The baby’s cries echoed through the room as his father carried
him away, his little hands reaching out for his beloved sister.
He watched her being taken away from him, never to be seen again.
His heart was breaking, nothing would ever be the same.
For the last 270 days they had been inseparable, but after everything
they’d been through, now they were being separated against their will.
It all started when his parents forced him to accept
a baby as his sister for one of their experiments.
She had been kidnapped from her own mother
for the sake of this twisted experimentation.
However, after a horrible outcome, the experiment concluded in failure.
Their child was no longer behaving "human".
Afraid of what could come next, and regretting their
decisions for the past 9 months, the two parents
were forced to put an end to their selfish desires.
What’s so wrong about being “forced” to accept
a baby sister who isn’t biologically related?
Well, when your sister is a baby chimpanzee, anything goes.
When fresh parents Winthrop and Luella Kellogg arrived home on
June 26th 1931, they brought home with them their 10 month old baby
Donald, and also a 7 and a half month old chimpanzee infant named Gua.
But why would a pair of new parents with their hands
full with their own human infant, choose to bring
home another of a completely different species?
Winthrop Kellogg was a comparative psychologist who worked
with dolphins, bats, rats, mice, and birds, but the experiment
he became most famous for was one he conducted with his
wife, Luella, that they called “The Ape and the Child:
a Study of Environmental Influence upon Early Behavior”.
You see where this is going right?
Kellogg was inspired to do this experiment in 1927
when he was a grad student at Columbia University.
While he and Luella don’t give us specifics in their book, it’s likely
that they were inspired by an article published that same year in
the American Journal of Psychology studying “wolf children” in India.
The article details how Reverend J. A. L. Singh set out one night
to hunt for Manush-Bagha, a Bengali cryptid that was supposed to
have the limbs of a human, but the white blank face of a ghost.
After months of searching, the reverend found a
wolf den and, after observing it for a time, found
the monsters the villages had spoken of as well.
Three wolves emerged from the den followed by two cubs, and two
pale ghostly figures crawling around on all fours, the man-ghosts.
The reverend immediately recognized them as two young girls.
When Singh and men from another village returned, managing to scare
off the two male adult wolves, he saw that the mother wolf was prepared
to fight and die for her cubs, her two human daughters included.
Singh caught the two girls and brought them back to an
orphanage he ran with his wife, naming them Amala and Kamala.
Unfortunately, the two girls weren’t able to integrate into society.
Amala, being the younger of the two at 18 months old, died in
less than a year in 1921, and Kamala who was 8 years old when
she was found, was only ever able to learn a few words, choosing
instead to spend time among local dogs before passing away in 1929.
The authenticity of the wolf childrens’ story is
debatable in our modern time, and largely debunked
but it made waves around the world in the late 20s.
Curious about the relationships between nature and nurture, the
Kelloggs wanted to see to what end removing an animal from its
natural environment could influence its cognitive abilities.
In the case of Amala and Kamala, they acted more like
wolves than humans, could a wolf then learn to be a human?
Of course, The Kelloggs weren’t the only ones curious to see if
animals were capable of human cognitive abilities, particularly speech.
However, any experiment to see how well an infant human
could integrate into a particular animal’s environment
would require leaving an infant alone in the wilderness,
and would be, obviously, horrendously unethical.
So, instead of trying to recreate a “wild child”, researchers
turned to see if they could create a “civilized animal”.
In 1909, psychologist Lightner Witmer attempted to teach a
chimp named Peter human language, however, Peter was a retired
circus chimp, and the experiment ended in bitter failure.
Witmer, analyzing his failure, said that he believed that if future
experiments used infant chimps, they may see more success than he did.
With this story in mind, the Kellogg’s devised their own experiment.
Winthrop wanted to use a subject that had the
least amount of “animal” influence as possible.
The two of them also wanted to ensure that
their animal was always treated like a human.
They wouldn’t put food bowls on the ground, or scratch behind
its ears, and Winthrop objected to any setup where they would
play with the animal and then leave it in a cage to be ignored.
Winthrop wrote that “Suppose an anthropoid were taken into a
typical human family at the day of birth and reared as a child.
Suppose he were fed upon a bottle, clothed, washed, bathed, fondled,
and given a characteristically human environment; that he were
spoken to like the human infant from the moment of parturition;
that he had an adopted human mother and an adopted human father”
So with their experiment beginning to take shape, Winthrop
and Luella Kellogg began arranging tests, systems,
and also, went to work on acquiring an infant chimp.
In the preface to the Kelloggs’ book, “The Ape and the
child”, Winthrop mentions that Luella was resistant at first.
He doesn’t specify what her concerns were, but one
can assume it has something to do with the idea
of a wild animal sitting next to her infant son.
So with an agreement made, Winthrop took a leave of absence from
his job at Indiana University, took a grant from the Social Science
Research Council, and moved himself, his wife, and their infant son to
Florida, close to the Yale Anthropoid Experiment Station at Orange Park.
Winthrop then made a deal with Primatologist Robert Yerkes,
and were given custody of a young female chimpanzee, Gua.
Gua was 7 and a half months old when she came to live with the Kelloggs.
Donald, their human son, was about 10 months old at the time,
but despite their relative closeness in age, Winthrop still
regretted that they couldn’t take custody of Gua at a younger age.
Despite Gua’s “advanced” age, Luella
and Winthrop started their experiments.
Psychologists Ludy Benjamin and Darryl Bruce, in their retrospective
review of the Kelloggs’ work, said that their testing was
exhausting, not just for Donald and Gua, but the researchers as well.
There were some hopefully very well compensated
baby-sitters now and then, however it was very rare
that the Kelloggs left their human and chimp dependents.
The Kelloggs have an itemized list of all of the tests they
conducted, but the most exhaustive tests they conducted
were monthly Gesell Tests for Pre-School Children.
They’re a series of tests that help educators and parents
evaluate the development of children aged 2.5 to 9 years old.
They observe a number of responses in 5 strands:
developmental, alphanumerical, linguistic
comprehension, visuo-spatial, and socio-adaptive.
Concepts surrounding early childhood development have
changed since the 1930s, and the Gesell tests are
typically used for children older than Donald and Gua.
It does serve us to illustrate how the Kelloggs planned to use
Donald’s test results “as a sample ‘normal’ record for a child
of his age in the particular human environment in which he has
been reared.” Basically, Gua was their experimental subject,
and Donald was their control that they would compare against.
For example, Winthrop notes that the majority of human children don’t
eat with a spoon by themselves until they’re around 18 months old.
With this in mind, the Kelloggs observed Gua and Donald’s spoon use.
By 13 months, Gua was eating on her own.
Donald, on the other hand, took 17.5 months before
he even could figure out how to use a spoon.
And before you start making fun of Donald,
that’s pretty normal for a human child.
In this aspect, the Kelloggs say that Gua was “considerably in
advance of the child in the rate at which she acquired this behavior.”
They did observe that Gua’s main difficulty using
a spoon was tilting the edge under her food.
She would rest the bottom against her bowl, and
just slide it into her food hoping for the best.
Whereas Donald learned quickly to tilt the spoon
under his food to collect the most he could.
That said, Donald struggled keeping the spoon
level in between his bowl and his mouth.
He kept spilling, something that Gua was “almost never seen to do.”
Gua and Donald would be tested daily
for a variety of different things, like;
“blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes,
depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to
tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears,
equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping,
language, comprehension, attention span, and others.”
The experiments included watching to see how Gua and Donald
reacted to seeing themselves in a mirror, giving nonsense names
to objects neither child had seen before to see how well they
could learn new words, and hanging a cookie from a rope to see
how well Donald and Gua could pull over a chair to reach it.
Point is, they did a lot of tests, and both Luella
and Winthrop went in assuming that Donald was the
control in the bizarre experiment—an unchanging factor.
The Kelloggs ended their experiment after only 9 months.
They don’t specify why though.
Funny enough, the Kelloggs are extremely specific for most of
their experiments, but omit the exact reason they shut it down.
That said, Benjamin and Bruce, hypothesize 3 possible explanations.
First, they speculate that perhaps the demands of
parenthood and research became too taxing—and yeah, preach.
Second, they may have learned all they thought they could
learn, and wanted to shift focus to the writing of their book.
And third, it was possible that as Gua continued to grow, her
physical strength grew, and her behavior became more and more erratic.
Maybe they believed that Gua could hurt Donald accidentally.
There may have been a fourth possible
reason for the conclusion of their study.
Gua wasn’t learning from Donald, instead, Donald was learning from Gua.
The experiment wasn’t specifically about teaching Gua
to use human language, but it was a significant goal.
In the beginning, Gua was able to quickly master a small number of
distinct “vocalizations” that Winthrop and Luella could understand.
They specify though, that she wasn’t consciously
“communicating”, but simply telegraphing her needs
in ways that Luella and Winthrop could anticipate.
Think of it like when a dog’s tail wags, it’s happy.
They’re not literally thinking “I am happy, now I will wag”,
it’s an involuntary physical response that we recognize.
Part of their experiment was to see if learning language alongside a
human, Donald, could improve Gua’s ability to retain words and concepts.
It’s well known that human children learn language primarily through
mimicry at first, so the Kelloggs wanted to test if Donald and Gua would
learn from each other as much as they would learn from their parents.
Unfortunately, she was terrible at imitating words and vocalizations.
Most babies go through a period of babbling where they’re basically
pretending to speak, but they still don’t know what words are yet.
It’s the infant equivalent of hearing a new word, and then using
it wrong in a room full of people who know what that word means.
To add insult to injury, while Gua didn’t
imitate Donald, he absolutely imitated her.
When he was 14 months old, the Kelloggs observed him
mimicking the bark she would make when she was hungry.
At first, he would just imitate her when she was making
sounds, but soon he began doing it all on his own.
Donald was 10 months old when Gua was brought into
the family, and he learned her name quite quickly,
adding “Gua” to his repertoire of 3 words total.
But the problem was that he only learned 3 words.
By his 19th month, Donald hadn’t increased his total vocabulary.
As he learned a new word, he seemingly forgot an old one.
It was that classic old saying of, monkey see monkey do.
Human see what monkey do, human do what monkey do.
The Kelloggs admitted that Donald was, communication-wise,
less advanced than Gua, but neither of them really learned
to talk during the 9 months they conducted their experiment.
So it’s possible that the additional reason for the
conclusion of the experiment was that it was showing
the opposite result than what they were testing for.
That, and also they might have been worried that their actual
human son’s early development might have been affected by
Gua, and the longer it went on, the worse it could get.
Like we talked about earlier, the concept for the
experiment was that Donald would be a “control” variable.
A normal child that would act the way that human environments require.
However, it turned out that he was as
much an experimental subject as Gua was.
Benjamin and Bruce say that “The Ape and
the Child is clearly a book about an ape.
It was the chimp who was the primary object of study”.
The Kelloggs clearly thought that their
human son wouldn’t be influenced by Gua.
They wanted to see how human-like a chimp
could become if raised in a human environment.
At the core, this experiment wanted to uncover the relationship
between nature and nurture, and in that regard, it was successful.
It taught the Kelloggs that chimps, or any animal really, if treated
like a human child will behave like a human child except when it
is limited by the simplicity of its brain in comparison to ours.
Other experiments have been conducted to see if chimps can
learn sign language, but most of these experiments are disputed.
For example, one chimp named Nim Chimpsky, was purported
to have learned sign language, but he never spontaneously
used sign language, only imitated his caregivers.
There’s also Koko the gorilla, but even her use
of ASL is contentious debate among scientists.
Inversely, the Kelloggs’ experiment also showed that humans
are, especially in early childhood, incredibly adaptable
to even the slightest changes in their environments.
Once those critical early stages of development have passed,
it’s much, much, harder to relearn some of these basic,
almost instinctive aspects of human-made environments.
The study eventually finished on March 28th, 1932, and Gua was
returned to her original home at the Orange Park primate colony.
Showing, at least for the time being, that our dogs and cats
and pet bearded dragons unfortunately aren’t going to start
acting like humans if we start treating them like a human.
Most animals, like Gua, are limited by the complexity of their brains.
We’re also limited by the complexity of our brains, but it
just seems like we’re the smartest because we’re the only
ones on the planet who figured out math—except for crows.
We need to keep an eye on those crows.
When it comes to the nature vs nurture debate, people often use
animals to “prove” that instinct, and biology influences us more than,
say, the socio-economic circumstances we’re born to, and live in.
But what this experiment shows is that even such a rudimentary
concept as vocalized language is so intricately intertwined with
the specific circumstances of those first years of our lives.
Even so little as having a monkey kid sister is enough to
disrupt key language forming stages in your development.
There’s still a lot more to learn.
This experiment itself was conducted nearly 100 years
ago as well, and we’ve made leaps and bounds since then.
Not to mention the ethics of experiments like
these, not just for humans but for animals as well.