Member Article

Shock result in duck/water study

Yes, it’s pointless research time again.

In a piece of research which seems to have been commissioned purely to get headlines such as the one above, a £300,000 study by scientists at the University of Oxford has discovered that ducks are quite fond of water.

Two scientists from the University of Oxford gave a group of ducks access to a pond, a water trough and a shower. They discovered, after three years, that the ducks spent a lot of time under the shower.

According to the Guardian, a representative of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: “It is common sense that ducks like rain and water. The last thing the government should be allocating scarce resources to is this sort of nonsense.”

Anthony Rew, the Devon chairman of the National Farmers Union, said the study proved that Defra, the government department that oversees the care of farm animals, was “quackers”. Yes, he went there.

To be fair to the researchers, the study was designed to find out the best conditions for farming ducks, as traditional duck ponds can become dirty and unhygienic. The results showed that the ducks weren’t actually all that fond of swimming, even if they did like the water itself.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .