Are some "researchers" just perverts with official titles?

 

I was horrified to read comments by Defense Secretary Hegseth last week about some of the "research" being funded by his department in recent years.

President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, testified before the Senate that the Department of Defense was spending tens of millions of dollars on tests that involved sticking “marbles in the rear ends of cats.”

Hegseth brought up the cruel and wasteful animal research during his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on Wednesday.

The exchange began as Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin grilled Hegseth about his administration ending many wasteful research grants.

“Give me an example of a ‘boondoggle’ in medical research and defense health,” Sen. Durbin said, likely unprepared for the response.

“I mean, we’re talking about some stuff I shouldn’t say in public, you know, marbles in the rear ends of cats, tens of millions of dollars,” Hegseth said while pantomiming inserting a marble in a cat’s rectum. “Things that don’t have a connection to what you’re talking about ... the Defense Department has been a place where organizations, entities, and companies know they can get money almost unchecked to whether or not it actually applies to things that happen on the battlefield.”

. . .

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, WCW uncovered a $10 million DoD contract funded through the Navy’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for grotesque experiments on cats at the University of Pittsburgh. These sick tests involved inserting marbles and balloons into the rectums of cats and subjecting them to electroshock treatments to study constipation and erectile dysfunction.

WCW provided The Gateway Pundit with photos from the experiments.

There's more at the link, including the photographs mentioned above (which I'm not going to reproduce here, because I find them disgusting and cruel).

I can't even begin to understand how inserting marbles into cats' rectums (recta???) can possibly assist studies into "constipation and erectile dysfunction".  I can't even figure out how cats' erections have anything to do with human erections, apart from the usual inflationary causes, so to speak.  As far as their human owners are concerned, cats might even be described as anti-erectionary . . . there's a reason why one of our feline companions pets masters is known as "cattus interruptus"!

All jokes aside, though, how was such "research" ever even envisaged, let alone authorized and funded?  Was/is there any genuine benefit to be derived from it?  It looks to me as if some perverted, animal-hating, cruel SOB devised this "research" purely for the kicks he/she could get out of it, and then persuaded some equally perverted SOB to shell out taxpayer dollars to pay for it.  I can see no other reason for this at all.

I'm delighted that Secretary Hegseth has put a stop to this.  Now, how about referring all concerned for criminal investigation on the grounds of cruelty to animals?  I submit that an appropriate punishment might be to use them as research subjects in the same way as the cats - perhaps using bowling balls instead of marbles, to ensure a more appropriate fit.  While we're at it, how about freezing the bowling balls before use, so we can claim to be studying frigidity?

Peter