Dear all:

I wasn't specifically looking for this, but I uncovered a book, the Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, that speaks more specifically about Harlow's monkeys and Chimp research more specifically.  Having started this one, I will be moving on to Love at Goon Park which is a biography about Harlow.

I have to say, his research, as presented in the Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary strikes me as particularly sadistic.  After he had discovered that the monkey babies spent about 18 hours a day sleeping with their cloth-mother and an hour or less a day with the wire mesh mother that fed them (stats that I think I will incorporate into prenatal classes), he went on to designed evil mothers.  This part I found hard to read.  These poor monkeys consistently went back to the abusive cloth mothers that blew air at the baby monkeys, shook violently back and forth, or were freezing cold.  There was even an iron maiden that had retractable spikes.  

I simply cannot get my mind around how anyone could do this AFTER they realized how important the loving attention of a mother was for these monkeys.  My dear father did hunt deer as a matter of survival when he was growing up in Northern California during the war -- yet at the same time rescued a pelican by waiting until the town doctor was drunk to coerce him to set its wing and coerce all the other boys in town to fish for the pelican until its wing healed.  He would never condone such treatment of animals despite being a hunter.  

This book also speaks about the trauma of breeding primates having their babies repeatedly taken away from them.  I remember on Animal Planet a story about Pandas being raised in captivity to preserve the population and how the mother Panda developed diarrhea when her baby was prematurely weaned and taken away from her so that the Panda baby could bond with humans.  This also meant that they could breed her more frequently than nature intended. 

If you think about it, we not only have disrupted our own mechanisms for bonding and creating stable relationships, but we have also done this to higher order mammals as well.  One of my friends mentioned that this is one particular breed of dog that cannot deliver puppies normally.  They are so inbred that they must have a surgical birth.  How bizarre is that?  Yet it is not so far from where we are drifting with our own births.  

Best regards, 

Susan E. Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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