This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way To See What Would Happen

On June 26, 1931, comparative psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife welcomed a new arrival home: not a human infant, but a baby chimpanzee. The couple planned to raise the chimp, Gua, alongside their own baby boy, Donald. As later described in The Psychological Record, the idea was to see how environment influenced development. Could a chimp grow up to behave like a human? Or even think it was a human? Since his student days, Kellogg had dreamed of conducting such an experiment. He was fascinated by wild children, or those raised with no human contact, oftentimes in nature. Abandoning a human child in the wilderness would be ethically reprehensible, Kellogg knew, so he opted to experiment on the reverse scenario—bringing an infant animal into civilization. For the next nine months, for 12 hours a day and seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife conducted tireless tests on Donald and Gua.