an uneasy relationship with animal activism, and, again, trends in the United Kingdom sometimes shadow accounts of what transpires in the United States. As a means to maintain control over the parameters of data collection, I chose early on to base the bulk of my research for Animal Ethos in the States, with occasional forays to the United Kingdom for comparative purposes.
As noted above, during interviews, I was often asked where and with whom I conducted my research. Here I must underscore that, given the politically charged nature of working in animal laboratories, I strictly adhered to promises of confidentiality at all levels of reporting. Specialized fields of experimental research can involve relatively small communities of scientists and other staff (in the words of one neuroscientist, “We all know each other”), and thus my written and verbal assurances (via my institution’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB-approved informed consent process) that I would not disclose names of specific labs, institutions, individuals, or animals was an important step in winning trust and acquiring permission to conduct lab-based ethnographic research. Although my movements were sometimes redirected to block my access to trade secrets and the like, this was relatively rare (nor of any interest to me). A significant focus of concern was reflected in questions about any ties I might have to animal activists, who are widely perceived among lab personnel as an ongoing threat to the safety and security of scientific property, animals, and people. I learned early on to underscore that I was neither an investigative journalist nor an activist, although I made clear that I was involved in interviewing individuals who self-identify as such. In line with standard anthropological ethical practices, all names in this work are pseudonyms; I have also obscured geographical locations of research sites. I am grateful for the assistance and support I received: throughout this project I was welcomed as a guest and curious interloper who was encouraged to engage in and witness a range of day-to-day lab activities.
Laboratory research encompasses vast realms of experimental science, and thus two additional parameters circumscribed my own activities. The first involved the decision to work exclusively in academic, university-based laboratories. Although some lab personnel move back and forth throughout their careers among industry (e.g., pharmaceutical), government (at, say, the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, or branches of the military), and university research, these are nevertheless fairly distinct domains of experimental animal science. Unlike the first two, academic research tends to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what is often referenced as “basic” or “pure” research most concerned with the advancement of knowledge (as opposed to, say, the profit-seeking pursuits of pharmaceutical companies). The bulk of my research occurred in evolutionary biology and neuroscience labs, although interviews involved specialists drawn from an even wider array of fields (including genetics, immunology, and primatology).
Another key difference between academic and other contexts is scale. Academic labs tend to be substantially smaller than their counterparts in government settings and the pharmaceutical industry, and given that a core purpose in academic settings involves training scientists (ranging from undergraduate to postdoctoral students), the same personnel—regardless of station in a lab’s labor hierarchy—typically work together as a team for several years at a stretch (if not for a decade or more). Although academic labs might partner with pharmaceutical corporations, they tend to be sustained by multiyear grants most often from government sources. These grants fund research space, the costs associated with breeding and housing animals, and lab payroll. Personnel typically consist of the lab’s director or PI, students of an array of ranks, technicians whose duties can range from cleaning cages and breeding animals to providing basic medical care and training research subjects, and veterinarians who specialize in lab animal health. In academic labs, such personnel are arranged in clearly delineated labor hierarchies; they also define small communities of specialists whose work together is driven by the scientific need to use animals as experimental subjects. Because teams are typically relatively small in size (ranging from half a dozen to twoscore employees), they generally work fairly cooperatively in the day-to-day management of animals. (Pharmaceutical employees, on the other hand, speak of much stricter hierarchies.) As will become clear in subsequent chapters, cooperativeness can give rise to creatively serendipitous moral responses.
As I learned from my earlier work with bioengineers, animals bear the power to inspire affective responses in human lab personnel. Driven by past experience, I chose to focus exclusively on mammals, informed by the assumption that lab workers would respond most strongly to warm-blooded creatures. This decision did not reflect my personal attraction to certain species over others—those who know me can attest that my affective responses to a hound, boa, shark, and cephalopod are equally strong. Rather, they reflect dominant understandings of species’ worth across wide domains of experimental science. During the course of this research, certain animals emerged as inspiring especially strong affective responses in lab personnel: most notably, dogs (specifically, beagles), primates (especially macaques), and other, smaller animals (most frequently rats and ferrets). I came to understand these as iconic species of laboratory science, and they figure prominently in the chapters that follow. Now that I have reached the end of this study, I admit I sometimes question whether this focus on mammals was necessary, and in the book’s conclusion I circle back and reconsider the affective power of non-mammalian species.
Animal Ethos officially spanned seven years of ongoing research (2010–2017); supplemental data are derived from earlier research with transplant surgeons (some of whom had worked with animals in the course of their training), xeno experts (for whom chimpanzees, baboons, pigs, and the occasional rat or hamster were preferred research subjects), and bioengineers (whose professional histories are entwined with calves, ewes, and sometimes dogs). Just as animals matter, domains of specialized knowledge and training do too. As I learned from my work on organ transplantation, although surgeons are most often celebrated in the literature as the true experts of this clinical realm, my research findings would have been shallower, I maintain, had I not worked in sustained fashion with nurses, social workers, procurement specialists, patients, and donor kin. Likewise, throughout this current project, I have made a point of moving up and down labor hierarchies, across research domains, and among different species.
Researchers and animal care technicians eventually emerged as those most likely to face and wrestle with moral quandaries. I nevertheless worked with a host of experts. Methodologically, the bulk of data were derived by shadowing lab personnel and conducting structured, open-ended interviews, informal group discussions, and life narratives that involved sixteen lab PIs, eight postdoctoral students, twelve undergraduate lab researchers,17 three lab technicians, twenty-two animal technicians or “caretakers,” six veterinarians, four animal activists, two animal law experts, two investigative journalists, two historians of science, three moral philosophers, and four bioethicists. These methods of data gathering were enhanced by additional sustained participant-observation within a range of sites consisting of labs based on five separate university and college campuses; three veterinary schools; and a wide range of specialized conferences in the United States and abroad that were focused on transplant-related research, animal husbandry and lab care, and animal welfare legislation. I have also spent significant time combing through historical archives, seeking advertisements and other public relations materials, and visiting a host of sites that memorialize animals in and beyond scientific domains.
The Organization and Scope of the Work
Animal Ethos consists of five core chapters, written as critical essays, framed by three analytical themes: intimacy, sacrifice, and animal exceptionalism. Part I, “Intimacy,” is informed by the premise that human-animal encounters are part and parcel of everyday laboratory life, a reality that engenders both standardized and creatively serendipitous responses. Whereas animals are categorized, labeled, counted, and cared for in ways determined by regulatory apparati, personal (versus coded) names and other unorthodox practices abound, indicative of a scholarly need to understand animals as being more than research objects or “data points” (as they are so frequently described in existing critiques of science). In chapter
