Children Need Love and Hugs

A Brief History of Maternal Deprivation

1928: John B. Watson publishes Psychological Care of Infant and Child. "Never, never kiss your child," Dr. Watson commanded. "Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage." Watson’s position is the standard advice to parents from pediatricians of the time.

1935: Rene Spitz pioneers direct observation of mothers interacting with their babies to understand potential causes of some children’s psychological problems.

1945: Spitz begins observations of children in orphanages.

1946: Benjamin Spock publishes The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. "Don't be afraid to trust your own common sense," he wrote. "What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best." Spock’s Baby Book was an instant runaway best seller.

By the time Dr. Spock died in 1998, nearly 50 million copies of his famous book had been sold worldwide. It had been translated into 42 languages, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

1948: Social Commission of the United Nations decides to study the needs of homeless children in post-war Europe. Other specialized agencies express their support.

January 1950: The World Health Organization commissions John Bowlby to lead the study.

October 1950: Bowlby presents his book-length report: Maternal Care and Mental Health.

February 1952: Second Edition of Maternal Care is printed.

Bowlby’s monograph Maternal Care and Mental Health was ... at once acclaimed an unqualified contribution to its subject. Its success is shown by the frequency with which it has been printed and the many languages into which it has been translated.

The conclusion Bowlby reaches in his monograph is that the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far reaching effects ... His indictment on that score of the nurseries, institutions, and hospitals of even the so-called advanced countries has contributed to a remarkable change in outlook that has led to a widespread improvement in the institutional care of children. (From the Preface to Deprivation of Maternal Care: A Reassessment of its Effects. World Health Organization. 1966.)

1952: A Two Year Old Goes to the Hospital. James Robertson. A Scientific Film.

This short film, made by one of Bowlby’s students, proved highly challenging to doctors and hospitals and is credited for much of the quick and sweeping change in child care in institutions that occurred following the publication of Maternal Care.

By the early 1950s, the old position, exemplified by John B. Watson’s 1928 work cited above, had been universally abandoned. The devastating and quick onset of the effects to a young child being removed from her mother was well and widely accepted; the even greater and lasting insult resulting from emotional isolation and the absence of physical contact with a nurturing caregiver was universally understood. Benjamin Spock’s suggestions to hold and kiss your children were universally understood to be key elements in the development of an emotional healthy human being.

While Maternal Care and Mental Health and A Two Year Old Goes to the Hospital, and similar work by a large number of researchers whose work has been somewhat forgotten as a result of Bowlby’s success, made it clear that children need emotional nurturing, the theoretical reasons for this need became the topic of much debate.

It was this arcane debate -- largely meaningless for clinical care -- that opened the door to a flood of incredibly cruel experiments on animals. The experiments continue today, though there are many fewer scientists interested in them.

Before looking at a brief history of the animal experiments, it is worth noting that research into the effects of various types and degrees of deprivation in children has continued.

Interest in the problem was greatly increased following the 1989 Christmas day execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The collapse of his regime opened Romania to the eyes of the world; shock and outrage resulted from the reports about the Romanian government's orphanages and the plight of the children who are sometimes referred to as the Ceausescu Orphans.

According to NGO estimates, more than 170,000 orphans were languishing in government institutions under appalling conditions.

"The [orphanages] varied from poor to abysmal," says Dana Johnson, an American doctor who first visited Romania in 1993. "People were very morose. There wasn't much joy in their lives and the institutions reflected that." In the baby houses, Johnson observed that children's physical needs were attended to and there was food to eat, "but there was neither the time nor the knowledge to truly promote normal development in kids." Unlike growing up in a family, the children didn't have lots of interactions with adults holding them, talking to them, singing or playing with them, and that lack of stimulation affects brain development. [Rewiring the Brain: Early Deprivation and Child Development. Romania's Orphan Story 1966-2006. American RadioWorks. Sasha Aslanian, Producer. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/romania/b1.html]

Today, much work is underway to improve the lives of the people who were in the institutions. Accompanying that effort, psychologists and medical doctors are detailing the lasting effects as well as the improvements.

For instance, in a 2010 paper, “Growth and associations between auxology, caregiving environment, and cognition in socially deprived Romanian children randomized to foster vs ongoing institutional care,” researchers report that:

Foster care had a significant effect on growth, particularly with early placement and high-quality care. Growth and IQ in low-birth-weight children are particularly vulnerable to social deprivation. Catch-up growth in height under more nurturing conditions is a useful indicator of caregiving quality and cognitive improvement.

From the many studies of these children and their life trajectories, it is clear that the only way to help them recover to any degree is by nurturing them, by providing the one thing they didn’t have as very young children. This “cure” fits neatly into what Benjamin Spock taught the world so many years ago.

See: http://www.cerebral-coffins.com/spk/ceausescus-orphans.html

With this as background, we can now consider a brief history of deprivation experiments using animals.

The earliest reference I can find that mentions separating baby animals from their mothers to see what would happen is the work of Howard S. Liddell, a vivisecting psychologist. Here’s a paean to the monster at the time of his passing.

Liddell’s maternal deprivation experiments focused on the use of twin goats. One was left with his or her mother and the other was removed periodically. This is the only animal study mentioned by John Bowlby in his WHO monograph.

A small number of critics of Bowby's work suggested that most of the deleterious effects observed as a result of maternal deprivation were the result of the children coming from “poor stock” both physically and emotionally; that is, most of the studied children were poor, and poor people are poor because of inherited genetic deficits.

Bowlby addressed these criticisms by appealing to Liddell’s experiments. He wrote:

... the only certain method of controlling [for] heredity is by the use of a sample of identical twins. Though there are no human twin studies on the problem, Liddell (personal communication) is doing experimental work on twin goat kids, one of whom is separated from its mother each day and the other is not. Except for the daily experimental period of 40 minutes, both kids live with and feed from their mother. During the experimental period the lights are periodically extinguished, a stimulus known to create anxiety in goats, and this produces very different behaviour in the twins. The one which is with its mother is at ease and moves freely; the isolated one is “psychologically frozen” (Liddell’s words) and remains cowed in a corner. In one of the first experiments the isolated kid discontinued suckling from its mother and, the experimenters being unaware of this and unable to help, died of dehydration after a few days. This is ample demonstration of the adverse effects of maternal deprivation on the mammalian young, and disposes finally of the argument that all the observed effects are due to heredity.

A pioneer in this truly and remarkably cruel line of study was Harry F. Harlow, the first director of the Wisconsin Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Harlow and his students were the authors of many of the approximately 500 scientific papers – published between the late 1950’s (Harlow published the “Nature of love” in 1958) through about 1985 – utilizing isolation-reared monkeys (occasionally dogs) as models of depressed and anxious humans, especially children [See Stephens, M.L. Maternal Deprivation Experiments in Psychology: A Critique of Animal Models. 1986. American, National, and New England Antivivisection Societies.]

Here's a sampling:

1959 Harlow HF, Zimmerman RR. Affectional responses in the infant monkey; orphaned baby monkeys develop a strong and persistent attachment to inanimate surrogate mothers.
1962 Seay B, Hansen E, Harlow HF. Mother-infant separation in monkeys.
1962 Harlow HF, Harlow MK. The effect of rearing conditions on behavior.
1962 Harlow HF, Harlow M. Social deprivation in monkeys.
1964 Seay B, Alexander BK, Harlow HF. Maternal behavior of socially deprived rhesus monkeys.
1964 Harlow HF, Rowland GL, Griffen GA. The effect of total social deprivation on the development of monkey behavior.
1965 Seay B, Harlow HF. Maternal separation in the rhesus monkey.
1966 Griffin GA, Harlow HF. Effects of three months of total social deprivation on social adjustment and learning in the rhesus monkey.
1967 Arling GL, Harlow HF. Effects of social deprivation on maternal behavior of rhesus monkeys.
(1967 Harlow wins National Medal of Science.)
1969 Kerr GR, Chamove AS, Harlow HF. Environmental deprivation: its effect on the growth of infant monkeys.
1970 Suomi SJ, Harlow HF, Domek CJ. Effect of repetitive infant-infant separation of young monkeys.
1971 McKinney WT Jr, Suomi SJ, Harlow HF. Depression in primates.
1971 Harlow HF, Suomi SJ. Production of depressive behaviors in young monkeys.
1972 McKinney WT Jr, Suomi SJ, Harlow HF. Repetitive peer separations of juvenile-age rhesus monkeys.
1973 Young LD, Suomi SS, Harlow HF, McKinney WT Jr. Early stress and later response to separation in rhesus monkeys.
1973 Chamove AS, Rosenblum LA, Harlow HF. Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) raised only with peers. A pilot study.
1973 Harlow HF, Plubell PE, Baysinger CM. Induction of psychological death in rhesus monkeys.
1974 Harlow HF, Suomi SJ. Induced depression in monkeys.
1975 Suomi SJ, Harlow HF. Effects of differential removal from group on social development of Rhesus monkeys.
1975 Suomi SJ, Eisele CD, Grady SA, Harlow HF. Depressive behavior in adult monkeys following separation from family environment.
1975 Suomi SJ, Collins ML, Harlow HF, Ruppenthal GC. Effects of maternal and peer separations on young monkeys.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that even brief separations can have lasting deleterious consequences to rhesus monkeys.

Papers on isolation and separation continue to be published by Harlow’s students and others. See for instance, Physiological and behavioral adaptation to relocation stress in differentially reared rhesus monkeys: hair cortisol as a biomarker for anxiety-related responses. Dettmer AM, Novak MA, Suomi SJ, Meyer JS. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2012. Both Novak and Suomi were Harlow’s students.

It remains to be seen, even after half a century of this cruelty, what benefit to human children has accrued from isolating baby animals from their mothers, as if any benefit could justify the willful infliction of so much suffering.

The benefit to those whom the taxpayers unknowingly pay to conduct these macabre cruelties is clear enough however.

UW-Madison, Feeling the Heat

I've been a reasonably close observer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison's use of animals and the things they say about it for quite a while. Over the years, I've watched them lie, pay-off critics, cover-up scandals, strike back at whistle-blowers, censor the information that the law forces them to provide to the public, spend large sums to keep themselves out of a critical spotlight, and just generally cringe whenever the light of day exposes a few tiny details of their very dark world.

One metric of the effect of public criticism on the university is its response to those criticisms. The more they try to defend themselves, the more likely it is that public comment from critics is making them uncomfortable. In my experience, they have never chosen to say too much in public, and rarer still, in the local papers, about what they are doing to animals unless pressed by a news reporter who they believe is going to write something that they fear could be embarrassing to them. This makes Research Animal Resource Center Director Eric Sandgren's two online essays about the university's decision to resurrect its use of maternal deprivation all the more noteworthy. They must be feeling some concern over the growing number of critical voices.

I appreciate Sandgren and his writing team taking the time to defend the university, the people who approved the study, and Ned Kalin. Their assertions provide an opportunity to look at their claims and omissions with some specificity.

Sandgren's two essays can be read here: "Mundane but important facts about the peer-rearing animal protocol review," and here: "The rest of the story."

Sandgren's apology begins with a well-worn bit of misdirection. He says, "Regardless of whether one supports or opposes the research, we can agree that it raises important ethical issues that deserve an open and informed discussion."

That sounds so very reasonable, except that in a case like this, open and informed discussion is meaningful only when it occurs prior to a decision, and particularly so when it's very obvious that the decision will be controversial. After the fact, giving lip service to the notion of open and informed discussion is just plain old spin.

A recurring theme in their post-hoc defense of their decision to approve Kalin's use of maternal deprivation is the claim that taking baby monkeys away from their mothers, keeping them alone, and then pairing them with other babies who were taken away from their mothers just isn't such a big deal:

Sandgren, in "Mundane": "the proposed studies produce at most a moderate early life stress... peer-rearing actually is used to save a monkey’s life when a mother rhesus rejects its infant and a foster mother cannot be found." (A mother monkey isn't an it.)

And then again in "The rest": "this same approach is taken to rearing baby rhesus monkeys whose mothers reject them at birth and who are not adopted by a foster mother. In other words, sometimes peer-rearing is used to save a baby monkey’s life."

This claim is both wrong and very odd; Sandgren seems to be saying that loneliness itself is life threatening, but decades of horribly cruel social deprivation experiments at UW-Madison proved repeatedly and redundantly that it isn't. A baby monkey taken from his or her mother could starve to death, of course, but putting him or her with another orphaned baby doesn't alleviate that risk and placing him or her with another orphan wouldn't save the baby's life.

Moreover and very distasteful, is the implicit claim that there is a concern for an orphaned baby monkey's life. This is one of those cases when someone uses words to mislead, or else is completely unaware that they are using words that has one commonly understood meaning and a much different one elsewhere.

The only reason they take steps to save a baby monkey's life is so that they can decide for themselves later on how to kill him after using him in some income-generating experiment.

Another recurring claim in their public statements is the assertion that the babies aren't really being socially deprived.

Sandgren: "The monkeys are not kept in total isolation. They are reared in a human-style baby incubator by people who feed and otherwise care for these infants...".

This is a very fine point. It is a reference to previous decades of egregious cruelty at the university that most readers will miss. In many past experiments, babies were taken from their mothers and kept in complete isolation for extended periods of time, being unable even to see the person who replenished their food and water. But the claim that the current methods aren't actually cruel because even more horrible things were done to monkeys in the past is a fallacy; it is probably being repeated so often because university spin-Meisters believe it will mollify critics or at least mislead the average reader or listener.

They should have done their homework. The effects of maternal deprivation are well-known; a few brief daily visits from a technician aren't sufficient to rectify them. The human-based evidence of this fact is extensive and has been well known since at least the early 1950s. Even today, studies continue to document the long-term consequences to humans when they are reared in far less-deprived circumstances and to determine the most effective routes to improved emotional well being:

The individuals’ development is continuous, genetically determined and environmentally structured and responsive. Institutionalization of infants and young children in ‘adverse conditions’ provides an environment with low emotional tones and poor stimulation with lack of sufficient responsive caretaking. John Bowlby’s seminal work “Child Care and Growth of Love” written in 1951 and later updated in 1965 with two additional chapters by Mary Ainsworth states deprivation results from lack of substitute mother, inadequate, inconsistent care and lack of sensitive nurturing. In early institutionalization, we can speak about “parental deprivation” instead of “maternal deprivation” as the paternal figure can successfully substitute that of the mother. Studies on the effects of maternal deprivation in the first year of life demonstrate that children show delayed psychomotor and speech development, lack of novelty seeking, poor emotional expression, lack basic trust and they do not seek adults when in distress. These effects are also evident in observations of children institutionalized between 1 and 4 years of age who show the three phases of Protests, Despair and Detachment. Romanian adolescents: literature review and psychiatric presentation of Romanian adolescents adopted in Romania and in Canada. Iftene F, Roberts N. Can Child Adolesc Psychiatr Rev.

In the case of rhesus monkeys, the research is also clear:

Different species of nonhuman primates vary in their response to different nursery rearing conditions. However, studies conducted for over 30 y have shown that in general, raising infants in pairs continuously with the same partner causes behavioral deficiencies. Compared with those raised by using other rearing methods, these infants showed more fear, social withdrawal, aggression, and less nonsocial exploration in this and other studies examining this rearing condition. These differences were thought to be due to the infants' excessive and persistent partner clinging, which precluded independent exploration. Although clinging was initiated by both partners equally often, infants were physically unable to break the clasp of their partners. In addition, infants who received partner clinging often responded to their partner's behavior with aggression.... The effects of four nursery rearing strategies on infant behavioral development in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Rommeck I, Gottlieb DH, Strand SC, McCowan B.J Am Assoc Lab Anim Sci. 2009.

Sandgren's use of the term "a human-style baby incubator" is also misleading. Human babies in incubators are cared for much differently than the monkeys isolated in the so-called human-style incubators at the university monkey labs. There is a growing trend to provide human infants confined to an incubator with frequent massage and physical stimulation.

Additionally, rhesus monkeys mature more rapidly than humans. This could mean that the subjective experience of being kept alone for the first six weeks of life is much more stressful for a rhesus monkey than it would be for a human.

Sandgren goes on to claim that "clinical records show that, in the UW-Madison colony, peer-rearing typically only is associated with thumb sucking behavior (just one young monkey in 10 years injured herself, and she recovered). Peer-rearing will measurably increase anxiety, as required by the experimental design ...".

As I have pointed out many times, the university and its spokespersons, including Sandgren, have a history of telling lies when the lies serve the interests of the university. There is no reason to believe his anecdotal claim about what the clinical records show. If the records substantiate his claim, the university should make them public; to know whether they genuinely demonstrate what he claims, Sandgren would have to make the daily care records, animal care staff comments, and the veterinary records available for public inspection and consideration. Short of such a full disclosure, their history of lying to the public suggests quite strongly that this claim is just more of the same.

In "The rest," Sandgren takes the writer of an Animal Legal Defense Fund blog to task for using the word "relentless." He writes:

The monkeys are not subjected to 'relentless fear'. Instead, approximately once a month for up to 18 months their reaction to a novel situation is observed. What are these novel situations? An unfamiliar human stands in front of their cage. An unfamiliar monkey is housed in an adjoining cage, or the two are housed together in a play cage. And one time, the monkey can see a snake, closed within a solid glass aquarium that sits outside the monkey’s cage. That does not constitute relentless fear.

Once again, Sandgren spins what he knows, or ought to know, to be otherwise. These so-called novel situations were not chosen because of their novelty.

Kalin has been using these "novel" methods for decades. Here's how he explains why he uses an "unfamiliar human":

When threatened, primates commonly engage in behavioral inhibition or freezing behavior. Freezing is an automatic response characterized by the cessation of motor and vocal activity. In monkeys, individual differences in freezing duration are stable over time and reflect individual levels of anxiety. Adaptive freezing helps an individual remain inconspicuous and decreases the likelihood of predatorial attack; however, excessive freezing, or behavioral inhibition, is a risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders. The human intruder paradigm was developed to study primates’ defensive behaviors, such as freezing, and their regulation in response to changing environmental demands... Brain regions associated with the expression and contextual regulation of anxiety in primates. Kalin NH, Shelton SE, Fox AS, Oakes TR, Davidson RJ. Biol Psychiatry. 2005

And compare Sandgren's description of how and why the snake will be used with Kalin's:

During the snake exposure test, animals will be placed in the small primate cage. The testing apparatus will be placed in front of the cage and the animals will be presented with their most preferred food items placed on top of a clear plastic box at contains a stimulus such as a live snake, rubber snake, roll of tape or nothing. Our previous work has shown that each of these items elicits a response in primates, with the live snake eliciting the most reliable and robust fear response. [Kalin cites published scientific papers at this point in his description, but the citations have been censored by the university.] The items that are not fearful or those that elicit lesser responses are included as comparison and control measures to quantitate the magnitude of the animals' response to the live snake. From Kalin's approved protocol, "Effects of early experience on the development of anxiety and its neural substrates." Pg 18.

Everything Kalin is doing to the babies is intended to cause them anxiety and fear. He expects this ordeal to cause their brains to develop differently than the brains of monkeys not similarly deprived and frightened. Are the fearful experiences relentless? Not in the sense that they continue around-the-clock, but certainly so in the sense that they are frequent and recurring events in these young victims' short and intentionally difficult lives.

After trying to mislead people about the nature of the deprived conditions and stress-filled experiences of the babies, Sandgren then launches into an attempt to justify the cruelty. And again, he either misunderstands what Kalin is claiming or else is just again being a propagandist for his employer and industry.

He begins in "The rest" with an appeal to Kalin et al's past work. he says, "In previous studies, these UW-Madison researchers mapped out pathways in the brain that are overactive in anxious monkeys (it turns out the same pathways are overactive in anxious humans too)." But again, he misleads.

Kalin's experiments on monkeys did not inform scientists about humans' brains; the exact opposite is true. Here's Kalin's quote from "The Neurobiology of Fear," a 2002 Scientific American article that was update from a 1993 article:

To follow up on the finding that humans with a preponderance of right frontal brain electrical activity are more likely to be anxious, we, along with [Richard] Davidson, examined the individual differences in this measure of brain activity in young monkeys. Similar to the observations in humans, we found that each animal's pattern of frontal brain activity was stable over time, such that animals with extreme asymmetric right frontal activity remained that way as they matured.

Continuing his defense of Kalin's project in "Mundane," Sandgren claims that the project has a clear scientific rationale. But he is not unfamiliar with the rationale Kalin used in his letter to a reporter with The Capital Times newspaper:

It is now widely accepted that early stressful environments that include parental stress, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect and inadequate parenting are the most relevant risk factors for the later development of psychiatric illness. Unfortunately, this type of adversity during childhood is endemic in our society. These early adverse circumstances can change the trajectory of a developing brain such that it becomes wired in a way that leads less fortunate individuals down a path of anxiety, depression and other forms of psychopathology. Discovering new interventions aimed at preventing the long term consequences of early adversity in children is critical and requires a basic understanding of the influences of suboptimal rearing on the primate brain. Recent advances in neuroscience and molecular neurobiology allow us, for the first time, to identify promising new molecular pathways that have the potential to counter the effects of early adversity on childhood development.

Kalin rationalizes his cruelty with the wild claim that the identification of irregularities in the brains of orphaned male rhesus monkeys isolated during the first weeks of their lives, and then repeatedly frightened, will lead to a drug (that's what is implied by his "new molecular pathways") that will cure or prevent the highly variable results that stem from the even more variable circumstances surrounding "early stressful environments that include parental stress, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, neglect and inadequate parenting." That sounds more like pie-in-the-sky than a clear scientific rationale.

Even sillier is Sandgren's faith-based assertion: "this study also will be highly relevant to the causes of anxiety in humans." But he doesn't know this. His assertion is anything but scientific or rational. He plays the role of the soothsayer. The majority of the results from attempts to measure the efficacy of animal models of human biology point strongly to the opposite likelihood.

Moreover, the apparent absence of clear beneficial results for human sufferers of emotional distress that stem from Kalin's decades of previous work using monkeys as models of anxiety and fear in humans stands in stark contrast to both his and Sandgren's assertions that anything of benefit to human patients will result. If there were much to ballyhoo from his previous projects with monkeys, I suspect it would have been mentioned by now, by someone, in neon lights.

Sandgren argues at some length in "Mundane" that oversight of research using animals by the university's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) is not just a rubber stamp. He both admits and denies that essentially all proposed experiments are approved.

First he quotes Wesleyan University Professor of Philosophy Lori Gruen: “the oversight committee chairs [at UW-Madison] told me they have never rejected a proposal. Not one.”

Then he says: "When our IACUC chairs say “failure to reject”, they mean that almost all protocols eventually reach a state that the IACUC can accept.

Then he says: "Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that our IACUCs reject 92 percent of the proposals they receive."

But his argument that the oversight system is working boils down to this: The committees eventually approve essentially every experiment that comes before them, even one that is as controversial as Kalin's. A duck, he seems to be saying, is not a duck.

Vivisectors have a very unscientific habit of ignoring evidence that does not support their self-image. Research shows that the use of animals isn't a very productive methodology. Research shows that IACUC committees do seem to act as rubber stamps. Research shows that the workers within the system are uncomfortable with and often embarrassed by what they are forced to do. Research shows that a system like the one surrounding the use of animals at a university will breed secrecy, cruelty, and public denial.

The university must be feeling the heat. As a result, Sandgren has tried to spin the plain facts and has presented false and misleading claims without presenting anything other than anecdotal claims and expressions of his faith and obedience in support. It is worth noticing that he did not point readers to Kalin's approved protocol; that information was made public by the Alliance for Animals.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison has a long, well-documented, and entirely despicable history when it comes to honesty and openness about its use of animals. Sandgren's two essays are simply the newest chapter in this (so far) never ending story of their cruelty.

Bennett, Kalin, Maternal Deprivation, and Me

I received a copy of the minutes from a closed session of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School Animal Care and Use Committee (ACUC) almost two months ago. You can view them here. This passage is included:

Dr. Lindstrom asked if there has been any discussion about the type of extreme experiments of this study. Dr. Krugner-Higby [A lab animal veterinarian] said yes, and said that she feels the creation of nursery-raised infant non-human primates (NHP) is severe because of what it can do to young animals. Dr. Capuano [Primate Center attending vet] said this type of research continues to be carried out at other NHP research centers, but acknowledged that this type of research has not occurred at UW-Madison since the 1980s. Dr. Lindstrom asked if this is an established animal model for this work, and asked if separation from the mothers could be half as long as is proposed. Dr. Krugner-Higby said the PI will say that his lab has gone as far as they can within "normal" anxiety range and the research needs to be carried out past that range. Dr. Capuano said that the PI is trying to compare mother-reared animals to nursery-reared animals at a specific developmental stage. He said that he is unsure if the ACUC has the right to tell a PI not to do their research because the research may cause harm. The ACUC frequently approves protocols that will have adverse effects on animals. Dr. Krugner-Higby said the difference is in other studies of pathogenesis (such as SIV) specific therapeutic or preventative endpoints can be identified and reached, but in these studies endpoints are less clear, noting the behavioral damage to the animals from this type of study is all ready well-known. Dr. Krugner-Higby said that she has read both of the grants listed on this protocol and neither of the grants describe the creation of nursery-reared infants in the specific aims nor in the Vertebrate Animal Sections. She said PI knows that he will have to inform his program officers of this explicit proposal. Dr. Capuano said he believes that a new grant has been submitted to cover that aspect of work. Extensive discussion ensued. It was noted that the PI is trying to learn what is different about the brains of young anxious NHPs in order to eventually develop therapies to treat anxious children and adults. Dr. Capuano said the PI over the past year has tested every NHP infant for the anxious phenotype to identify candidate animals for his work, and again stated he is not sure if the ACUC should question NIH-approved scientific research. Dr. Krugner-Higby noted the request for the creation of nursery-reared infants has not in fact been approved. Dr. Smith noted that this study is basic science, but the hypotheses and goals are not clearly noted in the protocol. He added that the proposed deprivation is not necessarily troubling, but it is the fact that the PI has not explained it well in this protocol in terms he can understand. Dr. Lindstrom agreed. Ms. Boehm asked if these NHPs infants are purpose-bred, do the fathers of the infants need to be accounted for? Dr. Capuano will check with Dr. Welter.

Shortly afterward, I wrote to the chair of the UW Letters and Science ACUC:

Hello [Chair],

I recently reviewed ACUC minutes of a meeting during which concern was raised regarding a study which will utilize maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys.

Just to gain some clarity, has Allyson Bennett's project been approved by the L&S ACUC?

Is her's the only pending or currently active project overseen by your committee currently utilizing maternal deprivation in monkeys?

Thanks in advance.

---

Hi Rick. With apologies, I'm not comfortable giving out information about protocols as I don't know what's available to the public and what's not. If you would be willing to share with me the minutes to which you are referring, those might provide a basis for discussion since those are already publicly available.

Best,
[Chair]

---

This is the abstract on the NIH RePORTER website:

http://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8135988&icde=12378561&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=2&csb=default&cs=ASC

I'm not asking about the minutes; I'm asking whether this study has been approved and is underway.

---

Hi Rick. As I said, I'm not comfortable being the source of information about protocols. There are, as you know, standard procedures for processing such requests at RARC.

Sorry,

---

A Möbius strip is a surface in three-dimensional space with only one side and one edge. The apparent resumption of maternal deprivation at the university is so outrageous, such a backward moral leap, that it seems to have teleported me onto the surface of a sort of mental Möbius pretzel. It seems that no matter how much I looked at the various bits of evidence about this, no matter which turn I took, which route I followed, I kept coming back to the same mistaken conclusions.

I had asked the L&S ACUC Chair about Bennett’s project because I recalled seeing the abstract of her funded study on NIH Reporter; it was the only listed study that involved maternally depriving baby monkeys.

I linked to the abstract in the email thread above. For reasons I can’t explain other than being trapped on that mental Möbius pretzel, no matter how many times I read this passage: “The studies will use a longitudinal research approach to identify the consequences of different early rearing experiences (nursery- versus mother-reared) on specific aspects of behavior and brain in middle- age (14-19 years; approximate range within 40-60 human years) in an existing population of adult rhesus monkeys;” I never could see anything but baby monkeys being taken from their mothers; somehow, I think, the shock of the conversation from the Grad School ACUC coupled with the fact that the only funded project involving maternal deprivation of monkeys at the university was Bennett’s, led me to some weird conceptual alloy or amalgam made up of both. I even discounted, at first, the use of male pronoun in the minutes.

My Möbius pretzel thinking about all of this was additionally confounded by the approach of Mothers Day and my desire to use this seemingly ideal opportunity to call attention to the resumption of maternal deprivation at the university.

Eric Sandgren called me a liar when I wrote that Bennett refused to debate me, but people who actually know me, know that I don’t lie. I wrote it because I believed it. I now understand at least this bit of confusion. A friend and colleague of mine is a member of the Ethics Forum committee. She and I did talk about asking Bennett to debate me, but Bennett's flat refusal to even talk in public about what she does made pursuing that challenge a non-starter.

[A brief side trip: I have to chuckle whenever a vivisector calls me a liar, which (maybe surprisingly) isn’t so very often. This is particularly funny when it is a senior staff person at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. That institution has been caught in really big lies like their repeatedly broken written promises to the County that the monkeys housed at the zoo wouldn’t be used in harmful experiments. And denials by senior staff that that even happened. They have engaged in blatant cover-ups and the destruction of information they feared would be embarrassing if made public. They have been caught breaking the state’s anti-cruelty laws and repeatedly violating Animal Welfare Act regulations. These lying lawbreakers are engaged in cruelty on a scale hard to fully understand, and they call me a liar and get all huffy if I make a mistake about some detail of their hidden evil work.]

I’m going to try to state the facts (as I understand them) and correct the unexplainable errors I have made regarding all of this over the past weeks:

1. Allyson Joy Bennett isn’t depriving baby monkeys of maternal care. I wrongly stated that she was.

She is using monkeys who were born and then maternally deprived at the NIH Animal Center in Poolesville (here's their propaganda page)– probably used and written about by Harlow’s protege Stephen Suomi, and then shipped to her previous institution, Wake Forest.

Her grant abstract gives few clear details about what she is and will be doing to these monkeys. A request for her UW-Madison approved protocol has not yet resulted in any information. In recently published papers using other monkeys born at Poolesville, raised without their mothers, used in unknown ways, and then shipped to Wake Forest, she continued to add to the insults and trauma they had already suffered. Here’s an example:

A nonhuman primate model of early life stress, social impoverishment through nursery-rearing rather than mother-rearing, has been shown to produce increased impulsive and anxiety-like behaviors, cognitive and motor deficits, and increased alcohol consumption. ....

Materials and methods
Animals: Male rhesus monkeys were born at the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and transferred to Wake Forest University School of Medicine at roughly three years of age. The animals were initially socially-housed and then moved to individual housing (76 × 60 × 70 cm3) approximately 1.5 years prior to this study to participate in a long-term voluntary ethanol drinking study. The home cage for each animal was equipped with an operant panel that supplied food, water, and ethanol for each animal. Monkeys were trained to operate the drinking panel to self-administer water or ethanol (4% w/v in water, see Grant et al., 2008 for more details). During the final 12 months of the experiment, animals were allowed free access to water and ethanol for 22 h/day. Monkeys were fed a diet of Primate Food pellets (Research Diets Inc., New Brunswick, N.J.) and fresh fruit. Water was available ad libitum. Experiments were performed when the monkeys were six years of age. This study was conducted in accordance with the Guidelines of the Committee on the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (NRC, 1996) and approved by the Wake Forest University Animal Care and Use Committee. Upon completion of the drinking study, necropsies were performed and samples collected for the appropriate assays.

From: Effects of early life stress on drinking and serotonin system activity in rhesus macaques: 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid in cerebrospinal fluid predicts brain tissue levels. Kimberly N. Hugginsa, Tiffany A. Mathewsb, Jason L. Lockea, Kendall T. Szeligaa, David P. Friedmana, Allyson J. Bennetta, Sara R. Jones, Alcohol. 2012.

2. I don’t now believe an offer or challenge to debate Bennett was ever conveyed. She was asked to give a talk at one of the so-called Ethics Forums, but declined to participate; an odd choice for a vivisector who is an active member of the small pro-vivisection group that calls itself “Speaking of Research.”

I think my lapse into fantasy on this point is because of my unfortunate conceptual hybridization of Bennett and the PI whose project caused such concern at the Grad School ACUC.

3. I think the unnamed PI in the Grad School minutes is Ned Kalin. It seems that it is him who is intend on reviving the particularly cruel methods pioneered by Harlow. Kalin, apparently, has been asked to debate me.

During the course of all this, I received a message of concern from a whistle-blower at the university urging me to file a records request for studies at the university using maternal deprivation.

I submitted this request:

May 10, 2012

Richard Lane
Associate Director
Research Animal Resources Center
396 Enzyme Institute
1710 University Ave.
Madison, WI 73726-4087

This is a public records request for a copy of all pending or approved protocols for projects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison involving animals and utilizing any one or more of the following methods:

isolation-rearing
peer-rearing
surrogate-rearing
maternal deprivation
nursery-rearing
social deprivation
environmental deprivation
surrogate peer-rearing

I am prepared to pay a reasonable search and duplication fee for the fulfillment of this request up to the amount of $100.00, but kindly ask that such fees be waived as this release will benefit the general public. If the aforementioned request for a waiver or reduction of fees is denied and fees are expected to exceed $100.00, please notify me to this effect before this request is processed.

Your prompt attention to this matter will be appreciated.

Two weeks later I got a phone message at home from the Research Animal Resources Center Director, Eric Sandgren (who thinks I’m a liar.) I replied to him in an email on May 24:

Hello Eric,

You suggested I call and speak to you about a recent records request. I prefer to maintain a written record of any communications with the university regarding this request, and so will try to clarify my request here.

Thank you for your phone message of May 23 asking for clarification of my May 10, 2012 request for a copy of all pending or approved protocols for projects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison involving animals and utilizing any one or more of the following methods:

isolation-rearing
peer-rearing
surrogate-rearing
maternal deprivation
nursery-rearing
social deprivation
environmental deprivation
surrogate peer-rearing

Additionally, I would like to amend my request to also include protocols using the method: early differential rearing, and any other method that involves the removal of an animal from his or her mother prior to the species-typical weaning age and is utilized as a means of inducing a change in behavior or physiology, or is used experimentally to determine whether any such removal for any amount of time causes a change or changes in behavior or physiology.

I have requested a copy of Allyson Joy Bennett's approved protocol in a separate request; there is no need to include that protocol in any response to the request described here.

The terms of art listed above are used in published scientific reports, grant applications, and published abstracts that refer to somewhat similar procedures. Typically, young animals are intentionally removed from their mothers, usually within 24 hours of birth, and are then raised either alone (isolation-rearing, surrogate-rearing, surrogate peer-rearing) or with an age-matched animal of the same species (peer-rearing).

Sometimes, the animals are maintained in conditions intended to isolate them from social or sensory experiences (social deprivation, environmental deprivation).

Nursery-rearing is a term of art used in some projects using the methods mentioned in the paragraphs above. Nursery-rearing can include animals being raised alone or with an age-matched animal of the same species.

To help you better understand my request, here are couple quotes that use one or more of the terms. These are from abstracts of currently funded research at the university:

"The present studies will determine if stimulation of Acb AMY1 receptors improves baseline or deficient PPI (induced by psychotomimetic drugs such as amphetamine or phencyclidine), and/or if agonists for this receptor augment the efficacy of clinically prescribed antipsychotic medications in the PPI paradigm. Finally, we will explore whether the family of amylin-related genes is regulated by isolation rearing, a developmental manipulation in rats that is known to produce schizophrenia-like PPI deficits in adulthood." 1R21MH093824-01 BAKSHI, VAISHALI P. AMY-1 RECEPTORS: NOVEL TARGETS FOR ANTIPSYCHOTIC DEVELOPMENT.

"The specific aims of this research are: 1) To determine the long-term effects of early differential rearing on specific aspects of behavior in rhesus macaques; 2) To determine the long-term effects of early differential rearing on both global and specific aspects of brain morphology and cerebral composition using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); 3) To assess the relationship between performance on cognitive, learning and memory tests and structural aspects of the brain in these nursery- and mother-reared monkeys;" 7R01MH084980-02 BENNETT, ALLYSON J. LONG-TERM COGNITIVE AND NEUROANATOMICAL CONSEQUENCES OF CHILDHOOD STRESS.

A proposed series of experiments involving some form of maternal deprivation were recently discussed at both the Graduate School and the College of Letters and Science ACUCs, and at a joint meeting of both committees. I believe the Principal Investigator on that project is Ned Kalin, but I am uncertain who the PI is at this point in time.

Because I do not know the term of art being used in that proposed research, I have included in my request many of the various terms of art for variations on maternal deprivation that are found in published reports, abstracts, and grant proposals.

From various published reports:

"A nonhuman primate model of early life stress, social impoverishment through nursery-rearing rather than mother-rearing, has been shown to produce increased impulsive and anxiety-like behaviors, cognitive and motor deficits, and increased alcohol consumption." Huggins KN, et al. Alcohol. 2012.

"For the first 8 months of life, infants were either with their mothers and peers (MPR, n=21) or reared in a nursery using either peer-rearing (PR, n=20) or surrogate-peer-rearing (SPR, n=20)." Dettmer AM, et al. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2012.

"This paper exploits a unique ongoing experiment to analyze the effects of early rearing conditions on physical and mental health in a sample of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). We analyze the health records of 231 monkeys that were randomly allocated at birth across three rearing conditions: mother rearing, peer rearing, and surrogate peer rearing. We show that the lack of a secure attachment relationship in the early years engendered by adverse rearing conditions has detrimental long-term effects on health that are not compensated for by a normal social environment later in life." Conti G, et al Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012.

"Males and females rhesus macaques reared either with their mothers (MR), in peer-only groups (PR), or in a "surrogate/peer-reared" (SPR) condition with limited peer interactions, were used as experimental subjects." Cirulli F, et al. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2011.

I hope these examples and my comments above will enable you to identify the pending or approved protocols for projects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison involving animals and utilizing any one or more of the many varieties of maternal deprivation. It is copies of these pending or approved protocols for projects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison which I am requesting.

Nothing here should be interpreted to mean that I am requesting copies of only the Bakshi protocol and the proposal discussed by the two ACUS mentioned above. I am requesting copies of any and all protocols using any of the methods explained here, but not in this request the Allyson Joy Bennett protocol.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify my request.

Sincerely,

Rick Bogle

To which Sandgren replied on the same day:

Thanks, Rick. I'm blind-copying this to the person here who is handling the request, and she and I will talk to see if this gives us what we need to move forward.

I'm hopeful that we will have a way to get this to you--I do not think it will be too difficult. The reason I called was that we don't have an easy way of searching our various databases to find those terms, and I didn't want to be in a position where we missed things that you were especially interested in because of that. Also, did you want this restricted to non-human primates? It will be far more difficult to identify records that might be responsive if you want any species.

I may email you again if I feel I need to run by you my interpretation or your request.

I replied:

Hello Eric,

Thanks. No, I am not limiting my request with regard to the species of the animals being used.

And Sandgren answered:

I'll pass that on.

And then, in a letter dated the following day, May 25 and post-marked May 25 as well, I received this from this from the Research Animal Resources Center:

Dear Mr. Bogle:

I am writing in response to your request for "all pending or approved protocols for projects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison involving animals and utilizing any one or more of [eight specific methods]."

We are unable to process your request as written as it is not sufficiently specific as to subject matter or length of time, and imposes an unreasonable burden on the University. (See Wis. Stats. 19.35(l)(h); State v, Gehl, 306 Wis.2d 247 (2007)). Please note that we have no reasonably efficient way to locate protocols according to concepts such as the methods you specified as we do not organize protocols on the basis of the types of methods you listed, and running a database query would only allow us to identify the use of your terms in titles of protocols. Furthermore, whether particular experimental designs constitute the methods you specified is a matter subject to interpretation. The task of locating records responsive to your request would require excessive amounts of time and resources, as each animal protocol would need to be manually reviewed, possibly with veterinary input to determine whether any component of any research protocol was considered to utilize one of the cited methods. Because we receive a high volume of records requests, each of which must be responded to in a timely manner, we must ask that you narrow your request to encompass a limited period of time, and to refer to a readily identifiable set of records that are capable of being located through reasonable efforts. To the extent that this amounts to a denial of your request, please note that it is subject to review by mandamus under Wis. Stat. § 19.37(1), or upon application to the Attorney General or District Attorney.

[Signed] Richard R. Lane,
Associate Director

There wasn’t, apparently, any communication about this between Lane and his superior. Maybe Lane was cut out of the loop when Sandgren stepped in. It’s hard to say. It's also hard to guess which of these communications is the definitive university response. Maybe its all just rope-a-dope.

I should also tell you that the Alliance for Animals was contacted by Allyson Joy Bennett in an email. She said that our recent newsletter had misrepresented her methods (and it unfortunately did for the reasons spelled out above), she said that she isn’t maternally depriving monkeys (which I’ve tried to clarify above), isn’t frightening them with a snake (I think that’s Kalin, since he has done this for years), and is not planning on killing the group of monkeys she is now using. She demanded that we correct our errors (I directed her to the webpage which clarifies the use of the snake) and told her that we would correct our error concerning the snake in our next newsletter, we’ll also clarify the fact that she’s using monkeys previously abused but not now creating abused monkeys. I told her we would hold off on any other corrections pending an opportunity to review her approved protocol. I asked her to send us a copy since getting records from the university is so often very difficult and time consuming.

In conclusion, no one I know who has been involved in this work for very long hasn’t made an occasional mistake, particularly those who try to understand what is being done to the animals in the labs. This is inevitable when dealing with people who behave as if they know that we are asking for information that will embarrass them or cause them to run afoul of regulators and the legal system.

In this case though, my errors involved something other than the typical institutional secrecy was at play. And, as I said above, I’m still trying to figure it all out. In any case, Bennett has been involved in a series of projects that have further abused monkeys whose entire lives have been manipulated in ways intended to harm them. What she is planning to do now remains undisclosed. It is probably Ned Kalin who is trying to get approval to start maternally depriving baby monkeys. The university hasn’t been forthcoming about any of this. And I have been very negatively impacted by this dark news.

Maternal Deprivation Cancelled

"The study design has been changed." Blink.

Without much ado the University of Wisconsin, Madison has cancelled its planned revival of Harry Harlow's infamous experimental use of maternal deprivation.

(They have apparently cancelled them. They say they have, but I'm skeptical of anything they say about their use of animals.)

It was May 11, 2012, that I first wrote about the university's plans, though I initially misunderstood who the vivisector was. I thought at first it was the evil Alyson Joy Bennett, when it was actually the evil Ned Kalin. Over the past three years, many other people have taken note of the cruelty and have added their voices (here, here, here, here, google Ned Kalin to see many more) to demand that the maternal deprivation experiments be stopped. Kalin used the euphemism early adversity in lieu of maternal deprivation, but no one was ever confused by his double talk.

In the university's defense of the defenseless, they mobilized a number of senior researchers and administrators who all made ridiculous and misleading claims about the project. They received support from pro-vivisection industry groups and a cult.

University Communications quietly announced on March 12, 2015, that: "... the study design has been changed. Researchers will now examine the wide range of individual differences in the development of anxiety in monkeys raised by their mothers. While this study will not examine the effects of early adversity, it will characterize [clinically meaningless other stuff.]"

I suspect that I am more surprised by this capitulation than anyone else in the world. The cruelty is going to be somewhat less it now appears. I'm very glad.

Kalin had based his request to NIH for millions of taxpayer dollars on his argument that he was going to come up with information that would lead to a cure or vaccination against the rare lifelong consequences that afflict a small percentage of people who experience early adverse experiences like child abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of poor parenting, and that he needed to maternally deprive 20 newborn rhesus infants to do so. He had explained in his grant request:

It is important to emphasize that currently there are no evidence based treatments available for young children exposed to early adversity who face the risk of developing debilitating psychiatric disorders. While numerous studies have been performed examining the effects of surrogate/peer rearing in nonhuman primates, no studies have been reported examining the effects of this rearing modification on brain development using state of the art imaging and molecular methods. These efforts will allow us to identify the exact brain regions affected, the changes in gene function in these regions, and the specific genes that are involved in increasing the early risk to develop a anxiety and depression. Such information has the potential to identify new targets in specific brain regions that can lead to new ideas about treatment and even prevention of the long-term suffering associated with early adversity.

That's apparently gone out the window. Dollars to vegan doughnuts, one or more of the university's high donors caught wind of the maternal deprivation project and exerted the only sort of pressure the university understands.

For much more on this saga, just search this blog using any germane term, like snake oil.

UW-Madison: Rewriting history, again.

There's an interesting but unattributed document on the University of Wisconsin's animal research "blog" that appears to have been written by Ned Kalin. You can read it here.

The page's web-title is "narrative kalin01213." This could change now that I've called it to their attention.

The in situ title is "Understanding the Root Cause of Anxiety and Depression." It seems to be a loose restatement of the letter Kalin sent to a Cap Times reporter which I sliced and diced here.

I wish I could find a way to winnow the liars from those who are merely confused, but the effects on public perception and belief are probably the same, so maybe it doesn't matter which is which.

In "Understanding the Root Cause of Anxiety and Depression," the writer, who I assume to be Kalin, repeats an oft repeated, and completely inaccurate assertion. He writes:

"... famous studies by Dr. Harry Harlow and others yielded groundbreaking insights into mother-child bonding that changed the way young children are cared for in many settings including neonatal intensive care."

That deserves an F. He might as well have claimed that Harlow cured cancer in his radiation experiments.

I think it weird that people who ought to be able to read and draw simple conclusions from simple facts so often don't, or won't. It's hard to understand why someone could argue that Harlow's work was at all important -- let alone groundbreaking -- when everything they ascribe as a beneficial result of his experiments was already widely known and embraced before Harlow began the long series of experiments that they credit as the primary cause, or at least a very important factor in the changes that took place in child care.

In 1946, pediatrician Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. It became an instant best seller and is widely acknowledged to be the most influential source on child care ever written. Encarta notes that it “sharply redefined the course of child care during the baby boom after World War II.”

But Harlow's defenders seem oblivious to history and simple facts like dates. (Do UW employees have sign some sort of secret oath to defend him?) They assign the progress in child care to Harlow when in actual fact, if he had never been born, the history child care would be completely unaffected.

John Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization to study the mental health of children who were “homeless in their native country” in post-war Europe. He began his studies in January 1950. His report, Maternal Care and Mental Health was published by the WHO in 1951. High demand necessitated a second edition, which was published in 1952. The first section of the report is titled “Adverse Effects of Maternal Deprivation.” The only mention of an animal study in his report is brief mention of a study on twin goat kids by H. Liddell.

Here's a passage from the 1962, WHO publication, Deprivation of Maternal Care: A Reassessment of its Effects that looks back on Bowlby's report:

The conclusion Bowlby reaches in his [1951] monograph is that the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life; and he draws the corollary that the proper care of children deprived of a normal home life is not merely an act of common humanity, but essential to the mental and social welfare of a community. His indictment on the score of the nurseries, institutions, and hospitals of even the so-called advanced countries has contributed to a remarkable change in outlook that has led to a widespread improvement in the institutional care of children.

Harry Harlow entered the field of maternal deprivation research in 1958 with his report on baby monkeys titled "The Nature of Love." This was more than two decades after Rene Spitz began studying and reporting on the effects of maternal deprivation, more than a decade after The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became a best seller, and nearly a decade after Bowlby’s World Health Organization report. And yet, we repeatedly hear from the university that it is because of Harlow's work that children are treated more humanely.

Kalin's new and still completely erroneous claim about Harry Harlow's place in history appears to be just another instance of senior university staff trying to rewrite history to suit their mythology and to meet their public relations goals.

One of the most telling instances of university senior staff trying to rewrite history is the denial made by Joseph Kemnitz regarding the most fundamental detail of the Vilas Zoo monkey affair, the greatest scandal involving the use of animals in the university's history. Kemnitz's central role in the scandal makes his denial all the more worthy of retelling. He made his denial to a student reporter.

County plans to honor monkeys
The Badger Herald
March 7, 2008

..... Bogle said a whistle blower found documents showing that since 1989 at least 201 monkeys from UW Primate Center had been sold to labs around the country and used in experiments at the UW primate center that resulted in their suffering and deaths, while written promises that they would be safe were in effect.

According to Bogle, Primate Center directors and members signed three different letters in 1989, 1990 and 1995, stating the center would not perform harmful experiments on the monkeys unless a monkey had unique genetic traits.

UW Primate Center director Joe Kemnitz said UW never entered into an agreement like that because it would not make sense.

"It's a biomedical research facility," Kemnitz said. "We are using taxpayers' money to research on animals to improve human health.

Kemnitz said the monkeys living at Vilas Zoo provided entertainment for Dane County residents and were mostly used in experiments observing their social structure.

"In the 1990s we made a decision to abandon the zoo facility. People felt they had learned as much from those monkeys as they could," Kemnitz said. ...

Boy, what a whopper! And the university never tried to correct his lies.

These are the letters spelling out the agreement that Kemnitz denied the university had entered into:

WISCONSIN REGIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER
June 15, 1989

Dr. David Hall Director, Vilas Park Zoo
702 S. Randall Ave.
Madison, WI 53715

Dear Dr. Hall:

I want to inform you of the Primate Center’s policy regarding our monkeys that reside at the Vilas Park Zoo in a building we refer to as the “WRPRC Vilas Park Zoo Facility”. This building was constructed with funds provided by the federal government to the Primate Center. Thus, despite its somewhat ambiguous designation, the facility is owned and operated by us and, accordingly, the University of Wisconsin.

More than a few of the monkeys housed at this facility have lived their entire lives there, and animals are removed from their natal groups only to prevent overcrowding. The groups have been established for the principal purpose of studying social organization and social dynamics in stable primate societies. Accordingly, on those infrequent occasions when animals are removed from a group, the removal is guided by procedures aimed at ensuring the least disruption of the group and at preserving social stability.

The research performed on troops housed at the zoo is purely observational in nature. As a matter of policy, no invasive physiological studies are carried out on these animals. In addition, the Center’s policy regarding animals removed from these established groups ensures that they will not be used in studies at our facility involving invasive experimental procedures. Such animals will be assigned to the Center’s non-experimental breeding colony, where they are exempt from experimental use. This policy on the uses of monkeys at the WRPRC Vilas Park Zoo facility has the endorsement of my administrative council as well as the staff veterinarians and animal care supervisors responsible for the care and humane use of all Center animals. As evidence of this, their signatures are also affixed.

Let me take this opportunity to point out that the Center has long taken a leadership role in the humane treatment of research animals. Our housing meets or exceeds all applicable standards. Our 12-person animal care staff has an average length of nearly 20 years of dedicated service to the Center and its animals. In addition, our chief veterinarian is one of just a handful of veterinarians in the state to be certified as a Diplomat of the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine, and our assistant veterinarian has developed a highly regarded program of pairing caged monkeys to enhance their psychological well-being.

Yours Truly,[Not so much, it turened out.]

[signed] Robert W. Goy, Director

Administrative Council

[signed] William E. Bridson Associate Director
[signed] Robert K. Watson, Assistant Director

Animal Care Unit

[signed] Wallace D. House Chief Veterinarian
[signed] Viktor Reinhardt Assistant Veterinarian
[signed] Stephen G. Eisele Breeding Supervisor
[signed] Milford Urben Vials Park Zoo Facility Supervisor

And this one:

WISCONSIN REGIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER
University of Wisconsin, 1223 Capitol Court / Madison, Wisconsin 53715-1299 FAX (608) 243-4031
April 18, 1990

Dr. David Hall, Director Vilas Park Zoo
702 S. Randall Avenue
Madison, WI 53715

Dear Dr. Hall:

I confirm that the existing and future policies of the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center are that any animals bred at the zoo are used in non-interventive behavioral research or for breeding purposes only.

We are very pleased to have the zoo facility and will do all in our power to make it an interesting display for the public as well as a significant Center for behavioral studies. We are addressing new ways in which the condition of the animals can be improved. In particular, with regard to the hair loss seen during the late winter months.

In addition, we are currently establishing field research in the conservation biology of stump-tail macaques. We hope to provide some illustrated posters of our studies concerning this endangered species in the wild. The posters will show how studies in captivity strengthen conservation efforts in the wild. I will of course consult with you in the preparation of these posters, which I hope would also be of interest to your Commission and to the public.

My predecessor, Dr. Goy wrote to you last year on June 15 and on July 17. Our policies were spelled out in detail in those letters and these policies will remain in place. In particular, Dr. Goy’s letter of June 15 addresses this topic. You are aware that the Center, which is one of seven federally-funded Primate Research Centers in the USA, carries out basic research in biomedical and behavioral sciences relevant to both human and animal health and conservation.

With best wishes.

Sincerely yours, [signed] John Hearn

And this one:

[From a fax:]

February 1, 1995
Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center
John P. Hearn, Director

Dr. David Hall, Director Henry Vilas Park Zoo

Henry Vilas Zoo/WRPRC Collaboration

Dear David:

It was a pleasure to review our partnership recently. It was doubly a pleasure to be able to report that the extensive renovations of our Vilas facility now provides year round heating and lighting for the animals. This is overcoming the earlier problems of coat condition that led to misunderstandings by some visitors. We look forward to continuing improvements and we will pursue all possible funding sources to put some trees nearby to soften the rather stark appearance of the building. We will also proceed to obtain a storage shed for the storage of the roof panels, and I will review this plan with you as soon as we have it ready for discussion.

We also reviewed our agreement (since 1989) on the study of animals at Vilas and when they return to the Center. These animals are studied in non-invasive research or assigned to our breeding colony. Investigative procedures include those, with no damage or consequence to the animal required for veterinary health or routine procedures used in human medicine. These procedures cause no physical or sensory deficit and are all fully in compliance and previously approved through the required regulatory steps of the university and Federal employees. In cases where animals are no longer suitable for breeding, they are either assigned to our aged rhesus colony, again for non-invasive work, or euthanized humanely. In cases where animals do not meet criteria for genetic health or inbreeding, similar procedures apply. In cases where exceptional circumstances require a different use, for example unique genetic characteristics requiring more detailed investigation for human and animal health, we will review the proposal in advance with you.

The work at our Vilas facility is proving important for the conservation biology research that the Center is carrying out in Thailand, Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere. The ability to test non-invasive genetic or endocrine monitoring systems, as well as the studies of social organization and the behavior of large primate groups, is an important role of the Vilas Lab and applies to the parallel field research. We will … [text undecipherable] … to explain and display this dimension of our research to the public through the information …[text undecipherable] … Vilas.

Thank you for your help in these endeavors. I enclose a one page summary of the Centers activities, for your information. As you know, I am available to discuss these matters or to present our work to your Commission or to the Society (of which I am a member) at any time.

With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[signed] John Hearn

And here's the university's official statement after having been caught lying repeatedly:

Inventory of Monkeys Used by the Primate Center From the Center’s Henry Vilas Zoo Colony
Statement by Graduate School Dean Virginia S. Hinshaw (8/13/97)

An inventory conducted August 11-12, 1997 by officials from the Wisconsin Regional Primate Center indicates that Primate Center monkeys housed in the UW facility at Henry Vilas Park Zoo were used in invasive research projects. This represents a serious breach of the 1989 local agreement between directors of the center and the zoo.

According to the June 19, 1989 agreement, no invasive studies were to be performed on animals housed at the zoo. While federal regulations for research were strictly followed by the center, the assignment of monkeys from the Vilas facility to some research projects did not adhere to that agreement.

I want to reiterate my instructions to the center’s leadership on Monday, Aug. 11, that no monkeys housed in the Vilas facility will be assigned to invasive research projects. No such assignments have been made in 1997, and none will be made in the future....

And on it goes...

Maternal Deprivation II

The "Serendipity" of Biomedical Research 

Vivisectors sometimes argue that even though their work does not appear at the current time to have provided any demonstrable benefit to human sufferers of some disease or other malady, scientific experimentation is pregnant with possibilities that something entirely unexpected might be learned or discovered at any time.

It’s true that discoveries are sometimes unexpected and sometimes more or less unrelated to the question at hand, and it is also sometimes true that discoveries made today, no matter how obscure or meaningless they might appear right now, could turn out to be useful in the future.

Here’s an interesting assortment of serendipitous discoveries I found on Webster’s [wonderful] Online Dictionary under serendipity. http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definitions/serendipity

Penicillin by Alexander Fleming. He failed to disinfect cultures of bacteria when leaving for his vacations, only to find them contaminated with Penicillium molds, which killed the bacteria. However, he had previously done extensive research into antibacterial substances.

The psychedelic effects of LSD by Albert Hofmann. A chemist, he intentionally ingested a small amount of it upon investigating its properties, and had the first acid trip in history, while cycling to his home in Switzerland; this is commemorated among LSD users annually as Bicycle Day.

5-fluorouracil's therapeutic action on actinic keratosis, was initially investigated for its anti-cancer actions.

Minoxidil's action on baldness, originally it was an oral agent for treating hypertension. It was observed that bald patients treated with it grew hair too.

Viagra (sildenafil citrate), an anti-impotence drug. It was initially studied for use in hypertension and angina pectoris. Phase I clinical trials under the direction of Ian Osterloh suggested that the drug had little effect on angina, but that it could induce marked penile erections.

Retin-A anti-wrinkle action. It was a vitamin A derivative first used for treating acne. The accidental result in some older people was a reduction of wrinkles on the face.

The libido-enhancing effect of l-dopa, a drug used for treating Parkinson's disease. Older patients in a sanatorium had their long-lost interest in sex suddenly revived.

Vivisectors sometimes point to accidental discovery as a partial justification for their work. It’s a sort of faith-based position on the value of basic science. See for instance: Serendipity in Research Involving Laboratory Animals. William C. Campbell. ILAR Journal. Volume 46, Number 4, 2005.

Harry Harlow and his student’s horribly cruel maternal deprivation experiments didn’t contribute to the care of humans. Their work was and remains a marathon demonstration that certain things we already knew and know to be true about humans are also true for rhesus monkeys.

It isn’t serendipity when the accidental discovery of something bad, especially while looking for something good, leads to great evil. Giving Harlow and his students the (unwarranted) benefit of the doubt, maybe they actually were looking for something good. If so, they never found it, and moreover, the legacy of their work is a small quasi-scientific industry dedicated to using monkeys in research purported to be intended to benefit human beings with anxiety, substance abuse, and other psychiatric disorders.

The monkey-model-of-human-anxiety industry produces only scientific papers. It is almost wholly publicly funded. Its work product does not include benefit to human sufferers of anxiety.

Harlow and his student’s work was the birth of the industry. The big discovery upon which the industry is based was the scientific fact that rhesus monkeys deprived of maternal care fail to develop normally; they are fearful and withdrawn.

As a result of this highly replicable and often replicated discovery, creating monkeys who are suffering from severe emotional problems is now matter-of-fact; it’s routine, thanks to the accidental discovery by Harlow and his many students that a baby monkey’s psyche can be quickly crushed by taking him away from his mother.

The ease of this psychic demolition is the tool that makes the publicly-funded maternal deprivation industry possible.
It has led to studies like “Amygdala gene expression correlates of social behavior in monkeys experiencing maternal separation. Sabatini MJ, Ebert P, Lewis DA, Levitt P, Cameron JL, Mirnics K. J Neurosci. 2007.

It has led to studies like the one reported on in 2010 by vivisectors at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. That study investigated whether rhesus monkeys who experienced early life stress would show “altered sensitivity” to the reinforcing effects of cocaine. Five “control monkeys” -- monkeys who weren’t taken at birth from the mothers, and four maternally separated monkeys were trained to self-administer cocaine. They discovered that the maternally deprived monkeys were less likely to become addicted. [Impact of early life stress on the reinforcing and behavioral-stimulant effects of psychostimulants in rhesus monkeys. Ewing Corcoran SB, Howell LL. Behavioral Pharmacology.]

And more recent reports like:

Early rearing interacts with temperament and housing to influence the risk for motor stereotypy in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Vandeleest JJ, McCowan B, Capitanio JP. Appl Anim Behav Sci. 2011. [“Motor stereotypy” is a technical term for abnormal behaviors that commonly involve various forms of self-stimulation such as self-injury, pacing, rocking, spinning in circles, excessive sleeping, and mouthing cage bars.];

and,

Early social experience affects behavioral and physiological responsiveness to stressful conditions in infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Rommeck I, Capitanio JP, Strand SC, McCowan B. Am J Primatol. 2011.

The maternal deprivation tool has been exported around the world. Chinese researchers reported in 2011 that: “[T]he deleterious effects of MS [maternal separation] on rhesus monkeys cannot be compensated by a later normal social life, suggesting that the effects of MS are long-lasting and that the maternal-separated rhesus monkeys are a good animal model to study early adversity and to investigate the development of psychiatric disorders induced by exposure to early adversity.” [Maternal separation produces lasting changes in cortisol and behavior in rhesus monkeys. Feng X, Wang L, Yang S, Qin D, Wang J, Li C, Lv L, Ma Y, Hu X.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.]

The most financially successful exploitation of young monkeys’ vulnerability to maternal deprivation may be the richly endowed work of Harry Harlow’s protégé, Stephen Suomi.

Suomi's publicly-funded project, "Developmental Continuity of Individual Differences in Reactivity in Monkeys" (Project No. 1ZIAHD001106) has received about $6 million over the past 5 years. In 2011 he explained his methods and results over the years:

As in previous years, a major focus of this project has been detailed longitudinal study of the behavioral and biological consequences of differential early social rearing, most notably comparing rhesus monkey infants reared by their biological mothers in pens containing adult males and other mothers with same-age infants for their first 6-7 months of life (MR), with monkeys separated from their mothers at birth, hand-reared in the labs neonatal nursery for their first month and then raised in small groups of same-age peers for their next 6 months (PR). In a third standard rearing environment, surrogate-peer rearing (SPR), infants are separated from their mothers and nursery reared just like PR infants, but then at 1 month are housed in individual cages containing an inanimate surrogate mother and additionally are placed in a play cage with 3 other like-reared peers for 2 hours daily for the next are 6 months. At 7 months of age, MR, PR, and SPR infants are all moved into one large pen, where they all live together until puberty. Thus, the differential social rearing occurs only for the first 6-7 months; thereafter MR, PR, and SPR all share the same physical and social environment. We previously demonstrated that PR monkeys cling more, play less, tend to be much more aggressive, and exhibit much greater behavioral and biological disruption during and immediately following short-term social separation at 6 months of age than MR monkeys, and they also exhibit deficits in serotonin metabolism (as indexed by chronically low values of CSF 5-HIAA), as do SPR monkeys, and they also have significantly lower levels of 5-HTT binding throughout many brain regions than do MR subjects. Many of these differences between MR and PR monkeys persist throughout the childhood years. Research in collaboration with colleagues from NIAAA has demonstrated that both PR and SPR monkeys also consume significantly more alcohol when placed in a happy hour situation as adolescents and young adults. This past year we published data extending these rearing condition differences to include developmental changes in plasma concentrations of BDNF and NGF (6), behavioral lateralization (4), acoustic startle response patterns following fluxotine treatment (11), and structural differences in various brain regions (15). Finally, we found that PR monkeys had chronically higher levels of cortisol obtained from hair samples than did MR and SPR monkeys throughout their first year of life, whereas during the second year SPR monkeys had higher levels than the other two rearing groups.

The knowledge that taking baby monkeys from their mothers is harmful to them has had only two effects: Taxpayer money has been poured into the bank accounts of scientists whose careers are based on taking monkeys away from their mothers and documenting the many ways they suffer, and, thousands of baby monkeys and their mothers have been separated from each other simply to hurt them.

MOTHERS DAY CANCELED

UW SCIENTISTS REVIVE HARRY HARLOW’S CRUEL MATERNAL DEPRIVATION

Maternal deprivation -- crushing a monkey’s spirit by raising him or her without a nurturing caregiver -- was invented and promoted by UW-Madison’s Harry Harlow and his students in the 1970s and 80s. Harlow’s experiments with maternal deprivation are widely acknowledged as being profoundly cruel.

Now, well into the twenty-first century, UW-Madison has again embraced the use of Harry Harlow’s cruel and controversial methods.

Recently hired experimental psychologist Alyson Joy Bennett has close professional ties to Harlow’s protégé Stephen Suomi, advocate of the infamous “Pit of Despair” – a device for keeping baby monkeys in profound isolation. Bennett maternally deprives monkeys and then uses them as her research subjects.

Monkeys experiencing these “deleterious early rearing experiences” have abnormally high levels of anxiety and stay huddled in place. They have pronounced cognitive and motor deficits. Emotional problems associated with this rearing method persist into adulthood.

Another UW-Madison researcher, Affiliate Scientist at the Harlow Primate Laboratory, Ned Kalin, has requested permission to take his decades-long monkey fear experiments even further by frightening young maternally deprived monkeys.

This is a giant moral step backwards and a challenge to public sentiments and mores. The UW Madison may have hired Dr. Bennett with the expectation that her research methods would spark public controversy. Maybe they hoped other UW scientists like Kalin would again embrace Harlow’s cruel methods.

Bennett is a leader of Speaking of Research, a group started to "take on animal rights groups" (SourceWatch). She is an outspoken defender of all experimental use of animals – and understandably so given the line of research she has chosen as her specialty.

The Alliance for Animals is asking its members and compassionate people around the world to speak out against this revival of Harry Harlow’s cruel methods by calling and writing Dr. Robert Streiffer, Chair of the university oversight committee responsible for approving these experiments, and urging him to stop them.

For Dr. Streiffer’s contact information and much more detail see:
http://www.allanimals.org/maternal-deprivation.html

Harry Harlow's Dark Shadow

If I worked in a field or in an institution associated with the name Harry Harlow, I too might think that his work needed defending; he was, and is, after all, an icon of the complete inability of an industry to regulate itself; its lack of a moral compass; and a willingness to rely on arcane and meaningless theoretical minutia to justifify cruelty.

Some (most?) within the industry must bear an unspoken sense of guilt over Harlow’s career. Some, even his past students, have spoken about their ethical failures:

Harlow’s colleagues, me included, never challenged him on the ethical points,” [John ] Gluck says, flatly and with regret. “The strength of our spines were [sic] not sufficient to carry the weight of our professional goals and our conscience.” (Blum. Love at Goon Park. 2002.)

Frank C. P. van der Horst and Rene van der Veer published three papers in the journal Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science in 2008 that, in part, argue that Peter Singer’s criticism of Harlow is unjust or inaccurate. (See: Harlow and Bowlby for links to these papers.)

In “‘When Strangers Meet’: John Bowlby and Harry Harlow on Attachment Behavior” they write in the introduction: “Although it has been argued (Singer 1975) that Harlow’s experimenting had no influence on Bowlby’s theorizing, here it will become clear that [it did].” They follow up more forcefully in the conclusion:

We may conclude that Harlow’s scientific influence on Bowlby has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt: Harlow’s experiments showed in a remarkable way what Bowlby had been theorizing about since his introduction to ethology in the early 1950s. Our findings make abundantly clear that Singer (1975) was completely wrong in asserting that Harlow’s findings had no impact on Bowlby’s theory whatsoever….

That’s a strong statement. But it refers to a straw man.

Singer does not argue that Harlow didn’t influence Bowlby’s theorizing.

Here’s the only passage in Animal Liberation (Singer, 1975) that mentions Bowlby and Harlow:

In another article Harlow and his former student and associate Stephen Suomi described how they were trying to induce psychopathy in infant monkeys by a technique that appeared not to be working. They were then visited by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist. According to Harlow’s account, Bowlby listened to the story of their troubles and then toured the Wisconsin laboratory. After he had seen the monkeys individually housed in bare wire cages he asked, “Why are you trying to produce psychopathology in monkeys? You already have more psychopathological monkeys in the laboratory than have ever been seen on the face of the earth.”

Bowlby, incidentally, was a leading researcher on the consequences of maternal deprivation, but his research was conducted with children, primarily orphans, refuges, and institutionalized children. As far back as 1951, before Harlow even began his research on nonhuman primates, Bowlby concluded:

The evidence has been reviewed. It is submitted that evidence is now such that it leaves no room for doubt regarding the general proposition that the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life.

This did not deter Harlow and his colleagues from devising and carrying out their monkey experiments. In the same article in which they tell of Bowlby’s visit, Harlow and Suomi describe [details of their efforts to induce depression.]

This is the sum total of Singer’s comment. He says nothing about Bowlby’s theorizing. Singer says only that according to Bowlby, the matter of a child’s need for maternal care was resolved, yet in spite of that, Harlow and his colleagues demonstrated the effect of maternal deprivation in monkeys; ad nauseam, I would say.

The story of Bowlby’s visit to Harlow’s lab has been retold often. It is repeated by Debra Blum in Love at Goon Park as well as by Stephen Suomi in “Rigorous Experiments on Monkey Love: An Account of Harry F. Harlow’s Role in the History of Attachment Theory.”

It raises the question of Harlow’s and his students’ insight and qualifications. You have to wonder what they missed, what they couldn’t see, what passed them by without notice. They seem to have been nearly blind. If someone who claims to be studying the behavior of an animal is unable to see the animal's distress, then how likely is it that his or her observations of the animal's behavior and motivations are accurate, complete, or at all meaningful?

According to Horst and Veer, Harlow and Bowlby were introduced to each other by British ethologist Robert Hinde. Hinde visited Harlow’s laboratory some time in the late 50s or early 60s:

I must have next met Harry when I visited Madison and was appalled by his room full of of cages with babies going “whoowhoowhoo” [a distress call] and Harlow had no sensitivity at that point that he was damaging these infants.

Notable too, is the fact that Harlow had been studying the behavior of primates since the early 1930s, and yet, more than twenty-five years later he was unaware that the monkeys in his lab were psychopathic. How sensitive to the implications of his research data could he and his students have really been?

Horst and Veer base their high opinion (defense?) of Harlow on his contributions to Bowlby’s theories. But Bowlby’s theories were just that. By the time Harlow entered the scientific argument in 1958 concerning the theoretical reason that children suffer when deprived of contact with a caregiver, the matter that children needed such care was not in dispute, no matter the rewriting of history that Harlow’s defenders are wont to rely on.

For instance, in 1962, the World Health Organization published Deprivation of Maternal Care. A Reassessment of its Effects. Public Health Papers No. 14 as a follow-up to John Bowlby’s 1951 landmark WHO report: Maternal Care and Mental Health. From the Preface:

Bowlby’s monograph Maternal Care and Mental Health was published by the World Health Organization in 1951, and was at once acclaimed as an unequalled contribution to its subject. Its success is shown by the frequency with which it has been printed and the many languages into which it has been translated.

The conclusion Bowlby reaches in his monograph is that prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his life; and he draws the corollary that the proper care of children deprived of a normal life is not merely an act of common humanity, but essential to the mental and social welfare of a community. His indictment on that score of the nurseries, institutions, and hospitals of even the so-called advanced countries has contributed to a remarkable change in outlook that has led to a widespread improvement in the institutional care of children.

While the practical effects of Bowlby’s monograph in the realm of child care have been universally acknowledged to be wholly beneficial, his theoretical conclusions have been subjected to considerable criticism….

It is this arcane argument that Harlow contributed to. In his 1951 Maternal Care, Bowlby mentions a single animal study—one using twin goats—to bolster his supposition that differences in rearing conditions were adequate to induce behavioral abnormalities. In his 1952 follow-up work and restatement, Child Care and the Growth of Love, he cited only two animal studies. He again mentioned the goats:

Though there can be no mistaking that these findings all point the same way, their value is frequently questioned on the grounds that many children in institutions are born of parents of poor stock, physically and mentally, and that heredity alone might well account for all the differences. Those who make this objection do not seem to be aware that in the majority of the studies described, care has been taken by the investigators to ensure that other groups of children, brought up in either their own home or in foster homes and of a similar social class and as nearly as possible of similar stock, were studied at the same time for purposes of comparison. The only certain method of ruling out the effects of heredity is by comparing identical twins. Though there are no human twin studies of the problem, one psychologist is doing experimental work on twin goat kids, one of whom is separated from its mother for a brief spell each day and the other is not. Except for the daily experimental period of forty minutes, both kids live with and feed from their mother. During the experimental period, the lights are periodically extinguished, which is known to create anxiety in goats, and this produces very different behavior in the twins. The one which is with its mother is at ease and moves about freely; the isolated one is ‘psychologically frozen’ and remains cowed in one corner. In one of the first experiments the isolated kid discontinued suckling from its mother and, the experimenters being unaware of this and so unable to help, it died after a few days. This is ample demonstration of the adverse effects of maternal deprivation on the young of mammals, and disposes finally of the argument that all the observed effects are due to heredity.

He also cited Konrad Lorenz’s work on imprinting in goslings.

Horst and Veer argue that Harlow’s work influenced Bowlby. In fact, the opposite seems to be a more accurate characterization of their interaction. Harlow based his work on Bowlby’s. Harlow wasn’t even original.

Stephen Suomi, in "Rigorous Experiments" writes:

…Two years later [in 1964] Hinde did essentially the same thing in a slightly different setting, and indeed maternal separation studies are still being carried out today, but if one goes back to the very first published studies carried out in Harlow’s lab (Seay et al. 1962, and Seay and Harlow 1965), in the Introduction and in the Discussion sections of those papers there is nothing but Bowlby. These monkey studies were modeled exactly on Bowlby’s published accounts of the effects of maternal separation on children, including the use of exactly the same terms—“protest,” “despair,” and “detachment,”—that Bowlby had employed in describing the reactions of children following separation from and reunion with their mothers….

Horst and Veer argue that Harlow was a “giant” in his field. But Harlow was well known and a standout before he began his experiments on attachment in monkeys. "The Nature of Love" was part of his inaugural address as the new president of the American Psychological Association in 1958. His published papers, prior to 1958 (and after) do not seem to warrant the leadership positions he has held.

Harlow’s fame and notoriety appear to have been based on a remarkably strong personality rather than on any contribution to human well-being. This is probably why psychologist and colleague Duane Rumbaugh could observe, “It was surprising to me how fast the citations dropped off after his death.” (Love at Goon Park) And it explains why no one had the spine to stand up to him.

Harlow’s affect on childcare is little more than a myth. Even in the 1964 WHO reassessment of Bowlby’s work cited above, of the six papers, two include a single reference to Harlow ("Nature of Love") and one includes "Nature" and two others simultaneously, out of about 273 other referenced works between the authors. From 1959 through 1964 Harlow had published at least 27 papers.

There is a large dollop of irony in all of this. Some psychologists, so-called experts in human behavior, are unable to overcome the power of Harlow’s dominant personality, even decades after his death.