he did worse than that, even...

*******the following will be triggering for people who are queasy about cruelty / abuse to animals. please don't read it if you think you may be triggered. or... if you choose to read it (and / or follow the links) please don't say i didn't warn you********

when he did the deprivation experiments he noticed that the monkeys got really attached to the cloth that was in the bottom of their cages. they would bite and snarl when the caretakers tried to remove it for cleaning.

he made a wire monkey with a nipple that provided food.
he made a cloth monkey that was soft and cuddly but didn't provide food. he expected the infant monkeys to spend the majority of their time with the wire feeding monkey - but they didn't. they would spend most of their time with the cloth monkey, cuddling it and playing with it. they would run over to the wire monkey for feeding but would return to the cloth monkey and they spent most of their time there.

http://www.stopanimaltests.com/photo...eprivation.jpg

so we learned that cuddles and play is preferred to whoever feeds you (hence change in practices in orphanages).

then he wondered just how strong this love bond was with the cloth cuddly monkeys...

so he make it so the cloth cuddly monkeys would hurt the infants. he put sharp metal spikes on them that would jab the infants when the infants tried to cuddle the cloth monkey. he made the cloth cuddly monkey emit a blast of pressurised water that would throw the monkey back against the bars of the cage. the monkeys would... keep going back to cuddle the cloth monkeys despite such abuse.

so we learned that infants who are severely physically abused still have strong attachment behaviour (love) for their abusers.

the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers never developed normal social skills once they were reunited with their peers. he wanted to mate the females to see whether they were capable of mothering infant monkeys well and to see whether the infant monkeys would develop normal social skills. the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers would bite and attack male monkeys who wanted to mate with them, however. they didn't seem to understand the social cues of 'want to mate' compared with 'want to fight'. so... he devised a 'rape rack' (that was his chosen terminology). basically... he made this rack that would physically restrain the females so the males could mate with them. he found that they were unable to mother their infants well. often they tried to kill them and / or they hurt or rejected them.

so we learned that abused mothers tend to not know what to do with their infants which tends to result in their being abusive to them in turn.

did we really need to do such cruel things to monkeys to learn any of this???? but still the monkey research continues... it was indeed because of Harlow that the animal rights activists started getting up in arms. The 'silver spring' monkeys were similarly influential with respect to that (where, for example, they would cut the nerve going from left arm to brain leaving the nerve going from brain to arm intact, tie up their right arm, and observe the monkeys starving themselves to death even though they should have been able to move their left arm okay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring_monkeys

that research was used to develop new treatments for neurological patients after strokes and the like. to teach them how to be able to move their limbs again. did monkeys need to starve to death in order for us to learn that?

IMHO no. we did not.

(Peter Singer is well worth a read. He argues that for the most part experiments that involve cruelty to animals could be more cleverly devised such that they do not involve cruelty to animals. it is just that... we are complacent...)