The Horror of the Ape and the Child Experiment
This scientist raised a chimp and a baby together to see what would happen.
In 1931, a radical psychological experiment took place in the Florida home of scientists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg. Their groundbreaking study involved raising a chimpanzee, Gua, as a sibling to their infant son, Donald, to probe human and animal behavior boundaries.
This peculiar arrangement was no mere eccentricity but a controlled scientific venture to explore how the environment could shape an animal’s development. The Kelloggs dressed, fed, and nurtured Gua precisely as they did Donald, integrating her into daily routines and subjecting her to tasks and expectations typical for a human child.
However, as the experiment progressed, the results began to take an unsettling turn, with Donald and Gua showing developmental changes that challenged the intended outcome.
The Ambition Behind the Experiment
In the early 1930s, Winthrop Kellogg, a psychology professor fascinated by behavioral science, began an experiment to test the limits of nurture’s influence on development. With his wife, Luella, Kellogg set off to study how the environment might affect the behavioral patterns of one of humanity’s closest relatives, a…
