shocking images of Lester Brown’s hardscrabble compound in rural Maryland (located south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a region still tainted by Jim Crow), set against the upscale Boston suburb of Newton or the luxuries in store for a dog adopted into a household able to afford a comfy family car.14
Legislating Affective Welfare
Today, the AWA defines the bedrock of contemporary welfare practices in the United States involving the use, management, and treatment not only of dogs, but of an even wider array of animals in laboratory settings. Although not the first effort at animal welfare, it is widely regarded in the United States as the most effective and comprehensive form of legislation to date specifically in reference to the well-being of lab animals. The law—subsequently amended and refined in 1970, 1976, 1985, 1990, and 2002—empowers the USDA (which also oversees farm animal welfare) with oversight of “refined standards of care and extended coverage to animals in commerce, exhibition, teaching, testing, and research” (Adams and Larson 2016). USDA inspectors may arrive at a lab without warning and, when they identify infractions, impose sanctions, levy fines, suspend activities, or close down operations. As the Life and Sports Illustrated articles make clear, special concern during the original drafting of the AWA was the traffic in stolen pets and, more generally, widespread use of animals of unknown origin in medical research. This concern led to the licensing of two categories of animal suppliers by the USDA: Class B (or “random source”) dealers, who acquire animals from auctions, shelters, and private breeders, and Class A (or “purpose bred”) commercial facilities that specialize in a range of creatures selectively bred specifically for lab use (Adams and Larson 2016).
Indeed, during the course of my own career in the early 1980s, when I held an office job in the research wing of a major East Coast university, postdoctoral students took advantage of there being no leash law and regularly drove around at night in an unmarked van to capture both stray and pet dogs spotted on the city’s streets. These dogs became research subjects in a cardiac lab several floors below my office for projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense.15 Today this same city has among the strictest animal welfare laws in the country, and such “random source” practices are now prohibited. Although laws have long varied from state to state regarding the legality of acquiring presumably abandoned animals from streets and shelters for lab use, recent actions at the federal level might well sound the death knoll of the Class B dealer. In 2012 and 2014, the NIH ceased funding research involving, respectively, cats and dogs acquired from Class B facilities, and in December 2015 Congress approved an amendment to the 2016 Agricultural Bill that prohibits the USDA from relicensing Class B facilities.16 The proliferation of Class A facilities—referred to today by lab personnel as “vendors” and research “partners”—defines a specialized commerce in animals that, ironically, was spurred on in large part by efforts in the 1960s to save abducted house pets from science. As we shall see later in this chapter, whereas the AWA helped to eliminate many house pets from the equation, the Class A–bred experimental dog increases in moral value when labs transform “retired” animals into pets by “adopting” them out or “rehoming” (rather than euthanizing) them once they cease to be of use experimentally.
In turn, the AWA not only lays claim to lasting effects on welfare practices in labs; it has transformed how researchers acquire and think about animals. Personnel I encounter who currently work for the institution where I once worked generally are unaware that their predecessors conducted street sweeps for “strays” or that dogs ever occupied the building. Those with similar research interests have shifted their attention to less charismatic species in deliberate efforts to avoid hostile reactions from the public. Thus, whereas forty years ago a cardiac researcher might well have worked with captured stray and pet dogs, a decade or so later a postdoctoral student trained in that same lab might have gone on to purchase beagles from a Class A dealer when setting up her own lab. In turn, even more recent graduates in the same field might work with animals classified as “livestock,” such as sheep and calves or hybrid piglets, who attract far less attention as warranting rescue.
Canine Sentiments
Today, much of the current literature on animal welfare in science focuses squarely on the rights of non-human primates, instigated by participants in The Great Ape Project (Cavalieri and Singer 1993) alongside such welfare and activist groups as the SPCA, HSUS, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and still others, all of whom have argued forcefully and convincingly for the rights of great apes (namely, gorillas and chimpanzees) as sentient species.17 These efforts have been credited with several groundbreaking developments. A joint report issued by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council (Altevogt et al. 2011) informed recent decisions at the NIH, under the directorship of Frances Collins, to pare back substantially and then bring to an end all use and funding of chimpanzees in laboratory research (Kaiser 2015; Reardon 2015). The NIH is now scrutinizing research involving an even wider range of primate species (Grimm 2016).18 In May 2015, only a few months prior to my arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to write this book, the Harvard-affiliated New England Primate Medical Research Center (one of eight such centers in the United States) was shut down in the wake of numerous animal welfare infractions (Johnson 2015; Klein 2015). In the wake of such decisions, two significant shifts have occurred that are relevant to my discussion here. The first involves concerted efforts among activists to prevent labs from euthanizing these animals by assisting in their relocation to primate sanctuaries; the second consists of attempts within labs to identify other animal models. The paradox, though, is that whereas many primates may be spared further research involvement, these reforms will not necessarily reduce animal use but merely shift the burden of experimentation to other species.19
Among researchers, NHPs—especially chimpanzees—figure prominently in discussions and debates on the ethics of science. Most often, associated arguments are framed by understandings of the Three Rs, or the welfare principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement. The Three Rs originated in the United Kingdom (Russell and Burch 1959) and were codified into practice there some time ago (Balls et al. 1995; Fraser 2008) and continue to inform standard welfare practices in lab settings. Very recently the Three Rs approach has made significant headway in the United States, where interviewees in my own study frequently cited the National Rese-arch Council’s 2011 revised edition of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the standard handbook for lab research, as altering their own behavior (Council 2011).20 (There is, nevertheless, significant evidence that the Three Rs have been around much longer in the United States; see, for instance, Conover 2000.) Briefly, whenever possible, research scientists should strive to replace animal experimentation with alternative techniques, use as few animals as possible, and remain ever alert to creative approaches to improving animals’ lives and living conditions so as to minimize their distress, pain, and suffering (Balls et al. 1995; Fraser 2008; Russell and Burch 1959).21
The Three Rs are now codified as standard approaches in academic labs in the United States. In this country, during both public discussions and formal scientific presentations, the chimpanzee is regularly put forth as the species most deserving of such attention and care. In contrast, when researchers speak one-on-one during interviews of their own private, moral concerns for lab-based animals, they are far more likely to speak of dogs (and this is just as pronounced among those who work with all sorts of animals, ranging from rodents to macaques). In other words, if one only pays attention to the dominant discourse on scientific ethics, subtler yet equally significant moral sensibilities remain obscure. I ask, then: What processes, beyond the passing of the AWA, render the dog an iconic species of moral encounters in science? In response, I consider how researchers understand species proximity and its moral consequences within the framework of quotidian laboratory life.
MODELING HUMAN-ANIMAL INTIMACY
Within laboratories, proximity assumes a range of forms where human-animal encounters are concerned. In the most basic sense, interspecies encounters are most clearly evident in the daily rhythm of animal management, care, and experimentation. In turn, and as noted above, interspecies
