Science or Sadism? Experimenters Tear Baby Monkeys From Moms
Crying, flailing, desperate to stay together—baby monkeys and their mothers are torn apart for useless experiments. They need your help.
Baby monkeys need their mothers.
When they need protection and consolation from a world they do not understand, they need their mothers. When it’s too cold, too loud, or too big, when they need reassurance, a warm hug, a kindness to smooth the coarseness of life, and especially when they need love, they need their mothers, just like you.
But unlike you, baby monkeys imprisoned in laboratories across the country are denied this elementary compassion. Experimenters dating back nearly 70 years have torn baby monkeys from their shrieking mothers and used the helpless infants for myriad tests, each plumbing new depths of depravity. And they all prove just one thing: Baby monkeys need their mothers.
PETA has been at the vanguard of the fight against this cruel practice. From Steven Suomi at the National Institutes of Health to more recent campaigns against the University of Washington’s Infant Primate Research Laboratory, the experiments of Margaret Livingstone at Harvard Medical School, an undercover investigation at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, and our relentless efforts against pregnancy experiments at Eastern Virginia Medical School, PETA continues to shine a bright light into the dank corners of ‘science’ that still engage in mother/infant separation.
Nature v. Unnatural
Various species of macaques, the preferred primate victims of laboratories everywhere, exhibit the same maternal instincts as human mothers. They are devoted and protective. Mothers gaze lovingly into their babies’ eyes and kiss them clearly demonstrating abiding love. The unfortunate mother who loses an infant experiences profound grief, sometimes carrying the limp body of her baby for days.
PETA’s undercover investigation at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center discovered that pregnant monkeys give birth in solitary in wire-bottomed cages. Their babies are taken away within a year.
As workers pull them apart, panic-stricken mothers and infants shriek and cry and flail and fight, so desperate to stay together they often lose control of their bowels.
Some infants, including two named Turnip and Cora—whose mother was reportedly killed in a Caesarean section experiment—were stuck in a bleak basement with only a stuffed animal for comfort. One monkey apparently gave birth to a stillborn baby. After she finally put him down, she spun in circles in anguish.
Junk Science
Monkeys deprived of maternal contact suffer lifelong effects. They’re more fearful or aggressive. They struggle to form normal social relationships. Many develop self-injurious behavior, biting themselves or pulling out their hair. Others develop “motor stereotypies,” such as pacing and rocking endlessly in their cages.
Motherless monkeys have a host of brain abnormalities that compromise sound scientific inquiry. They exhibit altered serotonin pathway function, cerebral blood flow, and changes in brain chemicals that support nerve growth and function.
Experiments carried out on these monkeys are just bad science. Even Steven Suomi, who for 40 years conducted maternal deprivation experiments on monkeys to purposely induce trauma in infants, admitted back in the 1970s that experimenting on monkeys yields almost nothing useful:
Most monkey data that readily generalize to humans have not uncovered new facts about human behavior; rather, they have only verified principles that have already been formulated from previous human data.
Digging the Pit of Despair
Exploration of maternal deprivation began in the 1950s at the University of Wisconsin, with an experimenter named Harry Harlow, whose tests became infamous for their cruelty.
Harlow tore newborns away from their mothers and gave some infants “surrogate mothers” made of wire and wood. Then he really got to work.
With his then-student Stephen Suomi, he created the “pit of despair,” a dark metal box designed to isolate the monkeys from everything in the outside world. Within days, the monkeys kept inside were driven insane, incessantly rocking and clutching at themselves, tearing and biting their own skin, and ripping out their hair.
When finally removed from isolation, they were too traumatized to interact with other monkeys. Some even starved themselves to death. But Harlow wasn’t done.
Suomi and Harlow created what they called a “rape rack,” a device to restrain and impregnate some of the female monkeys to produce a steady supply of infants for their experiments.
The pair would later watch and photograph the traumatized mothers physically abusing and killing their own babies.
Harlow II: Suomi
Suomi continued Harlow’s legacy with his own maternal deprivation experiments at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Infant monkeys were separated from their mothers within hours of birth and given a cloth-covered water bottle as a “surrogate” mother.
In some experiments, Suomi sedated the mothers, taped over their nipples, and watched as their infants caged with them screamed and cried, frantically shaking their unresponsive mothers. In at least one case, experimenters were heard laughing while a mother tried to remain awake to comfort her distraught child. As if this wasn’t horrible enough, in some instances, Suomi even released an electronic snake into the cage with the baby monkeys, who innately fear them.
Restrained newborn infants were also put in “startle chambers,” where experimenters scared them with loud noises, causing them to cry out and desperately try to hide or escape.
Following an intensive 18-month PETA campaign, NIH ended Suomi’s experiments and his lab was shut down in 2015.
Neo-Harlow: Livingstone
Harlow’s dark legacy continues today at Harvard Medical School, where Margaret Livingstone has spent over 40 years tearing baby monkeys away from their mothers and manipulating their visual experiences, including sewing their eyes shut or depriving them of seeing human or monkey faces, just to see how badly it damages their brain and visual development.
Livingstone also forces goggles onto newborn monkeys taken away from their mothers, which befuddle their vision with a disorienting strobing effect for up to 18 months.
Tormenting Pregnant Baboons and Their Babies: Gerard Pepe
For nearly 50 years, Gerald Pepe and his collaborator Eugene Albrecht have subjected baboons to invasive and deadly experiments at Eastern Virginia Medical School under the guise of pregnancy research. Baboons are impregnated, injected with drugs known to cause severe side effects, and repeatedly sedated for painful procedures. At various stages of pregnancy, they are forced to undergo cesarean sections, and their babies are typically killed. In just one recent three-year protocol, the school approved the use of 156 baboons—including 63 fetuses cut from their mothers and killed and 40 newborns destined for more experiments. The school’s own records detail the severe physical and psychological suffering endured by the baboons. Many have had multiple surgeries, suffered serious injuries, and displayed self-harming behaviors due to stress and confinement. These cruel studies have yielded no benefits for human health.
Despite receiving millions in public funding, Eastern Virginia Medical School has repeatedly violated federal animal welfare regulations in its pregnancy experiments on baboons. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cited the school for a critical violation after at least three baboons underwent multiple major surgeries without the required scientific justification or prior approval. Following pressure from the school, the USDA granted an exception, allowing experimenter Pepe to perform up to six cesarean sections each on five baboons. However, after the school was cited again in 2023 for failing to meet even the minimal conditions of the exception, the USDA withdrew its approval.
What You Can Do
Please TAKE ACTION today to stop these horrific experiments.
If you are a Massachusetts resident, urge your state lawmakers to support a landmark bill that would prohibit experimenters from separating infant primates from their mothers for the first year of their lives.
And everyone can take action to urge Harvard’s administration to close Livingstone’s laboratory and release the remaining monkeys to a sanctuary.
You can do so by sending polite comments to the following people:
Alan M. Garber, M.D.
Interim President, Harvard University
president@harvard.edu
George Q. Daley, M.D., Ph.D.
Dean, Harvard Medical School
office_of_the_dean@hms.harvard.edu
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