The problem with this attitude is that it presupposes that scientific discovery is linear, predictable, and evaluable without context or scientific knowledge, from an armchair.

For all we know, a study like this could accidentally reveal something about gut health in cats, which later is confirmed to be true about humans, which later is combined with other knowledge to treat bowel cancer.

When you devalue "dumb" science because you judge it at face value, you devalue all science. Republicans are very fond of doing this also and it's helped create more scientific ignorance in the public and it has made less funds available for science.

There's nothing more worthy of having money spent on it than science. You're obviously not a scientist, and even if you were, you cannot predict the future or know what you don't know. Scientific knowledge is like a giant puzzle and we don't know what all the pieces are ahead of time or how they fit together.

There is. You won't get much money for a study like this but you also don't really need a lot.