The 5 Weirdest Drug Experiments Performed on Animals
Why let animals enjoy a natural buzz, when science is more than willing to step in and take that high to new hilarious, bizarre, kind of mean-spirited heights?
We've written about animals on drugs before, and why not? Drugs are hilarious. Animals are hilarious. But that article was about animals getting high naturally off of the drugs that God intended for us. And it was missing something: Science. Why let animals enjoy a natural buzz, when science is more than willing to step in and take that high to hilarious, bizarre, kind of mean-spirited new heights?
Those Sheep Will Steal Your Patio Furniture
Researchers needed to study the effects of Tasers on targets under the influence of methamphetamines, and nobody's going to mock that. Meth addicts are the demographic most often Tased--monthly, weekly, daily, or in some cases every single time they visit the laundromat to yell slang terms for genitalia at that pretty Asian girl that works there. But how on Earth would you get volunteers for a study like that? Most people won't even touch meth for fear they'll wake up somewhere in Iowa, let alone get Tased while on it. But you know who's got two thumbs, doesn't mind getting Tased and fucking loves the shit out of meth?
Meth addicts! Well, except for Jimmy Handclaws--the thumbless guy who sleeps under the overpass--but hey, the Tasing and meth parts still hold true.
"Lost 'em fightin' a pack of dogs, but sure, I'll sign up!"
But rather than hopping on the clean and bright highways of reason and logic, the scientists opted instead for the disused, dusty trail of hilarious insanity: They gathered up 16 sheep, gave the animals a speedball of powerful sedatives and methamphetamines (an extremely dangerous combination under any circumstances) and then proceeded to Tase the ever-loving shit out of them on top of it. This is science, ladies and gentlemen: comatose sheep, on meth, being Tased by stoic looking men in white lab coats.
"It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to get these monkeys drunk and shoot paintball guns at them."
Can you guess what happened next?Nope! None of them died, not one
! Despite being given the exact recipe for a confusing, nonsensical death, every single one of the sheep lived, displaying no signs of the abnormal, potentially fatal heart rhythm that human targets under similar conditions often succumb to.Final Outcome:
Somewhere out there, there exists a small gang of speed-freak sheep struggling with a dueling sedative addiction. They may or may not be immune to electricity.
Those Bees Will Not Shut Up About Finding Authentic Mexican Food
Scientists from the Macquarie University in Australia and the University of Illinois completely ran out of shit to do in 2008, so they decided to test a hypothesis. And I would like to be absolutely clear here: The following is not a joke. This is the actual wording as it appeared in the scientific study: " cocaine can have as devastating an effect on honey bee society as it does on human society".
That's what they pitched to their superiors. And not only were they not
assigned a social worker on the spot, but they actually received the grants to go ahead with the project and obtain their results. It's official: "Scientist" is the hardest job to get fired from.
"Ha ha, seriously? They went for the bee thing? Holy shit! All right, let's science this bitch!"
Their experiment involved isolating a small segment of the bee population, and dosing them regularly with cocaine. Then they would release the addict bees with the rest of the hive to look for "sugar." At first read, that sounds like some scientist just has a coke addiction of his own, access to a lot of bees and an unwillingness to drive downtown, but the bees in question were searching for literal sugar, and not more of the nose kind.
"Yes. Yeeesss! My research is complete! Now, my bees, TO THE COCAINE!"
The report says that, despite their drugged state, the bees still remained completely accurate in reporting the sugar's location back to their hive. It's just that they exaggerated how much there was, how easy it was to get and how totally fucking awesome
it was when they found it. No, seriously: They drastically over-estimated the potency of their find when relaying information to the hive. The scientists were right. After a few weeks of a regular coke habit, these bees behaved exactly like their human counterpart: That guy who comes sprinting up to you in the hallway during parties, telling you about "these insanely hot bitches all over my jock, man! You have to come see 'em. Gotta be my wingman, bro! Ha ha! Ride my tail anytime, Maverick! Come on!" And then, when you arrive at your destination, you find only two confused Puerto Rican men who believe they've been contracted for some kind of late-night gardening job because they only recognized the word "hos." Lasting Effects:
Somewhere there is a swarm of bees that is really fun for about an hour and a half, and then incredibly annoying for the next seven.
These Spiders' Families Hardly Recognize Them
A career in NASA is just the best: Even if you don't make the A-team where you get to do infinite backflips in the zero gravity of space, you still get to be a researcher on the ground, gettin' bills for carrying out whatever crazy bullshit you whipped up last minute on grant day. And so at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, they decided to drug the holy shit out of a bunch of spiders
, on the grounds of "testing which species respond most accurately to the toxicity of chemicals." No specific goal, really, just: "What do spiders do while high?" And here we go:
Spiders on marijuana weaved about half their webs before abandoning their project. Presumably because a rerun of MacGyver came on.
Spiders on Benzedrine, an upper, spun their webs faster but left great, gaping holes due to lack of planning. Just like meth-heads, who are surprisingly effective at ripping all the plastic plumbing out of an abandoned home, only to remember down at the scrap-yard that it's copper wiring they'll pay you for.
On caffeine, they throw a few strands together at random before growing impatient and abandoning the project. Presumably while hurling a stapler across the room and swearing at the receptionist on the way out.
This is what happens to spiders on LSD: "The lines... they go on forever! Can you see them, Earl? Can you see them?! TELL ME YOU CAN FUCKING SEE THE LINES, EARL!"Lesson Learned:
That spider may not be attacking, it may just be having a bad trip, hallucinating tiny humans scrabbling around beneath its exoskeleton.
That Elephant Spoke to Buddha on The 10th Plane
Louis Jolyon West is a son of a bitch. Let's just get that right out of the way. He's the kind of irredeemable bastard you have to pat down on his way out of the Salvation Army. His most notable experiment, at the University of Oklahoma, was researching the effects of LSD. After witnessing a few bad trips, West drew a parallel between the drug-induced fits in humans and the tendency of some male elephants to go "on musth"--a fugue-state where they are overtaken by a bizarre kind of temporary rage and attack everything in sight. Figuring that nothing goes better with crazy than more crazy, he thought to combine the two, and dosed up a bull elephant with a metric-fuckton of acid.
"Well damn, Johnson, I honestly can't tell when an elephant is trippin' balls. Do you think it's working?"
West and his lab assistant hooked up with a morally lax zookeeper at Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo, who gave them access to Tusko, a 7,000-pound, 14-year-old male elephant. To accurately dose the elephant within levels experienced by the average human drug user, they painstakingly calculated the elephant's metabolic rate, assessed the relative potency of the drug, accounted for the weight difference, then converted all the measurements to Fuck It, and just shot everything they had into him. About 300-milligrams of pure LSD. Enough for 3,000 hippies to bother God about their mundane bullshit on a Friday night. So what valuable data did this experiment yield? Five minutes after the injection, he fell over and died. In a move that practically elevates dickotry to an art-form, this is the actual conclusion to their report: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa."End result:
Hopefully some sort of furious, hallucinogenic elephant curse.
Those Rats Can Feel the Bass in Their Bones
Sometimes, comedy just fails at its task. Sometimes the effort to bring out the inherent humor in something--to dissect a subject, analyze it, spin it and ultimately reintroduce it so that society might understand it better--simply does not work. Sometimes the world just writes a better joke. Here is the actual lead to a story announcing the results of this scientific paper:"A new study has been published, demonstrating for the first time that rats on ecstasy who listen to loud music have more sex than rats on ecstasy who do not listen to loud music."Science, everybody!Knowledge Gained: They prefer Nine Inch Nails.
