Part V The Abuse of Animals in Vivisection and Scientific Research
Animals in Scientific Research
The Nature and Prevalence of Animal Abuse in Science
Fundamental Research
Example 1. Mother-Infant Separation in Monkeys
Example 2. Desensitization of the Glans Penis and Sexual Behaviour in Cats
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Animals in Scientific Research 399 Example Mother-Infant Separation in Monkeys Between 1957 and 1963, the US animal researcher Harry Harlow and his associates studied the effects of maternal deprivation in macaque monkeys (Harlow et al 1965) In these experiments baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers in order to observe the effects of partial and total social isolation Some of the monkeys were kept in solitary confinement for up to 15 years The motivation for these studies was the WHO Maternal Care and Mental Health report published in 1951, which set out the maternal deprivation hypothesis (Bowlby 1951) Harlow began his studies of behaviour of non-human primates in the 1940s Initially the studies were largely observational and based on cognitive tasks In the late 1940s, Harlow began surgically removing parts of the brain of his monkey subjects to see to what extent the brain damage impaired their cognitive and behavioural abilities One such study is titled ‘Discrimination learning by normal and brain operated monkeys’ (Warren and Harlow 1952) Despite severe criticism of Harlow’s work both by some of his peers and the animal protection community, maternal deprivation studies in monkeys continue to receive funding and ethical approval and have been published as recently as 2009 and 2010 (Law et al 2009a, 2009b; Arabadzisz et al 2010) Example Desensitization of the Glans Penis and Sexual Behaviour in Cats In the 1960s, Dr Lester Aronson at the American Museum of Natural History conducted invasive research on the sexual behaviour of cats with a research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (a member of the US National Institutes of Health, the principal government funding agency for medical research) A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Aronson, together with his assistant Madeline Cooper, chronicled 15 years of experiments in which the two had mutilated cats in order to observe the effects on the behaviour of the animals (Singer 1998; Aronson and Cooper 1967) As with the example of Botox, it was once again public outcry and public opinion that put an end to these animal experiments, all of which had obtained ethical approval according to NIH guidelines The following, more recent examples, are intended to illustrate the point that not much has changed since the 1960s and that fundamental research