Running on empty: Why the feds love paying to test animals exercising on treadmills

Galileo had his telescope, Louis Pasteur had a compound microscope and American scientists today have … the treadmill?

Something about the turning belt gets researchers going, particularly when taxpayers fund it. Over the years, they have put live turkeys, mutilated cats, dead turtles and various other animals on treadmill-style machines to delve into the secrets of life.

Wayne State University stuck flies on a “treadwheel” to force them to mimic climbing. Washington State University put kangaroo rats on a treadmill to study how their feet interacted with unfamiliar terrain. That project earned a new half-million-dollar lease on life from the National Science Foundation in 2022 as scientists promised that the information they gathered would help with robotics.

The National Science Foundation at one point funded three different studies that put fish on treadmills, including one that ran mudskippers to exhaustion to test speculation that increased oxygen levels may have sped the animal kingdom’s first breakout from sea to land some 365 million years ago.

Justin Goodman, vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group for federal spending on animal testing, said researchers have created “a veritable Noah’s Ark of animals running on taxpayer-funded treadmills.”

“Animal experimenters are generally a group of uncreative copycats who follow the money, not the science, and will keep doing iterations of the same thing for decades as long as the government funds it,” Mr. Goodman said.

His outfit has been tracking some of the more extreme experiments, including one that paid for Russian scientists to debilitate cats, implant electrodes in their spines, put them on treadmills and prodded their spinal cords to move in an effort to understand what sort of sensory inputs help cats walk.

That funding ended with President Biden’s ban on grants to Russian entities after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Treadmill experiments are far from the only federal research to draw scrutiny, but they seem to carry peculiar notoriety.

Sen. Tom Coburn may have ignited the trend in 2011 when, in questioning spending decisions at the National Science Foundation, he highlighted an experiment that put shrimp on a treadmill.

Coupled with a funny YouTube video someone created showing the shrimp mightily struggling to train, paired with music from one of the training montages from the “Rocky” movies, the experiment went viral. The researchers figured a healthy shrimp could run 66 feet per minute but sick shrimp performed worse.

Researchers outfitted a tiny duct tape backpack to the shrimp to add weight, a la Rocky Balboa carrying stones to build his strength.

NBC News had featured the shrimp to some fanfare, but Mr. Coburn’s questions created a firestorm, particularly when he pointed out the $560,000 that the National Science Foundation paid for the experiment.

David Scholnick, the professor responsible for the project, spent the next decade defending his research to all comers, insisting that Mr. Coburn unfairly maligned him.

“To be clear, the treadmill did not cost millions of taxpayer dollars, the goal of the research was not to exercise shrimp, and the government did not pay me — or anyone else — to work out shrimp on treadmills,” Mr. Scholnick wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

He said he was trying to test how well organisms can fight off infections under stress, so he put shrimp on a treadmill to induce stress and studied their immune responses.

The treadmill itself was probably $50, which he claimed to have paid for from his own pocket.

Mr. Scholnick conducted the research while he was a professor at Pacific University in Oregon. The school ousted him in 2020. A year later, he filed a $2 million lawsuit against the school for mistreatment. The two sides reportedly reached a settlement that was undisclosed.

The National Science Foundation, which funded Mr. Scholnick’s work, also responded in a 2021 memo calling the shrimp research “promising” and warning that America is lagging behind competitors in growing the crustacean — a shrimp gap, if you will.

“This research will not only help improve our understanding of shrimp health and immune response in natural and farmed environments, but also aid in growing the nation’s aquaculture industry, decreasing the seafood trade deficit, and creating new jobs,” the agency said.

Science fans piled on by praising the research and defending the need for the government to pay if the U.S. hoped to remain a global leader.

Team treadmill also remained undaunted. Almost every agency with a research mission has funded projects that put animals on the belt.

Mr. Goodman has spotted pigs on a treadmill, paid for by the Defense Department; grizzly bears, sponsored by the Agriculture Department and the U.S. Geological Survey; and more cats on a treadmill, courtesy of the Veterans Affairs Department.

The National Science Foundation reigns as king of the treadmill, said Mr. Goodman, who has identified projects involving fish, lizards and turkeys, along with turtles and shrimp.

Researchers say they are making big strides in knowledge by putting critters through their paces.

The National Science Foundation project involving turkeys, conducted by Clemson University researchers, used a special X-ray machine to peer through the reptiles’ shells to see how they moved on a treadmill. For good measure, they did the same thing with a dead, previously frozen turtle.

The result, the researchers said, was an unparalleled look at the way some turtles swing their hips.

Washington State University, which put the kangaroo rats on a treadmill, was also responsible for the bear study, which researchers said ran nine grizzlies uphill and downhill to measure how much oxygen they used. They concluded that bears, like people, are lazy and like to search for the easiest paths. They said that may explain why bears and people encounter each other in “shared landscapes.”

Of course, the researchers had a bear of a time getting the animals onto the exercise machines and had to use food rewards to entice them into their workouts.

Mr. Goodman said the research sounds like excuses.

“Putting the cruelty and goofiness of these projects aside, the treadmill is the perfect metaphor for the billions of wasteful government spending on animal experiments: constant and repetitive exertion of resources that never actually gets us anywhere,” he said.