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Not all unethical psychological experiments wreak havoc on humans, you rotten speciesist. Other animals — that’s right, you’re an animal too, like it or not — bear the brunt of human tinkering, in fact. Our primate cousins get to have the tops of their heads removed to induce strokes and are taught to self-inject cocaine and morphine until they’re junkies. Mice are forced to bully each other until they’re despondent enough to serve as subjects in clinical trials for antidepressants. You get the idea.

Bad as most lab animals have it, one group of rhesus macaque monkeys (the kind that serve as helper monkeys for the disabled) got it as bad as any ever have at the hands of one Harry Harlow, a Stanford-educated psychologist. In the 60s and 70s Harlow wanted to get to the bottom of love and its role in forming societies, by examining what happens to monkeys that are kept from their mothers.

To make sure his process wasn’t flawed, Harlow waited until the baby monkeys he used were good and attached to their mothers, then separated them. Instead they got a shiny wire version of their real moms, replete with a bottle for milk, and — oh yeah — spikes and cold air jets to simulate abuse. Ready for the heartbreak? Harlow found the baby monkeys still grew to love what he called “Iron Maidens” in the absence of their real mothers.

Oh, it gets worse. He also wanted to see what happened to young monkeys that lived in isolation. To find out, he removed them from their social groups and kept them in cages he called “Wells of Despair.” After spending six weeks in solitary, many of the monkeys he used had gone too crazy to rejoin their social group. At least a few lived another 15 years in isolation, having been broken by the experiment.

But, hey, they’re monkeys, right? Who cares if they’re stripped of their mothers and driven crazy? Or, as Harlow once put it, “How could you love monkeys?”

Boo-ya! moment: Harlow’s maltreatment of his subjects is generally credited with inadvertently creating the animal rights movement.

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Here’s Harlow: