The Liberation Of Britches @unnecessaryfuss

unnecessaryfuss "What type of mind could have conceived of this and, perhaps more importantly, could have carried it out?"

Britches, a Stump-tailed Macaque monkey born into a breeding colony at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in March 1985, was removed from his mother at birth, had his eyelids sewn shut, and had an electronic sonar device attached to his head as part of a 3-year sensory-deprivation study involving 24 infant monkeys.

Acting on a tip from a student, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) removed Britches from the UCR laboratory on April 20, 1985, when he was 5 weeks old — along with 467 mice, cats, opossums, pigeons, rabbits, and rats — during a raid upon the laboratory. The ALF took footage of the raid and of Britches' condition when they found him, passing it anonymously to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who used it as the basis of their film, Britches. A similar film was released by PETA a year earlier titled Unnecessary Fuss.

According to Science Magazine reporting on the Riverside raid, PETA was a "mouthpiece for the unidentified liberationists". As a result of the ensuing publicity, 8 of the 17 studies interrupted by the raid were not restarted, and the university stopped allowing baby monkeys' eyes to be sewn shut. The NIH conducted an 8-month long investigation of the animal care program at UC-Riverside and concluded it was an "appropriate animal care program" and that no corrective action was necessary.

A spokesman for the university criticised the ALF, saying that claims of animal mistreatment were "absolutely false" and that there would be long-term damage to some of the research projects, including those aimed at developing treatment for blind people. Researchers alleged that activists had applied black Mascara or paint to the monkey's eyelids to make the sutures look larger than they were, and that damage to the eyelids reported by pediatrician Bettina Flavioli on behalf of the ALF had, in fact, been caused by the pediatrician herself.

The Study: Conducted by PSYCHOlogist David H. Warren. And the reason for this experiment? To determine the effect of blindness on children.

According to PETA's president, based on papers found in the lab by the ALF, the UCR researchers wrote that performing this study by artificially blinding the monkeys was necessary because "sufficient numbers of blind human infants [to study] were not within driving distance" of Riverside, California, and because the experimenters did not wish to be inconvenienced by the normal household routines if forced to work with blind children living at home.

The Raid: The ALF was alerted to the laboratory's work by a student who had reported the Britches' situation to an animal protection group, Last Chance for Animals. An ALF contact volunteering there heard the complaint, and approached the student for more information.

On April 20, 1985, ALF activists broke into the laboratory and removed Britches along with 467 other animals, taking footage of the raid, which they handed anonymously to PETA. Activists found Britches alone in a cage clinging to a device covered in towelling that had two fake nipples attached, apparently intended to serve as a surrogate mother. Britches' eyes were bandaged and a sonar device was attached to his head, which emitted a high-pitched screech every few minutes. Britches was driven to Utah and examined by a retired pediatrician, Bettina Flavioli, who recorded her report on video.

Medical Report: Dr. Ned Buyukmihci, a doctor of veterinarian medicine, specializing in veterinary ophthalmology, and founder of the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights, examined Britches after he was removed from the lab. He stated that the sutures used were too large and that the monkey's eye pads were filthy. He said: "There is no possible justification for this sloppy, painful experiment."

Britches After The Raid: According to Ingrid Newkirk, Bettina Flavioli contacted a primatologist about Britches's future, and was referred to a sanctuary in Mexico that would take him. If not raised with other monkeys, the primatologist advised that Britches would grow to be aggressive and unmanageable. Following Flavioli's advice, the monkey was socialized by a number of handlers, to avoid his becoming too attached to any one of them. When he was five months old, Bettina Flavioli paid for the ALF to fly Britches to a sanctuary to be raised by a female macaque.

updated 14 years ago

The Liberation Of Britches

unnecessaryfuss 2009-10-22 | "What type of mind could have conceived of this and, perhaps more importantly, could have carried it out?"

Britches, a Stump-tailed Macaque monkey born into a breeding colony at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in March 1985, was removed from his mother at birth, had his eyelids sewn shut, and had an electronic sonar device attached to his head as part of a 3-year sensory-deprivation study involving 24 infant monkeys.

Acting on a tip from a student, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) removed Britches from the UCR laboratory on April 20, 1985, when he was 5 weeks old — along with 467 mice, cats, opossums, pigeons, rabbits, and rats — during a raid upon the laboratory. The ALF took footage of the raid and of Britches' condition when they found him, passing it anonymously to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who used it as the basis of their film, Britches. A similar film was released by PETA a year earlier titled Unnecessary Fuss.

According to Science Magazine reporting on the Riverside raid, PETA was a "mouthpiece for the unidentified liberationists". As a result of the ensuing publicity, 8 of the 17 studies interrupted by the raid were not restarted, and the university stopped allowing baby monkeys' eyes to be sewn shut. The NIH conducted an 8-month long investigation of the animal care program at UC-Riverside and concluded it was an "appropriate animal care program" and that no corrective action was necessary.

A spokesman for the university criticised the ALF, saying that claims of animal mistreatment were "absolutely false" and that there would be long-term damage to some of the research projects, including those aimed at developing treatment for blind people. Researchers alleged that activists had applied black Mascara or paint to the monkey's eyelids to make the sutures look larger than they were, and that damage to the eyelids reported by pediatrician Bettina Flavioli on behalf of the ALF had, in fact, been caused by the pediatrician herself.

The Study: Conducted by PSYCHOlogist David H. Warren. And the reason for this experiment? To determine the effect of blindness on children.

According to PETA's president, based on papers found in the lab by the ALF, the UCR researchers wrote that performing this study by artificially blinding the monkeys was necessary because "sufficient numbers of blind human infants [to study] were not within driving distance" of Riverside, California, and because the experimenters did not wish to be inconvenienced by the normal household routines if forced to work with blind children living at home.

The Raid: The ALF was alerted to the laboratory's work by a student who had reported the Britches' situation to an animal protection group, Last Chance for Animals. An ALF contact volunteering there heard the complaint, and approached the student for more information.

On April 20, 1985, ALF activists broke into the laboratory and removed Britches along with 467 other animals, taking footage of the raid, which they handed anonymously to PETA. Activists found Britches alone in a cage clinging to a device covered in towelling that had two fake nipples attached, apparently intended to serve as a surrogate mother. Britches' eyes were bandaged and a sonar device was attached to his head, which emitted a high-pitched screech every few minutes. Britches was driven to Utah and examined by a retired pediatrician, Bettina Flavioli, who recorded her report on video.

Medical Report: Dr. Ned Buyukmihci, a doctor of veterinarian medicine, specializing in veterinary ophthalmology, and founder of the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights, examined Britches after he was removed from the lab. He stated that the sutures used were too large and that the monkey's eye pads were filthy. He said: "There is no possible justification for this sloppy, painful experiment."

Britches After The Raid: According to Ingrid Newkirk, Bettina Flavioli contacted a primatologist about Britches's future, and was referred to a sanctuary in Mexico that would take him. If not raised with other monkeys, the primatologist advised that Britches would grow to be aggressive and unmanageable. Following Flavioli's advice, the monkey was socialized by a number of handlers, to avoid his becoming too attached to any one of them. When he was five months old, Bettina Flavioli paid for the ALF to fly Britches to a sanctuary to be raised by a female macaque.

The Pit Of Despair

unnecessaryfuss 2009-10-23 | Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, and another of Harlow's doctoral students who went on to conduct additional deprivation studies, said, in his view, "the Animal Liberation Movement in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow's experiments."

The "Pit Of Despair," or vertical chamber, was a device used in experiments conducted on Rhesus Macaque monkeys during the 1970s by American PSYCHOlogist, Harry Harlow, best known for his sadistic maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of human clinical depression in order to demonstrate the importance of tangible affection in social and cognitive development.

Harlow's first experiments into the effects of loneliness involved isolating a monkey in a cage surrounded by steel walls with a small one-way mirror, so the experimenters could look in, but the monkey couldn't look out. The only connection the monkey had with the world was when the experimenters' hands changed his bedding or delivered fresh water and food. Baby monkeys were placed in these boxes soon after birth; four were left for 30 days, four for six months, and four for a year.

After 30 days, the monkeys, "total isolates" as they were called, were found to be "enormously disturbed." After being isolated for a year, they barely moved, didn't explore or play, and were incapable of having sex. When put with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied. Two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death.

The Chamber: 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 monkeys from hanging from the upper part of the chamber.

In order to find out how the isolates would parent, Harlow devised what he called a "Rape Rack," to which the female monkeys 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.

The pervert PSYCHOlogist found that, just as the monkeys 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," wrote the PSYCHOlogist. Having no social experience themselves, the monkeys 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.

Though these sordid experiments showed what total and partial isolation did to developing monkeys, still, the PSYCHOlogist did not feel that he had captured the "essence" of Clinical Depression, and so the madman devised a new more sinister contraption, a depression chamber that drove baby monkeys into a desperate state of loneliness, helplessness, and a sense of being trapped. Harlow referred to this chamber as being sunk in a "well of despair," "dungeon of despair," and "well of loneliness."

Most of the monkeys placed inside it were at least three months old and had already bonded with others. The point of the experiment was to break those bonds in order to create the symptoms of depression. According to Harlow: "most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless."

Steven Suomi, one of Harlow's many doctoral students, placed some monkeys in the chamber for his PhD. He wrote that he could find no monkey who had any defense against it. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. He concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was no defense against depression.

Willam Mason, another of Harlow's students who continued deprivation experiments after leaving Wisconsin, said Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive."