Taxpayers Fund Swedish Massages for Rabbits

U.S. taxpayers paid for rabbits to receive Swedish massages four times per day according to Senator Tom Coburn’s annual report on government waste which he released today. Other wasteful spending includes putting mountain lions, moneys, rats, and cows on treadmills. From The Washington Times

More than a dozen lucky rabbits were given Swedish massages four times a day, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, as part of a study to figure out whether massage can help recovery times after strenuous exercise — a practice Sen. Tom Coburn says makes a mockery of federal spending.

The rabbit massages are one of the hundred wasteful products Mr. Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, identified in his latest edition of the Wastebook, an annual compendium of the ridiculous and outrageous items in government spending, which he is releasing on Wednesday.

Some of the rabbits were then given immediate massages, some were given delayed massages, and the unlucky ones weren’t given any massages at all. Scientists then tried to figure out if the massages helped.

Taxpayers paid $387,000 for the two-year study, which concluded that other studies were right, and massage seemed to help in recovery — though it wasn’t clear that rabbit physiology could be extrapolated to humans. The rabbits were euthanized at the end of the study, Mr. Coburn’s report says.

Remember this the next time Nancy Pelosi says, “The cupboard is bare. There is nothing left to cut.”