... discrimination that he termed 'speciesism', and in the same way that experiments are not done on old people because it would be called ageism, experiments cannot be carried out on animals without being hopelessly hypocritical. Certainly, looking at an experiment such as Harlow's Monkeys, it is easy to see how the animal rights argument could be applied. Firstly, it is hardly fair to separate a mother and baby at birth in any species, and it would not happen for the sake of research in humans, so how can it be justified simply because the animal can't talk? And secondly, what exactly was the benefit to humankind from this experiment? What Harlow found was that nurture seemed to be more important that nature, and that baby monkeys that had had no comfort for ninety days suffered irreversible psychological damage. This was translated on to human children that six months was the ...

See this essay or coursework document in full right now