Let’s Pray for God’s Innocent Creatures in Satanic Labs. By Dr Chapman Chen
In the late 1960s, US psychologist Harry Harlow sought to understand depression and loneliness by designing an apparatus that the author describes as resembling a torture device for monkeys. A rhesus macaque was confined inside a large, vertical, cone-shaped chamber made of hard stainless steel, with a wire-mesh floor. The monkey received food and water but was otherwise left completely alone inside the chamber for weeks. Harlow called this apparatus the “pit of despair,” intending it to reproduce the feelings of hopelessness and isolation associated with severe human depression.
Harlow's experiments have widely been regarded as sadistic, unjustifiable and exploitative. Literary critic Wayne C. Booth pointed out that Harlow and his colleagues repeatedly inflicted suffering on nonhuman primates merely to demonstrate something that people already understood: destroying the social relationships of inherently social creatures can psychologically destroy them.
Harlow did not actually shun this image of a cold-blooded experimenter. In Carol Tavris's interview with Harry Harlow in the Pittsburgh Press-Roto magazine in April 1974 (See Deborah Blum, The Monkey Wars (1994), p. 92), he commented: “The only thing I care about is whether the monkeys will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I really don't like animals. I despise cats, I hate dogs. How could you like a monkey?”
The monkeys brutalized by Harlow are just the tip of an iceberg. A widely cited analysis by Katy Taylor and Laura Alvarez estimated that about 192.1 million animals were used for scientific purposes worldwide in 2015, many of whom were subjected to unspeakable tortures.
For these innocent creatures of God, let’s say Vicar James Thompson’s Prayer for Laboratory Animals:-
Gracious God whose analogy of self was in terms of how shepherds of old treated other species committed to their charge. Shame animal experimenters of their evil; move the hearts of Christians to rise up in rightful indignation; restore to your church the prophetic zeal that publicly rebukes cruelty while priests, wrapped up in rituals, condone it. By your arm destroy vivisection from our land, as you once did slavery and child labour. Thou whose Son didst liberate the animals about to be sacrificed in the Temple, bless and guide those who liberate animals from a far worse sacrifice today. Amen.
References
Taylor, Katy and Alvarez, Laura Rego (2020). “An Estimate of the Number of Animals Used for Scientific Purposes Worldwide in 2015.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0261192919899853
Information about Harrow’s monkey experiments: https://www.iflscience.com/the-pit-of-despair-was-one-of-the-most-unethical-experiments-of-modern-science-60408
Source of the prayer: Jones, Philip (2022). The Animals' Padre: The Life and Works of James Thompson, p. 114. https://all-creatures.org/book/r-animals-padre.html
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