Parents raised their son with a chimpanzee for the sake of an experiment: it ended tragically (4 photos)

The experiment was intended to show how the environment can influence development and whether chimpanzees can truly think like humans.





Psychologists Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife Louella raised their son Donald with a chimpanzee named Gua, who was seven and a half months old when she joined the family on June 26, 1931.

Early in his career as a psychologist, Kellogg had always wanted to conduct such an experiment, fascinated by feral children who were raised with little or no human contact. Having rejected the idea of ​​leaving a human child in the desert for obvious reasons, the American decided to do the opposite - to return the baby animal to human life.

In this experiment, which people call "disturbing", the couple were treated as "brother and sister": they wore baby clothes, ate in high chairs and kissed each other goodnight before going to bed.



For nine months, the couple conducted experiments on Gua and Donald for 12 hours a day, including spinning them around in chairs until they started crying and performing various tasks, the results of which were recorded. One day, while testing their reactions to a loud noise, the psychologist decided to line up a chimp and a baby next to each other, facing the camera, while a man fired a gun from behind them.

"The fundamental question was, is a chimpanzee a chimpanzee because it has chimpanzee genes, or because it is raised by other chimpanzees?" writes Theodore Dumas in Adult Health and Early Life Adversity: Behind the Curtains of Maternal Care Research. "So if baby Gua grew up to be very chimpanzee-like in a human household, then genes won. However, if baby Gua grew up to be more human than chimpanzee-like, then environment won. So Gua was treated like Donald's sister, and received the same bathing, dressing, and feeding routines."





The trial was supposed to last five years, but the couple had to end the experiment early due to concerns that Donald was exhibiting disturbing behaviors, such as grunting to get more food, fighting with Gua, and even biting.

Other theories suggest that the parents were worried that Gua might one day harm Donald as her power grew.

Unfortunately, both Donald and Gua met tragic ends.



After the experiment was abandoned, Gua was sent from what was essentially a loving family environment to a "relatively barren cage" in a primate colony on March 28, 1932.

"This was the second time she had been separated from her 'mother/keeper', and she went from a warm, affectionate family life to a relatively barren cage with other strange and not very well-behaved chimpanzees," the report said. "She died less than a year later, around her third birthday, of a ruptured heart (pneumonia was the official cause of death)."

Meanwhile, Donald sadly died in 1973 at the age of 43. It is believed that he committed suicide a year after his parents died.