Pit of Despair
April 12th, 2007 at 3:26 am
(Other Writ, Self Writ, Animals)
The pit of despair, or vertical chamber, was a device used in experiments conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys during the 1970s by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow and his students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of human clinical depression.
The vertical chamber was little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom. A 3/8 in. wire mesh floor 1 in. above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel. The chamber was equipped with a food box and a water-bottle holder, and was covered with a pyramid top — … — designed to discourage incarcerated subjects from hanging from the upper part of the chamber.
Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to six weeks. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.
It gets worse…
After 30 days, the “total isolates,” as they were called, were found to be “enormously disturbed”: two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After being isolated for a year, the monkeys were found initially to barely move, didn’t explore or play, and were incapable of having sexual relations. When put with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied by the other monkeys.
In order to find out how the isolates would parent, Harlow devised what he called a “rape rack,” to which the female isolates were tied in the position taken by a normal female monkey in order to be impregnated. Artificial insemination had not been developed at that time. He found that, just as they were incapable of having sexual relations, they were also unable to parent their offspring, either abusing or neglecting them. “Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were,” he wrote. Having no social experience themselves, they were incapable of appropriate social interaction. One mother held her baby’s face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another crushed her baby’s head. Most of them simply ignored their offspring.
Etc….
Wikipedia Pit of Despair
‘…In action how like an angel !…’
