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Worked in a monkey lab?

Ned Kalin

Animals do a lot of things instinctively…. But people--and probably monkeys--have the ability to think 20 steps into the future: `In the end I'm going to feel great, because I worked hard to get there,' or `I'm going to get a lot of credit for this.' It's the prefrontal cortex that brings those emotions into play and guides us in our behavior. If we didn't have a sense of what would be wonderful or awful in the future, we would behave very haphazardly.

Ned Kalin (UW primate vivisector) in Wired For Sadness. Discover.  April, 2000.

If Ned Kalin believed that monkeys were simple automatons--slaves to a fixed response to a given stimulus, he could be forgiven for the suffering he causes. But he believes otherwise, apparently, and this is what makes him demonic.

To be fair to Kalin, he does not work his evil in a vacuum. He has many helpers and partners. Consider his recent paper: Calling for help is independently modulated by brain systems underlying goal-directed behavior and threat perception, coauthored by Andrew S. Fox, Terrence R. Oakes, Steven E. Shelton, Alexander K. Converse, and Richard J. Davidson.

Kalin also thanks H. Van Valkenberg, T. Johnson, J. King, and the staff at the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology and the National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin for their technical support.

And throughout Kalin's publications one finds a clear and overt statement concerning the similarity between human and monkey suffering. Here's another example:

Rhesus monkeys are an excellent species with which to investigate mechanisms relevant to human emotion and psychopathology. Rhesus monkeys and humans share similarities in social and emotional behavior, and rhesus monkeys express psychopathology similar to that observed in humans. Importantly, both species have a well developed prefrontal cortex that is highly and reciprocally interconnected with the amygdala, and evidence suggests that these structures are an important part of the circuitry involved in regulation of emotion in humans. For these reasons, we have been using rhesus monkeys to characterize fear- and anxiety-related behavior and physiological responses and to elucidate the brain mechanisms underlying these responses.

From: The Role of the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala in Mediating Fear and Anxiety in the Primate.

Science has demonstrated unequivically that we share our small planet with other beings who think and feel in much the same way thay we do. This discovery has not resulted in a renaissance of understanding and a widening of our moral concerns, but instead has resulted in people like Kalin being paid by us to frighten them, to mutilate them, and to kill them.

Somehow, compassionate, ethical people fell asleep while people like Kalin gained control. It is time to throw the bums out.

Madison's Hidden Monkeys is a joint project of the
Alliance for Animals and the
Primate Freedom Project