medical specialists in the midst of discovery or accomplishment, this image shows Pasteur absorbed in a quotidian task. With notepad in hand, Pasteur studies a cage of rabbits, jotting and recording his observations. The fact that the image appeared in Harper’s Weekly is likewise notable: this text targets not experts but lay readers, who, though they might condemn the use of animals in science, are nevertheless invited to witness the scientist at work. The essay signals, too, an American interest in European lab research. Through the efforts of Harper’s Weekly, Pasteur crossed the Atlantic.
The Harper’s piece reveals the interplay of transcontinental research and associated animal welfare practices, themes that emerged regularly during the course of my research for Animal Ethos. Researchers often asked me “where” my work was based, a vague question that could signal an inquiry into anything from which or whose labs (for privacy issues I declined to provide names), what kinds of labs (university, not pharmaceutical), and which countries (predominantly the United States, with occasional forays to the United Kingdom for comparative purposes). The last response always inspired further commentary. Both U.K.- and U.S.-based researchers regularly underscored that the respective welfare restrictions imposed on their activities were among the “strictest,” “most confining,” or “toughest” in the world.14 What is important here is that research and welfare protocols travel internationally, and thus, generally speaking, U.S.-based welfare practices share common origins with those that originated in the United Kingdom, a factor that has proved helpful in my own efforts to track their respective histories.
Laboratory Labor and Animal Welfare
The paired histories of contemporary laboratory research and animal welfare movements are deeply entwined in both the United States and United Kingdom. In the words of lab personnel and activists, animal rights movements in the United Kingdom lay claim to a history of more “heated,” “vehement,” “sustained,” “militant,” and “effective” strategies; nevertheless, strategies that originate there have been known to inform subsequent legislative and other interventions in the United States. The United Kingdom’s Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, for example, is widely regarded as a precursor to subsequent initiatives in other countries. (The first piece of legislation to protect research animals in the United States was the Animal Welfare Act of 1966; I discuss this in a subsequent chapter.)15
An early icon of the animal rights—also known as the anti-vivisection—movement in the United Kingdom is the monument to the “little brown dog.” This memorial was erected in Battersea Park, London, in 1906 to memorialize a small terrier who was subjected repeatedly to surgical and other procedures during medical school lessons at University College, London.16 The “Brown Dog Affair” (1903–1910) was instigated when two feminists of Swedish origin, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schnartau, managed to make their way into the university as spectators during a lecture by physiologist William Bayliss, who regularly employed canine subjects in his research and lectures. The two women, who founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden after visiting animal labs at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1900, publicly accused Bayliss of performing illegal (and repeated) vivisection demonstrations. During the lecture in question, the surgical procedure was deemed terminal and the dog was killed with a knife to the heart by one of Bayliss’ students, Henry Dale. (Dale was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1936.)
The Brown Dog Affair pitted feminists, anti-vivisectionists, and sympathetic labor groups against medical students, and at various points confrontations required significant police intervention. In 1907, for instance, around a thousand medical students marched through London’s streets carrying effigies of brown dogs, an event that escalated to the point that it became known as the Brown Dog Riots. The monument itself was regularly targeted by vandals (who, presumably, were medical students), and by 1910 the district of Battersea chose to remove the sculpture (doing so at night and under heavy police protection). The Brown Dog Affair sparked a trial in which Bayliss sued for libel and won; it led, too, to the establishment of a royal commission charged with investigating the experimental use of animals in medicine and science (Gålmark 2000; Lederer 1992; Mason 1997) (see Figure 2).
FIGURE 2. Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Latchmere Recreation Ground of Battersea Park, London, erected 1906 (presumed destroyed in 1910). Joseph Whitehead, sculptor. National Anti-Vivisection Society (U.K.), 1906, photographer unknown. Source: Wikicommons. Wikicommons image derived from Encyclopaedia Britannica entry “Advocacy for Animals,” 2010.
I present this story as a means to highlight certain historical threads relevant to this present work, where several key themes will reemerge in the chapters that follow. Although the Brown Dog Affair is part of British history, its conspicuousness assists in foregrounding several issues of equal relevance to the United States. The first concerns the early, coterminous, public display of medical research as a public good, set alongside the rise of animal activism. This pairing will lead to the retreat of animal research to secured corridors of laboratory space. Second is the importance of realizing that research practices, animal welfare policies, and activism travel. Not unlike the Harper’s illustration of Pasteur in his lab, the animal rights movement likewise made its way across the Atlantic. Throughout the twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries, both activists and medical researchers in the United States have been known to turn to, consider, and draw inspiration from parallel developments in the United Kingdom. The third theme concerns the varying affective power of animal species. As I demonstrate later in this book, the dog looms as an iconic figure of medical research, and in the United States, not unlike in the United Kingdom, the social values assigned to dogs inspired significant welfare reforms over half a century after the Brown Dog Affair. Finally, the original monument (along with another that replaced it in 1985), offers a compelling entry point for considering the moral underpinnings of animal science. The monument to the little brown dog not only attests to the affective power of canines but also provides a relatively rare example of a public monument honoring lab animals. As I illustrate in subsequent chapters, memorials to experimental creatures proliferate in labs, mounted neither by activists nor in public parks but by lab personnel within the sheltered enclaves of research laboratories.
THE PARAMETERS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT
The focus for Animal Ethos emerged slowly, taking several unintended turns along the way. During the summer of 2010, while I was in residence as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, I partnered with philosopher Michael Banner on a pilot ethnographic project concerned with morality in lab animal science. This joint endeavor helped me realize a desire to delve more deeply into day-to-day practices involving lab animals in the United States. Off and on for the next seven years, I grounded my research in university-based laboratories that employed mammals as research subjects.
My reasons were as follows. First, as my initial work in the United Kingdom taught me, localized histories of animal rights activism, subsequent welfare legislation, and daily laboratory practices can vary significantly as one moves from one national context to another. My initial foray into laboratory science involved shadowing and interviewing lab staff of a range of origins in the United Kingdom, a country regarded elsewhere as home to the most stringent animal welfare and care policies. Staff explained that this reputation was tied to the country’s sustained history of animal activism. (My purpose is not to defend or refute such claims but, instead, to track how such assertions inform moral reasoning.) U.K. standards of care and ethical frameworks have a tendency to drift elsewhere (most notably in the form of what is widely known as the Three Rs—“replacement, reduction, refinement”—first proposed by Russell and Burch in the 1950s [1959]). As I later learned, laboratory practices are simultaneously similar and distinct as one moves within and across national boundaries. The United States also dominates the world stage in setting standards of welfare, care, and quotidian practices that might in some instances mirror those in the United Kingdom and in others reveal very different trajectories. Experimental
