I came to a report on a 1985 break-in at UC Riverside. Among the many animals stolen was an infant macaque named Britches. Britches’s little eyes had been sewn shut the day he was born, in order to test some sonic equipment designed for blind babies. The plan was to keep him alive for about three years in a state of sensory deprivation and then kill him to see what that had done to the visual, auditory, and motor-skills parts of his brain. I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science
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