I was working with my boss on the final touches of an NSF grant proposal. It was probably about this time of year or slightly later, because the sadists at NSF in charge of this particular program always put the deadline right after the New Year, which meant working day and night during the Christmas holiday season to finish up the proposal.
Anyhow, we were finishing up when I remarked, “One thing about the NSF. You never hear those stories about how someone used political connections to get a grant.” I was thinking of stories that had been circulating person-to-person about one independent(?) researcher of questionable merit who had great connections with his congressman and seemed to get all sorts of projects of questionable merit funded through appropriations. Though it wasn’t just this one person I was thinking of.
My boss had just spent several years at NSF, and contradicted me, “Every time a Congressman called to inquire about a proposal from one of his constituents, that proposal got marked with a piece of red tape for special attention.” (Not an exact quote, but close.)
This was in the days back when proposals were submitted in multiple paper copies rather than electronically. I have no idea how a Congressperson’s attention might be noted now.
But, just because a Congressman might give a proposal special attention, that didn’t mean it was going to get funded. The proposals were still evaluated on their merit and funded largely on their merit, subject to availability of funds. (Contrary to the official line, I always assumed the NSF tried to get the most bang for the buck and selected the proposals to fund accordingly. I didn’t think this a bad thing, but it was contrary to the line we were often fed about how funding decisions were made, which didn’t take budget realities into account.) There was a peer review process that weighed heavily on the decisions. The people I worked with had a good track record of having their proposals funded, and I never heard a whisper of anyone I knew getting a Congressperson involved in intervening on our behalf.
The grant proposal process has its problems, but it’s a far cleaner method than funding projects through special Congressional appropriations.
It’s an even better photo at full size. :-)
$4.5 billion would be one half of one percent of the total. That’s pretty significant when you consider how many congressional hands were in the cookie jar.
Ah, I see that the ancient struggle between bobcat & bureaucrat is still going strong, & with a hefty price tag.
Merry Christmas, Doug!
We’ve been overlooking the real flaw in this plan. Sure you can spray a rat with cat pee and the grossed out rat will leave… But the net result is that your house, factory or warehouse will smell like cat pee. A smell so awful that it grosses out a rat…
While there might be a niche market for this kind of thing – I really cant see it flying.