Don't Forget the Monkey

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After loosing his parents this orangutang was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments.  The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness. The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center.  The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated.  The 2 lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since. The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend.  They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.

Harry Harlow set up one of the nation’s best-equipped primate laboratories at the University of Wisconsin. There he did a famous series of experiments focused on contact comfort in babyhood (Harlow & Harlow, 1962).

Harry Harlow raised rhesus monkeys from birth, and he found it was necessary to keep young monkeys separate from each other for health reasons. This separation began soon after birth, and he noticed that young monkeys deprived of contact with their mothers appeared to suffer mental distress. The babies became very attached to cheesecloth diapers in their cages, clinging onto them like security blankets.

What vision did Harlow have while on a champagne flight over Detroit?

As the story goes, Harlow was on a champagne flight over Detroit in 1957, wondering which would be more powerful, contact comfort or food. Suddenly he got the idea of providing the babies with a choice between two mothers, one of which would provide something soft to embrace, the other of which would provide milk. To make a cuddly mother, Harlow’s assistants covered a wire frame with terrycloth. A second mother was identical to the first but had no terrycloth; it was just a wire frame with a built-in milk bottle and nipple. Harlow found that baby monkeys preferred the terrycloth mother, spending as little time as possible on the wire frame mother. Contact comfort was more important than food, except when the baby monkey was actually eating.