ABSTRACT
August 1, 1936 is an infamous date in modern World history as it marked the opening of the Olympic Games held in Berlin, Nazi Germany. Almost entirely forgotten, it was also the day that an infrahuman animal – as nonhuman animals were commonly referred to at the time – was first reported to have behaved in a way indicating the presence of an addiction-like desire or striving for a drug, that is, a desire so predominant to take “precedence over practically all other needs and impulses” (Spragg 1940). This seminal observation was made by Sidney Spragg at Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology in New Haven, a laboratory that had been recently founded and headed by Robert Yerkes, a well-known pioneer in the study of primate behavior and cognition. Spragg reported this finding in a 132-page monograph published in 1940, thereby launching the field of research on nonhuman animal models of addiction. I will describe and discuss this landmark study in some detail below, and use it as the starting point for a walk on the animal side – not the wild one – of addiction research to explore how this research has evolved to this day and how it challenges, more or less successfully, the human uniqueness of addiction.
