Artfldgr makes many excellent points in his/her posts. But I wonder about the “its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people” defense for the isolation experiment.

Was it really necessary to suspend the monkeys upside down for months, years, at a time to learn the effects of “isolation”? What was the purpose of that little twist? To tell us what might happen to a human being hung upside down in total darkness for months/years at a time?

And I wonder how the scientists evaluated the devastating effects on the monkeys. To what degree were the effects caused by mere isolation? What was the effect of darkness? What was the effect of being suspended upside down for months or years at a time? How could they determine which of those circumstances broke the monkeys?

How DID they separate those various “causes” and their “effects”?

but lets look at the real outcome. these few monkeys taught us that there is a real biological link between social individuals and that link has to be healthy, and its key to producing healthy functional individuals.

what many might not realize, and expecially zena, is that after those tests, there came the knowlege that profoundly changed how we treat animals.

it also quashed the fascist socialist idea of raising kids by the state like farming. because the link between child and presumptive parent is a loop that if not satisified creates sick individuals.

its not malevolent… what color would you pick for a sensory deprivation experiment? the point was to show that that environment WAS harmful. now we know they are, we can now claim that putting a person into such would result in illness. its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people. its part of the argument against certain acts because they are known not presumed to be harmful.

before the work, there was no actual way to know if it mattered. it might not. if the monkey were a lizard, or a chicken, it wouldnt have been malevolent and cruel.

you and i are part of the history AFTER the knowlege. its part of the reason why we have the idea that this isnt a good thing!!! as mentioned above, this was presented in school, and no one heard the teachers teaching that this should be ignroed.

without this there would still be an argument as to what constituted sufficient environment, and whether attachment is critical to good health.

and then there is the fact that there is no alternatives… no way to know other than to find out. if we didnt find out, i think suffering would have been much more as the issue would never be resolved, but be forbidden. and which way it went would have owed more to fashion than fact.

and you might not realize that vetrinarians will treat pets including pet rats, as well a sother animals… we have meds and treatments for them as a side adjunct to the research you are against.

in fact prior to that kind of information, we just laid them low.

living things are chaotic. and i mean that in the mathematical sense, not in the we act crazy sense.

there is no way to determine the reaction of a system without testing it on a system.

reality often behaves counterintuitively.

if you really want to stop the testing, then get out there and lobby for the state to allow humans to sacrifice and become the tests.

would you step up first? would you truly do the collective thing for animals and mankind and allow the medications that are to be used in cancer therapy? they would first have to give you the cancer, but i am sure you dont mind.

or will you visit the childrens hospitals and tell the kids with leukemia and other conditions that they are going to die, and there is no hope because you wont let testing be done?

are you willing to forgoe medical treatment in the future? are you willing to stand up and tell all the women hoping for more progress against breast cancer you shut down shop?

then you never realize that these animals live very brutal lives on their own, and that literally millions of them are born and supported that would never exist otherwise. most research not being the kind you imagine.

and if you found you had mice in your house or rats, would you leave food out for them or would you set traps or have someone else do it?

the more we move away from reality, the more we can make up things that dont fit or work with reality and become harmful.

without medicine and the kind of research done, we would still have things like small pox. your life expectancy before antibiotics and other nostrums was not much. prior to the modern era the average person lived to 25 or 30… with cleaner water and germ theory (proven with animals) we progressed till we live in a society so clean and so steril of the norms of life that we can detach from life and come up with all kinds of things that stem from thinking about things that in the past we wouldnt have had time to think of.

today we have enough time to think of things but we dont have enough time to understand them in detail. so we are forced to take a side based on an argument that plays on our ability to relate.

reality has something utopias dont. and thats no alternatives. reasearchers do try not to hurt animals, they try to be humane. they try to limit the numbers, and they have boards that review and go over the reasons for the research. usually much prior work in vitro has been done, and even on larger cell clusters. but nothing will replace a systemic test in reality.

either its done on the animals or the products are allowed to be sold without testing and we find out over the first few years of their usage.

but then you would be yelling at the horrible corporate people that cause misery by not testing their products.

not alternatives… you cant have it both ways, and the latter way is decidedly less good. it would require people to be tested on, or volunteer for it. hence my question above.

this is why so many policies on the left are touted as progressive but they are nothing but stagnation or regressive.

you cant rail wanting the poor and the sick and infirm to be healthier on one side… and have good medical care…

and then also say we have to stop the process that provides those things. you think medicine is expensive today, but in truth its not. economically speaking these new expensive devices over time become lower in price till tey are ubiquitous. just compare MRI in its first days to today. and the new research brings cheaper better functioning machines.

much of what is around you is actually a product of medicine, in that extending lives from an average of 25 years to 77 years, allows our average level of intellgence to be a lot higher. it allows experts to work for decades longer doing what they are good at.

if it werent for the meds, we would die around 25 – 30 on average, and thats it… thanks to them, you can contemplate their end. without them, you wouldnt have had a nice life at all.

You said it Neo, I got heartsick looking at those poor monkeys when I was a kid, and things haven’t changed much. Still, considering where psychology was going, it looks like the appropriate dope slaps got administered to the anti-cuddlers as a result of this work. Well, his early work…