in the United States, informing processes I describe as sentimental structures of laboratory life and associated affective politics. Throughout the chapter I draw on the personal narratives of lab personnel to explore how dogs, alongside other animals, engender strong human emotions, especially in response to protocols that require staff to harm, cull, and kill animals under their care. I ask: How do moral responses arise and extend beyond the scope of mandated bioethical codes of conduct? How might we begin to uncover a hierarchy of animal preference? Under what circumstances do lab personnel privilege a sense of kinship across the species divide? Why do scientists typically privilege “sentient” species, and what, precisely, is meant by this term? Throughout this chapter I draw on the history of canine research and the rise of the beagle as a specialized research animal to demonstrate the importance of “charismatic” species in my efforts to identify and decipher otherwise obscured moral values.
Chapter 2, “Why Do Monkeys Watch TV?” addresses other iconic species of science. Here I consider the charismatic status of non-human primates, who, by virtue of their evolutionary proximity to humans and highly “sentient” natures, epitomize favored research species. Their use in science is nevertheless fraught with moral quandaries. For several decades, primates have served as a barometer for animal welfare debates, frequently inspiring spirited, heated, or caustic encounters between lab personnel and activists. Throughout this chapter I focus specifically on macaques—perhaps the most widely used of all lab-based primate species—to navigate the complex world of animal welfare and associated “enrichment” practices. I draw on observations in monkey labs to interrogate the significance of a common refrain, namely, that monkeys like to watch TV. I tackle this assumption head-on by considering the history of primate engagement with visual media via experimentation. I then trace how these research practices cross over to the domain of “enrichment” and as a presumed “welfare” practice during “down time” when animals are not actively engaged in experiments. These practices and assumptions have significant consequences for shaping the everyday lives of captive, lab-based primates, and they uncover still other understandings of the moral values of the humans who circulate in laboratory space.
Part II, “Sacrifice,” comprises chapter 3, “The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals.” This section is intended as an interlude, where I pause to consider the inescapability of animal death in laboratories as predetermined by standardized research protocols. When informed of the focus of my research (a study of moral thinking in laboratory science), lab personnel of all stripes regularly responded by speaking of animals’ deaths and acts of killing. This chapter probes the unsettling significance of these unsolicited responses. I explore how lab personnel make sense of the need to “sacrifice” or kill animals for science and the moral consequences of animal death as an inescapable aspect of laboratory work. Set against the ubiquity of killing in science, I consider the significance—and limitations—of animal “sacrifice” as an overworked trope in theorists’ assessments of lab research. A dominant argument that pervades the literature is that this term flags an unspoken, sacred contract between human and animal. I propose other readings as a means to loop back to the relevance of interspecies intimacy.
Part III, “Exceptionalism,” considers how animal technicians and researchers grapple with the affective power of animals. As I show in chapter 4, “Science and Salvation,” a widespread public assumption is that lab animals are systematically objectified and always considered to be expendable creatures. Throughout my research, however, I regularly encountered lab personnel who sometimes rescue animals from culling in ways that demonstrate forms of animal exceptionalism. At times in full view of a supervisor, a lab employee might spare a creature destined for culling and take this favorite animal home as a house pet; another might stage a back-door meeting with animal activists to find new homes for animals destined for euthanasia. In turn, the remains of favorite deceased animals might be retrieved from disposal and lovingly preserved and displayed as memorials to honor them. These unorthodox practices provide evidence both of alternative understandings of the charismatic qualities assigned to various creatures and of how the moral responses that prompt them facilitate possible human redemption.
In chapter 5, “The Animal Commons,” I consider other forms of animal rescue that emerged from data associated with researchers’ practices. Whereas animal technicians might save animals from culling or preserve their remains in memorial form, researchers demonstrate occasional attempts to share animals, especially in contexts marked by scarcity. I consider such specialized efforts to be moral actions that foster an emergent “animal commons” reminiscent of, say, the open-sourcing of data in other quarters of science.
In the book’s conclusion, “The Other Animal,” I revisit the boundaries that have circumscribed my research. As noted earlier in this introduction, Animal Ethos is concerned exclusively with contexts that employ mammals, a decision driven by the assumption that they are most likely to inspire affective—and, therefore, moral—responses in human lab personnel. I consider the affective power of “the other animal,” employing zebrafish as an analytical foil. Throughout this book I demonstrate the dialectical relationship between welfare and care; in the conclusion, I strive to move along another elusive boundary of interspecies empathy, asking in the end why, how, or even whether a dog, monkey, or ferret inspires stronger affective responses than does, say, a school of fish. As with welfare and care, attentiveness to empathy can unmask otherwise obscured, everyday practices that might deepen our understanding of morality as a significant social dimension of science.
PART I
Intimacy
1. The Sentimental Structure of Laboratory Life
Experimental scientists inhabit a world bereft of both a lexicon of affect and venues for expressing emotions for laboratory animals. In contrast, among animal technicians and lab veterinarians, “compassion fatigue” (Kelly 2015; Scotney, Mclaughlin, and Keates 2015)—especially in response to animal “sacrifice” or euthanasia—has garnered attention, and terms such as “grief,” “loss,” and “anger” alongside “pain” and “distress” figure prominently in associated literature, workshops, and symposia that target lab animal caretakers.1 When I ask lab researchers about the emotional burdens associated with lab animal suffering, without fail they reference the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), their in-house ethics boards (known as institutional animal care and use committees or IACUCs), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requirements, alongside disciplinary bioethical codes of conduct, to underscore that proper experimental design and animal management prevent acts of undue harm (and, thus, by association, their own emotional distress). Such responses are not unique to animal research: they echo those that typify physicians’ responses to the subject of patient “suffering” in clinical settings (Sharp 2009a). Actions that cause excessive or unwarranted harm are deemed unethical.
This black-boxing of suffering does not preclude affection and concern for lab animals, however. As I learned during my previous research on artificial heart design, experimental bioengineers rarely regard the research calves and sheep with whom they work as mere work objects. Rather, many develop strong emotional attachments to creatures they recall fondly decades later, their personal histories as scientists entwined with those of long-deceased research animals (Sharp 2013). More recently, while working in a range of other laboratory domains, I regularly encounter affective responses to myriad species ranging from zebrafish and mollusks to rodents and monkeys. In essence, laboratories are affective menageries.
Throughout this chapter I navigate the complexities of interspecies intimacy in experimental science, focusing on the muted presence of affective registers as evidenced in researchers’ actions and thoughts regarding animals. (In subsequent chapters I consider the sentiments of animal technicians and veterinarians.) Early in their careers researchers become well versed in standards of animal “welfare” and “enrichment” while simultaneously mastering emotional detachment when working with a range of species. Their personal actions and private concerns nevertheless reveal that research animals engender strong emotional responses. Procedures and protocols that require injuring, culling, or killing animals
