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Learning to See the Animals Again

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More than half a century ago, Harry Harlow began controversial experiments depriving baby monkeys of their mothers. Harlow forcibly separated newborn primates from their mothers and other monkeys and placed them in long-term, total social isolation and even a chamber he infamously called the “pit of despair.” As a result, the baby monkeys became severely disturbed, sometimes to the point of starving themselves to death. It became clear that the monkeys required more than sustenance; they also needed the love of their mothers and to play and live with other monkeys.

Even though Harlow’s maternal deprivation experiments have been widely criticized on ethical grounds, there are now efforts to revive Harlow’s methods – both at the Wisconsin Primate Research Center and the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. John Gluck was one of Harry Harlow’s few students.  He joined me in a conversation about the new experiments inspired by Harlow’s 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s experiments, and why he now opposes forced maternal deprivation.

Dr. Gluck is currently working on a book that traces his process of coming to see the world of animal research much more critically than he had been quietly encouraged to do during his education. His book is tentatively titled Learning to See the Animals Again: From Animal Research to Animal Protection.

HF: Tell me about when you first started working with Harry Harlow.

JG: I felt very lucky to be admitted to the Wisconsin graduate psychology program in 1968.  There I worked with Gene P. Sackett, John Davenport and Harry Harlow. Harlow was interested in supporting me because of my knowledge in the area of learning theory and my interest in discovering the effects of early experience on intelligence.

Harlow’s laboratory was very congenial, even a family-like environment. There was a lot of mutual support among the students and faculty and much socializing. While Harlow was an unopposed authority figure he did not carry a whip. He encouraged students to take their own experimental direction and to not necessarily follow his model.  Everyone respected him in the laboratory – from his graduate students to the animal caretakers, electrical crew and metal workers who constructed housing and experimental equipment. There were a tremendous amount of research resources available for graduate students including animals [who are considered “resources” in the research industry], trained professional research assistants, statisticians, and the lab’s own dedicated library and librarian.

Harlow was always traveling, but when he was not he sometimes would show up and play Bridge with the students, faculty, and staff during the lunch hour.  He walked the halls of the lab at night frequently inviting students into his office to share coffee and conversation late into the night.

I never saw Harlow’s graduate students, including myself, express dissent or concern about his research directly to him. However, Deborah Blum, in her book The Monkey Wars, described how several of his earlier post-doctoral students expressed criticism for the work and how the experiments were described to members of the public, who were already outraged by Harlow’s experiments.  To say that most of the students were deaf and blind to these public welfare concerns would be an accurate characterization.

HF: What were your initial reactions to the experiments Harlow conducted?

JG: Frankly, I was primarily struck with the resources that were available for experimental use. I was initially impressed with how the monkeys were fed and housed. They had access to veterinarians and a small army of trained caretakers. The cages were clean and the animals were appropriately tested for tuberculosis. Neurosurgeons even participated in the brain surgeries in which parts of the monkeys’ brains were extracted. There were obviously more resources in Harlow’s laboratory than in the laboratories I had come from – like those of Texas Tech University.

I eventually felt conflicted about some of the experiments, which were intended to model human psychopathology.  However it wasn’t unusual for other laboratories to house monkeys in isolation. At the time, every conceivable animal – dogs, chimpanzees, rodents, and others – were kept in barren conditions under the guise of studying the nature and nurture of behavioral development.  Remove the social environment and see what behaviors remained. Very crude studies indeed, but not rare.

Nonetheless, I felt a dis-ease with the experiments but doubted that I had a basis to criticize them.  After all, Harlow and the other faculty were all internationally famous and received enormous grants from those institutions concerned with supporting scientific progress.

HF: How many of Harlow’s students carry on his legacy?

JG: Probably not many…a small number of his approximately 20 to 30 students.

HF: How did you first hear about the recent experiments in Wisconsin and at the National Institutes of Health?

JG: Some people I keep in touch with from the University of Wisconsin Madison sent me a link to an article in the local paper called the Isthmus. There was also a lot about Steve Suomi’s experiments in the National Institutes of Health annual report.

HF: Do you know Ned Kalin or Steve Suomi, the laboratory researchers who lead these controversial experiments?

JG: Suomi and I were close friends. We shared an office in graduate school, took classes together, and socialized frequently. I didn’t know Kalin, but one of his co-researchers – Steven Shelton – came to New Mexico when I decided to euthanize some monkeys whose lives I thought were too miserable. Steve was also a friend of mine and actually had been a student at the University of New Mexico at one time before moving to Wisconsin.

HF: You eventually left animal experimentation and turned to your attention and time to the fields of clinical psychology and ethics. What prompted the evolution of your thoughts in this area?

JG: First, I started to question animal models of psychopathology. I never felt like they were very valid. When I finished clinical training at the University of Washington, I was left feeling that there were some real questions about the psychopathology models (models of depression, schizophrenia, etc.). Not one of my clinical mentors in clinical psychology ever talked about the animal experiments as being helpful in elucidating effective clinical interventions with suffering humans. To them, the studies appeared to be just irrelevant.

Then, more slowly, I came to realize the depth of the poverty and suffering of the lives of the animals in my own lab. I started to be able to see it. This was fueled by my interactions with veterinarians and students who had serious ethical and scientific questions about the experiments I was doing.

HF: What do Harlow’s other students think of your transition?

JG: Jon Lewis was another Wisconsin graduate student who had serious concerns about some of Harlow’s primate studies. He told me once that most of the group I had trained with at Wisconsin didn’t understand what had happened to me.  I should say that I never tried to explain myself to them and neither did they ask me directly.  Gene P. Sackett, with whom I earned my Masters degree at Wisconsin, and I have talked in recent years about my concerns.  While he mostly disagrees with me he has said that he respects my work.

Harlow’s former editorial secretary, who also remains a good friend, has seen most of my critical writing.  While she has offered suggestions about how to better express myself, she remains a staunch advocate of Harlow’s positive influence on the field of psychology.  I learned recently that she gave her son, a writer and publisher, my papers on ethical problems with animal experimentation. He came to visit me recently and it was clear he thought my change was a very natural process and not a disloyal aberration.

HF: What do you think of the experiments that are being conducted at the National Institutes of Health and University of Wisconsin?

JG: There are a lot of obvious similarities between them.

I am very skeptical about the models they are trying to use to understand the effects of early adversity in children. The researchers use rearing conditions where infants are immediately removed from their mothers and live the first month in an incubator in order to monitor food intake and temperature. There the infant has access only to a soft inanimate surrogate for approximately one month. Then the infant is moved to a cage where [s/he] is paired with a second infant similarly raised, and the two baby monkeys stay in that situation for over a year. Members of the control group are infants who are permitted to live alone with their mothers during this time.  It is quite a distortion to suggest that an infant living only with [her/his] mother is a “normal” control. If one looks at rearing in the natural environment, infants have access not only to their mothers but to other infants and monkeys of different ages and sexes. “Mother only” is not a normal condition.

It seems like rearing infants first with only an inanimate surrogate and then an age mate is like taking a developmental baseball bat and smacking them.  The impact of this procedure is broad and crude.  In a sense it is like the old total isolation experiments – expose infants to an empty environment and test what behaviors remain and what happens to their physiology.  These researchers are not cruel people I am sure, but they seem to me to be scientifically desperate.  No doubt the monkey infants will be changed neurologically and behaviorally by this treatment, but how then do you unravel what was responsible for what changes?

What changes when you remove a mother from an infant’s environment? A source of warmth, protection, facial communication – monkeys looking at faces is an important part of their development. Mothers are a source of information about what things mean – what should be and should not be frightening, what sounds to be and to not be concerned about. Mothers can show their babies it is “okay to get a little scared” – they teach them how to be resilient. A mother is a source of highly variable social transactions which are so crucial in development…all of that and more is absent.

Basically, the researchers are introducing a tremendous developmental insult in an attempt to mimic neglect, physical and/or sexual trauma in a human infant – I don’t see how it maps on to that world and to the world of therapy where medications are only rarely useful.  Therapy is much about developing trust and helping individuals to reduce the power of abuse-related tendencies and powerful memories.

The researchers make the point a couple of times in the protocol that the experimental monkeys do not suffer as much as abused human infants. With all due respect, how do they know that? It may be a wish that suggests their basic humanity but it is a pretty questionable assumption on their part.  We as humans are not very good at identifying pain and suffering in our own species let alone a totally different primate species like a rhesus monkey.

What they know is that when you use these devastating developmental manipulations the brain changes. That they know.

Another point on the protocol: When asked to entertain possible alternatives to their adverse procedures, the researchers say that other studies with bonnet macaques which have used a variable foraging model – this creates stress on the mother by making food availability highly uncertain which therefore interrupts normal mother-infant interactions – the researchers doubted whether the procedure would generalize to rhesus macaques. How do they raise questions about generalizability between old world monkey species but not about how experiments on monkeys would generalize to humans?

HF: Some have claimed that today’s maternal deprivation experiments are different. Are they really though?

JG: They are to some extent – at least the infants have some surrogate not just an empty cage, but a surrogate and a peer. You put young infants together and they primarily cling onto one another. I suppose it would make a difference to have another warm body – but it isn’t like that situation doesn’t create highly abnormal monkeys.

This is just about degrees of suffering – at what point does it not make much of a difference anymore what you do?

HF: It is sort of like a tortured child in solitary confinement versus keeping a tortured child with another tortured child.

JG: Good analogy.

The researchers seem to be working very hard to think of these testing situations as not terribly problematic. When discussing the removal of mother-reared infants for the purpose of testing they actually likened it to humans dropping off their kids at a babysitter.  When my wife and I dropped off our kids with a babysitter, it was with someone who knew something about caring and comfort. We certainly didn’t anticipate that the sitter was going to test their response to blood draws and frightening human intruders.

HF: What do you think of the public response to the experiments?

JG: Madison is a community of highly educated people. Historically, there has been a lot of concern expressed for various kinds of social harm. Apparently, large segments of the population in Madison question whether this is valuable research, particularly in light of the harms that are produced. They want to play a part in determining that the university they love and support is involved in research they support – I wish more communities were so involved.

This is a community that during the Vietnam War was trying to get Dow chemical research support off the university campus since they made instruments of war. Their opposition to these experiments is an extension of that general concern. They want the university to express values the community can get behind. They have high expectations for the university.

I remember having a conversation with a president emeritus of the university – President E. B. Fred, who had a house on campus around 1970. He had published a book on all the memorials on campus. I got a copy and wanted to send it to my mother to thank her for paying for my education. As I sat down and talked with him I asked him to autograph his book for my mother. At the time, it was a campus enflamed in political activism. The National Guard was gassing demonstrating students on a regular basis. I asked him what he thought of these rough interactions. He said he was a politically conservative person but that he wanted to see the concern expressed. That’s the sign of a healthy university community, he said.

HF: What is your vision for a more ethical and appropriate framework for studying psychiatric disorders?

JG: People underestimate what can be done ethically with humans.

There was a study published fairly recently out of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin. The study compared images of the brains of abused children from different categories – neglected or sexually abused children, with children who were not abused. It was done in a noninvasive and ethical way.  They found important differences in the volumes of several brain structures associated with emotional functioning.

While it is true you couldn’t do the Kalin study in humans, that’s not to say you can’t do studies ethically and compassionately in humans that will open the door to knowledge about abuse and neurological changes.

To hear people say that this is the only way you can study this just tells me how little people have committed attention to creating alternatives.

 

The Right to Avoid Wrongful Imprisonment

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Tomorrow, across America, voters will weigh in on several hot topics. In addition to deciding congressional seats, voters will determine the outcome of several measures on abortion, guns, immigration, parental rights, the minimum wage, and voting rights.

What they won’t decide on is Tommy’s fate. That is currently in the hands of the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court. In April of this year, I wrote about Tommy and Steve Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), the attorney representing Tommy, who happens to be a 26-year-old chimpanzee.

For years, Tommy has lived in solitary confinement in a small, dark, cement cage in a used trailer lot.

Wise and the NhRP aren’t fighting for voting rights, or even parental rights, for Tommy. Wise is simply asking the judge to free Tommy from being imprisoned in a dungeon of a cage. To get him out of prison, Wise needs to convince the court that Tommy should have legal rights – as a nonhuman animal person.

Tommy lives very differently from his kin living in the wild. Chimpanzees naturally live in large groups and develop close social bonds, including bonds between brothers. They remember the past and look forward to the future. When they are isolated from other chimpanzees, chimpanzees can develop psychiatric disorders like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.

Right now, since he is not considered a person, Tommy has no legal rights. He can be poked, prodded, and killed, without legal ramifications. He is “something,” not “somebody,” the legal equivalent of a pair of tennis shoes or a carrot.

Wise told WIRED magazine: “’Chimpanzees are autonomous, self-determining beings. Why shouldn’t they be legal persons?’… ‘How is it that we can ignore the autonomy of a nonhuman, while making [autonomy] to be a supreme value of a human being?’”

After all, corporations can be considered persons (but strangely can’t be held liable as persons). Why not then consider living, sentient, intelligent beings as persons?

In court, Wise presented exhaustive scientific evidence provided by the world’s leading primatologists that chimpanzees are deeply intelligent and make conscious choices about their lives – if they are permitted to do so.

The appeals court’s decision is expected in the coming weeks. If Wise is successful, Tommy will be released to Save the Chimps sanctuary in Florida, which is as close to the wild as possible in North America. Having visited the sanctuary, the difference between Tommy’s cage and the freedom he would experience in the sanctuary is like night and day.

If the decision favors Tommy, it could protect individuals like Tommy from some of the worst abuses.

Those who are opposed to Wise and the NhRP’s efforts worry about what it would mean to humans if we take the lives of nonhuman animals more seriously. Fortunately, recognizing the needs of other animals does not minimize who we are as people. On the contrary, it can help enlighten and benefit us, similar to how recognizing the needs, rights, and strengths of women and girls has benefitted men and boys in ways that are impossible to fully articulate.

We really have nothing to lose – but Tommy and others like him have already lost so much. Don’t we owe them at least some of our humanity?

 

 

Fighting the Ebola Stigma

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We’ve seen it before. Discrimination based on fear and misconceptions about disease. Too much of what we have seen in the response to Ebola is reminiscent of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

As a medical doctor double-board certified in internal medicine and preventive medicine and public health, I’ve seen how stigmatization can devastate patients and the public health response to HIV/AIDS and other diseases in the United States and abroad. Over the past decade, I’ve worked in several African nations including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda.

Unfortunately, people of African descent are now being stigmatized because of the fear and hysteria surrounding Ebola, even if they never traveled to West Africa. But a Liberian-American woman is now challenging xenophobic attitudes, after her niece was sent home after she sneezed in school. The child has never been to Liberia.

Around the country, people of eastern, central, and western African descent are facing similar forms of discrimination in schools, restaurants, hospitals, and airports.

Launching an Internet campaign with the slogan “I am a Liberian, not a virus,” aunt and mother Shoana Solomon is challenging the growing stigmatization of people of African descent.

Unfortunately, the stigmatization associated with Ebola also extends to health care workers who are returning from countries ravaged by the disease. Nurse and epidemiologist Kaci Hickox was the first health care worker to be quarantined under a New Jersey and New York policy, shortly after another health care worker who recently returned from the region tested positive for Ebola in New York City.

Politicians reversed their decision to hold Ms. Hickox after scientists including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed out that there was no medical basis to quarantine Ms. Hickox.

Ebola is not a death sentence. Though it is a public health threat that needs to be taken seriously, people can survive the disease. As cofounder of Partners in Health, Dr. Paul Farmer, said, “Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality ‘supportive care’ are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.”

We need to continue to mobilize resources to resource-strapped areas affected by Ebola. This is the only way we will contain the disease.

Immediate public health action is critical. Thousands of children are being orphaned in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, some left homeless and alone because of the hysteria surrounding the disease.

A dog in Spain was even stigmatized and killed, despite testing negative for the virus. But, too often, animals bear our burden. It is entirely possible that our treatment of animals is what landed us in this situation in the first place. The Ebola virus is typically transmitted to humans by killing and eating animals like bats, pigs, monkeys, and chimpanzees.

In fact, both of the two American outbreaks of Ebola are traceable to the maltreatment of animals. In 1989, a mutated form of Ebola was discovered in Reston, Virginia, after monkeys were imported in crowded, inhumane conditions from the Philippines to the United States for use in laboratory experiments. The outbreak was the basis for Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone.

The discrimination and stigmatization we are witnessing is very different than the actions of the health care providers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in Dallas, Texas. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Duncan’s nurses described how they sat with Mr. Duncan, comforted him, held his hand through protective gear, and extended the compassion due any living being – even as he died.

We should reward these acts of kindness, not penalize them.

 

The High Price of a Torture Policy

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In an open letter released Sunday evening, a dozen Nobel Peace Prize laureates urged President Obama to close the United States’ dark chapter on torture. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates – Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and former President José Ramos-Horta of East Timor – organized the joint letter, which asks the Obama administration to fully disclose details about the use of torture by United States officials. Some of the letter’s authors are torture survivors.

The twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates urged the United States “to take the necessary steps to emerge from this dark period of its history, never to return.”

The letter came just one day after The New York Times released details of how journalist James Foley and other hostages were tortured before the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheaded them – what The New York Times referred to as “the horror before the beheadings.”

Unfortunately the horror Mr. Foley and others suffered is all too common. For more than a decade, I have conducted forensic medical evaluations of men, women, and children who have suffered through unimaginable forms of torture. As a medical doctor specializing in internal medicine, preventive medicine, and public health, I have met political prisoners who were beaten, burned, and nearly drowned.

Torture occurs in about ninety percent of countries worldwide, and there are about half a million torture survivors living in the United States. Anyone can be a victim of torture, and many people do not know why they are targeted and tortured.

Many of the torture survivors I have met sought refuge in the United States because of the democratic ideals that generations of Americans have fought to protect.

Some people believe that torture can be justified in extraordinary circumstances – such as during the interrogation of terrorism suspects. But all perpetrators of torture believe their actions are justified. Our actions set an example for the rest of the world. At their worst, our actions can place Americans at risk for retaliation by enemy combatants, terrorists, and hostile governments.

Unfortunately, this risk is no longer theoretical. It’s already happening.

As The New York Times revealed Saturday, in addition to lining up ISIS hostages in bright orange uniforms, mimicking those worn by Guantánamo Bay prisoners, ISIS captors also waterboarded prisoners, much like the George W. Bush administration did. As The New York Times quoted: “’It was when there was no blood,’ a former cellmate said, ‘that we knew he had suffered something even worse.’”

When a victim is waterboarded, water is poured over a material covering the face and breathing passages, causing a sensation of drowning. People experience severe fear and pain, and they can suffer from damage to the lungs and brain. They can even suffer from sudden death. Unfortunately, waterboarding is a form of torture and mock execution that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition.

Under the Bush Administration, lawyers argued for a narrow definition of torture under United States law, giving the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to use waterboarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique” in certain cases, including on detainees classified as enemy combatants. Numerous government officials denied that waterboarding is a form of torture, essentially ignoring international law and longstanding precedent.

There is no justification for the ways Mr. Foley and other hostages were treated – or the ways ISIS has treated other men, women, and children across the globe. But we are better than them. And we are not above the law.

Mr. Foley was certainly better. The New York Times article indicates that even as his captors attempted to strip him of his dignity, he shared meager rations of food, blankets, and camaraderie – even organizing Secret Santa games. This is how we will defeat evil – not by perpetuating evil itself.

As the Nobel Peace Prize laureates explained to Mr. Obama in their open letter, the United States is at a crossroads, and it is crucial that President Obama ends an era that “will be used to justify the use of torture by regimes around the world.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureates wrote, “As torture continues to haunt the waking hours of its victims long after the conflict has passed, so it will continue to haunt its perpetrators.”

Instead of perpetuating torture, we should return to the principles on which our great nation was founded. It is imperative that we reverse course immediately, to avoid the terror that is already plaguing the globe.

True Courage – Love, Not Violence

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Violence is in the news. It’s hard to escape – from stories about #WhyIStayed to #WhyILeft, to the Oscar Pistorius trial and verdict, to the escalating crisis in the Middle East and concerns about the US entering another war.

But earlier this week I listened to a different sort of story – an inspiring story from a mother who lost her son to extreme violence and responded with love, not violence. With courage I couldn’t fathom, Nicole Hockley stood up and told those of us who attended the 19th international Institute for Violence Abuse and Trauma (IVAT) conference how she learned her autistic son Dylan was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, soon after she learned her other son, Dylan’s brother Jake, survived the tragic mass shooting on December 14, 2012. Rather than responding to her unimaginable tragedy with malice, she asked us to “let love lead the way.”

At the conference, Nicole Hockley spoke of the need for common sense gun legislation reform, as well as the need to promote mental wellness in our society – mental wellness that takes the form of empathy, compassion, and connectivity.

Nicole Hockley spoke to a room of like-minded people. The IVAT conference is a unique forum for people from diverse disciplines and viewpoints to come up with workable solutions to prevent and respond to violence, abuse, and trauma. I was there to talk about Physicians for Human Rights Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, in which my colleagues and I work with our Congolese and Kenyan partners to end impunity for sexual violence. Other conference sessions focused on military sexual trauma, child trafficking, and the links between human, animal, and environmental rights, among many other topics. All of the people I met at the conference are working hard to identify nonviolent methods to effectively prevent and respond to violence.

Even just this week, many people are warning us about the consequences of responding to violence with violence. In a New York Times Op-Ed, Charles M. Blow urged caution in our response to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As Mr. Blow points out, “missions creep, wars get foggy and the very definition of victory can become elusive” – all while soldiers and civilians die, the number of our enemies grows, and money is diverted from education and health care.

Responding to the “Why does she stay?” question, CNN anchor Christi Paul reminded us that we asking the wrong question. Instead, we need to show compassion, support, and love for women and men caught in violent situations and get to the bottom of why we permit violence in our society.

Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipain, a 66-year-old black woman who grew up in Soweto, studied law during apartheid, and found Oscar Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide, commented in her ruling that “Many people in this country have experienced crime, but they have not resorted to sleeping with a firearm under their pillow,” as Pistorius evidently did.

Science supports the idea that nonviolence – not violence – is the most effective antidote to violence. Scientist Paul J. Zak, who is known for coining the term “moral molecule” to describe the hormone oxytocin, has shown that a large number of caring and compassionate actions among humans and other animals cause oxytocin release, which calms fear and aggression and often leads to other caring interactions. In other words, kindness is contagious.

If Nicole Hockley can show tremendous forgiveness and lead with love, can’t we?

Nicole Hockley closed her talk with a story about her son Dylan. Dylan used to flap his arms like a butterfly. She alluded to the butterfly effect – the idea that a single occurrence, no matter how small, can alter the course of the universe forever – and she voiced her hope that Dylan’s memory would lead to significant change. If one small butterfly can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, imagine if we all flapped our wings of love.

The truth is, showing love takes more courage than waging war. But if you are ever short on strength and courage, think of Nicole Hockley and the other brave parents of Sandy Hook Promise who are working toward a world in which your kids – all kids – are safe and loved.

Don’t we owe her, Dylan, and the many others across the globe impacted by violence everyday at least as much?

We need to stop romanticizing violence. Nonviolence isn’t some lofty unreachable goal. It takes one caring action after another, all of which can add up over time to become a hurricane of change.

 

 

Love’s Vulnerability

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On a cool, late May evening in Nairobi, Kenya, I met Love and soon said good-bye.

I met Love as my colleagues and I returned from training a group of health professionals on how to evaluate and care for child survivors of sexual violence. The week of training left me with mixed emotions. I grieved for the children left vulnerable to abuse, and admired the dedicated doctors, nurses, and police officers who make daily sacrifices to protect them.

As our work always does, it left me wondering how we can reduce vulnerability to physical and psychological injury, especially for individuals who can’t always protect themselves. At the time, I had no idea how my reflections on vulnerability would be tested.

As we drove back to Nairobi, traffic along a main highway came to a near stop. Love was the reason. A car struck Love and continued on, as other cars maneuvered around his still body.

I insisted we stop. A colleague clarified that Love was not human, but “just a dog.” I explained that I would insist we stop for anyone left to suffer to his death.

When our driver stopped, I immediately jumped out of our van and ran toward a security guard who pulled Love to the median. I asked the security guard to take me to the dog, and he helped stop traffic to reach Love.

Love looked up at me with big brown eyes. Though he whimpered in pain, he didn’t even retract his big floppy ears as I approached him. He had old scars and scratches on his face, a torn ear, bitten nose, severe fractures in his front and hind legs, and ticks and fleas all over his body. My obstetrician-gynecologist colleague, Michele, helped me pick up Love with some clothes I grabbed from my bag. Since I wasn’t sure if he would bite out of fear, I took some old scrubs to tie as a muzzle if needed. (It wasn’t necessary.)

A severed electric cord wrapped around Love’s neck. It appeared he was tethered by the cord and chewed through it. Michele and I carried Love to our van and, despite earlier objections, my colleagues had already arranged for a veterinarian to meet us at his clinic.

Meanwhile, I placed a call to my Kenyan friend, Jos, who runs an African animal welfare organization. Though Jos was in the US at the time, he quickly put me in touch with friends at the Kenya Society for the Protection & Care of Animals (KSPCA), and they verified that the veterinarian we chose had a good reputation.

We reached the veterinarian in fifteen minutes. As we surveyed Love’s injuries, we realized he suffered from multiple wounds and shock, and he was unlikely to pull through surgery. We made the difficult decision to euthanize Love. He lay in my arms while Michele and I gently stroked him and whispered that we loved him in soft, soothing words.

Love died quickly. Though I knew we saved him from further suffering, I struggled with the decision to bring his life to an end. The veterinarian asked me to name him and I gave him the name Love. It was love that saved him from suffering to death by the side of the road.

When I returned from Kenya, I told Love’s story at a University of Oregon conference on vulnerability, where I was asked to give a keynote presentation about the overlap in human and animal vulnerability. The task wasn’t difficult. Animals are similar to humans in the ways that they suffer and mend, both physically and mentally. Our flesh and minds are similarly vulnerable to fear, pain, thirst, hunger, and disease.

But we need more than air, food, and water. We need shelter, love, respect, and opportunities to pursue happiness. When deprived of these needs, humans and animals can suffer from mental disorders including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Love was vulnerable in so many ways. He had no political power. Legally, animals are property, so they can be bought, sold, and subjected to unimaginable lives. Love was restrained and ridden with disease. Just as children depend on adults, Love was completely dependent on his relationships with humans. Children and animals are some of the most vulnerable individuals in society, since they have few legal rights, if any.

I thought of Love last weekend, just after the Fourth of July, when I met Spot, a dog who is chained near our West Virginia cabin. I approached Spot’s owner, who turned out to be a frightened widow who used Spot as a guard dog. She graciously accepted my concern, suggestions, and literature detailing how she could bring Spot into her home. I hope she realizes how Spot shares her fear and vulnerability.

Someone asked me why I stopped for Love and Spot. My answer is pretty simple. If I were in their place, I would want someone to do the same for me. Although we can’t save everyone, it is worth trying to reduce vulnerability to suffering whenever we can. My husband and I try every time we help turtles cross the street, stop for wounded or lost animals, and whenever we do the same for humans. Though he and I are fortunate to have medical expertise, it isn’t necessary. Every day, I am touched by what people do to save others from lives of despair. A recent poignant example was the rescue of Raju, an elephant in India who was finally freed after living in painful, spiked shackles for half a century. Raju wept as he was freed.

In the meantime, it is equally important to reduce vulnerability through policy change, our power as consumers, and by raising our voices to speak out for those who can’t always speak for themselves.

There is a lot of work to be done. Although the US has signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is one of only two UN members that have not ratified the convention. (Somalia is the other.) Elsewhere, the Animal Legal Defense Fund is working to leverage public and congressional support for a basic Animal Bill of Rights, while attorney Steve Wise and his team at the Nonhuman Rights Project work to secure legal rights for animals. Recently, Muhamed Sacirbey, human rights proponent and Bosnia’s first UN ambassador, suggested that perhaps the time has come to appoint a UN Ambassador for Animals.

It would be easy to surrender to all the horrific images on television, Internet, and daily life. Instead, I see the promise of a better world. Working together, we can lift the burden of suffering and transform systems that underpin neglect and violence into freedom, safety, love, and respect.

Though some people were surprised by our quick actions in Nairobi, they were also inspired. And they inspired me. The security guard didn’t have to pull Love to the median or help us cross the highway, but he did. Our driver was exhausted from driving all day but, by the end of the evening, he was exuberantly shouting, “God Bless You!” The veterinarian offered free services, though we opted to pay him. By the end of the night, I learned that KSPCA had received other calls on Love’s behalf.

So, the choice is ours. Will we turn our backs on those who need us most, or will we join the heroes and heroines who refuse to cower from the challenge of making the world a better place?

Let’s choose Love.

 

 

Common Needs and Common Ground

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On October 10, 2013, Tommy looked beyond the bars of his cell to see attorney Steven Wise, the man representing him. Tommy kneeled in a cage that Wise described as a dungeon. Tommy has never been accused any wrongdoing to land him behind bars. His only “crime” is that he is not human. Tommy is a chimpanzee.

Tommy’s story is featured in today’s New York Times Magazine and a short op-doc about Wise’s journey to protect Tommy and others like him.

Two months after his visit to see Tommy, Wise legally petitioned the court to release Tommy from his solitary confinement in a small, dark, cement cage. Leading primatologists supported Wise’s petition by describing the cognitive, emotional, and physical capacities and suffering of chimpanzees like Tommy. Tommy’s life would have been very different in the wild.

In the wild, chimpanzees have rich and vibrant lives. Mothers closely care for their children, particularly during the first few years of their children’s lives. Young chimpanzees cradle sticks like infants, mimicking their mothers and displaying imagination, similar to the ways in which human children play with dolls. As they mature, chimpanzees develop deep social bonds and grieve the loss of their kin. When traumatized, chimpanzees can suffer from depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviors, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Fortunately, chimpanzees – like humans – can also display tremendous resilience and recover from trauma.

Wise is fighting for very basic rights for Tommy. He is simply asking the courts to provide Tommy the right to live his life more closely to the way he is meant to. Wise has asked the courts to recognize Tommy’s fundamental needs for bodily liberty and integrity – in other words, a life without confinement and being severely harmed. These needs are critical to Tommy’s health and well-being.

Although public health laws are important to human health, some of the most essential laws to human health are those that protect our fundamental needs. International laws like the United Nations Convention against Torture and the Rome Statute of the International Court, and constitutional laws, protect us from infractions on our basic needs. While further progress needs to be made on behalf of vulnerable human populations, the rights of humans and nonhuman animals are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there is common ground occupied by those working on behalf of humans and nonhuman animals – both because of the common potential for suffering and because many solutions to successfully combat prejudice, abuse, and violence are universal.

In 1954, Abraham Maslow described five areas that are critical to human physical and psychological well-being: the freedom to meet fundamental physical needs (e.g. air, water, food, sleep, and movement); safety and security; love and belonging; respect; and opportunities to learn, explore, and contribute. Emerging scientific evidence reveals that many other animals have similar needs. From chimpanzees to chickens, dogs to cats, and elephants to rats, we are learning that other animals love, learn, laugh, and grieve in similar ways to humans (and sometimes more impressively than humans).

Concepts like the One Health Initiative recognize the connections between the health of humans and nonhuman animals. While the idea behind the One Health Initiative is a good starting point, I hope the One Health movement will look beyond the public health impact of animal health to human health and to the mutual essential needs humans and nonhuman animals possess.

Historically, many people have been denied rights to basic freedoms and needs based on the color of their skin, their gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. The arc of the moral universe has slowly bent toward justice and laws have evolved, thanks to the courage of everyday heroes and heroines who fought for the health and well-being of other individuals. Today, efforts like those of Wise and his team of lawyers and scientists also focus on eliminating prejudices based on species. Tommy’s life depends on it.

Those of us who have been born free and remain free cannot help but take for granted freedom from abuses. Imagine not being able to move at will or protect yourself from trespasses over your body. Somebody bravely fought so we don’t have to fear these abuses. Shouldn’t we do the same for others?

 

 

 

Rethinking the Ethics of Animal Research

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In 1965, Americans were stunned to read about Pepper, the Lakavage family’s affectionate Dalmatian, whose story changed America. Pepper was often found accompanying Julia Lakavage on her nursing rounds in an Allentown, Pennsylvania hospital. One summer evening in 1965, Pepper disappeared. After a desperate search by Pepper’s family and her supporters, Pepper was found dead in a New York hospital laboratory. She had been stolen by dealers and sold for use in research experiments. Pepper’s story, published in Sports Illustrated, along with a Life magazine article, “Concentration Camps for Dogs,” showing starving, chained, and dead dogs at a breeding farm, galvanized support for the US Laboratory Animal Welfare Act.

When the US Congress passed the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act in 1966, it provided minimal protections to every dog, cat, monkey, and other nonhuman animal living in taxpayer-funded laboratories. But, in 2002, Congress inserted a loophole to arbitrarily exclude birds, mice, and rats from being counted as “animals.” There are still no absolute limits as to how much nonhuman animals used in research can suffer, even for those covered by the Animal Welfare Act and other international guidelines. Upwards of 100 million nonhuman animals are used in experiments each year.

Many of the ways that nonhuman animals are used in society, including in research experiments, are reminiscent of the ways in which humans have been maltreated. Sometimes changes in laws only occur in response to public fury, as in Pepper’s case. Concerns about systematic selection of humans for research because of their easy availability, class, compromised position, or manipulability have also led to significant improvements in human research protections. Recorded abuses of human research subjects served as the impetus for the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and resulting Belmont Report.

Once again, public concerns have driven a recent shift in US federal policy governing animal research. Concerns about chimpanzee research have moved front and center. My colleagues and I have shown that chimpanzees used in laboratory research experience signs of posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric disorders, similar to mental illnesses experienced by war veterans, rape survivors, and human torture survivors. The results of our purely observational international study were featured as a reason for Scientific American editors’ call for a ban on chimpanzee experiments.

In response to public concerns about chimpanzee experiments, US Senators Bingaman, Udall and Harkin, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson requested the National Institutes of Health commission an independent report by an Institute of Medicine committee to analyze the need for chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral research. Unlike virtually all previous federal-level reports regarding the protection of human and nonhuman research subjects, this report was accepted as federal policy within two hours of its public release on December 15, 2011. The resulting report recommended what are unusually demanding guidelines for taxpayer-funded animal research. The policy change opened the door to larger questions about the lives of other nonhuman animals who are used in research experiments: What about other nonhuman primates? Or dogs, cats, or mice?

A new article collection entitled, “Rethinking the ethics of research involving nonhuman animals,” published in the esteemed journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, openly challenges traditional notions about animal experimentation. Editors Tom Beauchamp, John Gluck, and I asked authors to examine how concepts traditionally reserved for human research could be applied to considerations about the use of nonhuman animals in research. In this original article collection, authors explored how major concepts in human research ethics – such as autonomous decision-making, informed consent, assent, dissent, obligations to avoid harm, and demands of justice – could and should be applied to decisions about animal research.

The time has come for a more honest and thorough evaluation of the ways in which humans use and treat nonhuman animals. Barring nonhuman animals from basic protections undermines the fundamental principles on which protections for humans are based, and exclusion of nonhuman animals from basic protections opens the door to subjugation, discrimination, and abuse of nonhuman animals and vulnerable humans. Only when we take these issues seriously will we see justice for all animals – including humans.

 

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