whereby our species shares evolutionary, behavioral, and cognitive histories and qualities with other creatures. But the quotidian tasks associated with laboratory research also necessitate intimate encounters with individual creatures, a complex reality that varies according to the type of animal used and the parameters of experimental design.
Consider NHPs, whose human “proximity” or “sameness” is glossed in evolutionary terms. This notion of relatedness references interspecies kindredness: as I am often told, apes and monkeys are our primate “cousins.” In other instances, researchers may speak of “sentience” as a guiding factor for determining proximity. This factor is most notable (again) where NHPs are concerned, yet similar language is likewise applied to canine, cetacean, corvid, and, increasingly, porcine research subjects. Sentience flags a creature’s cognitive abilities to puzzle through experimental challenges in ways reminiscent of how humans think, serving as ethical evidence that supports using members of a particular species as research subjects. Yet sentience also figures in researchers’ quieter, more personal efforts to puzzle through the moral conundrums that confront them, flagging their private concerns about the detrimental effects of experimental research on various species.
Within the United States, chimpanzees and an assortment of monkeys have long been involved as experimental proxies for humans, sometimes at the penultimate stage before exploring human subjects. (This is perhaps best exemplified by the early years of the Space Race; see Haraway 1989; Sharp 2007.) The use of other sorts of research primates readily foregrounds our understanding of interspecies encounters, as have decades of sustained research on primate communication, especially in teaching sign language to great apes (Fouts 1972; Gardner, Gardner, and Cantfort 1989; Haraway 1989, 1991; Patterson et al. 1988). Again, evolutionary proximity naturalizes this logic and legitimates such scientific practices. As a colleague once volunteered, “after all, aren’t we 98 percent chimpanzee?” But as Jonathan Marks reminds us, we are also 35 percent daffodil. Marks describes this logic of genetic proximity to highlight our propensity to privilege evolutionary and, more recently, genetic thinking as a dominant logic of similarity (2003). In turn, as science historian Nancy Leys Stepan argues in her now-classic essay on the “role of analogy in science,” the unrecognized metaphorical power of “complex,” “intertwined,” and “overlapping” analogies that pervade evolutionary science informs an “analogical reasoning” then embraced as scientific givens or truths (1986, 264). Whereas Stepan is concerned specifically with how gender and race become entwined with evolutionary theory, she, like Marks, likewise offers a means to step back and rethink assumptions that inform the logic of species proximity.
In other contexts, animals are understood as ideal models for physiological reasons, a different sort of analogy that informs yet another logic of kindredness. Pigs (perhaps most often, fetal piglets) have long served as proxies for human anatomy in high school and undergraduate biology programs in the United States. Fetal piglets make for ideal dissection subjects because, like humans, they are mammals and thus have such features as hair and mammary glands, their soft tissue is easy to cut and penetrate, they are readily available from slaughterhouses and the like, and they are cheap to obtain. As I am often told, “when you open them up, they look just like a human body” (a point sometimes disputed by anatomists because, as quadrupeds, their organs are aligned differently than humans’). Again, the logic of porcine proximity is defined as physiological rather than evolutionary.
Domesticates of Science
Domestication defines yet another dimension of human-animal intimacy that pervades the logic of laboratory encounters. Domestication has long been understood as a hallmark of the evolutionary history of our species, involving the specialized transformation of flora and fauna for human use. As archaeologist Melinda Zeder reminds us, “pathways” to domestication—understood as an interspecies “partnership”—are varied and include animals understood “as livestock, working animals, household pets, and companions” (Zeder 2012, 161–62). Typically, as Zeder explains, “Domest-ication is seen as a process in which humans deliberately and with forethought assume control over the domesticate’s movement, feeding, protection, distribution, and, above all, its breeding—directed at achieving specific clearly identified goals…. Domesticates within this perspective are usually characterized in economic terms as productive capital … or by the way in which they become integrated into the social fabric of human society” (2012, 162).22 Refinements to this definition—reminiscent of Benedict’s dualism and Wilson’s temporality—recognize domestication as a “mutualistic relationship, in which both partners, human and domesticate, reap the benefits” in “codependent relationships” (2012, 162).23 For Zeder, domestication is “a sustained, multigenerational, mutualistic relationship” that affects “both the domesticate and the human side of the equation”; furthermore, it “is a fluid and nonlinear process that may start, stop, reverse course, or go off on unexpected tangents, with no clear or universal threshold that separates the wild from the domestic” (2012, 162–63, 166). As an archaeologist, Zeder is unconcerned with contemporary laboratory research. Nevertheless, her assertions offer an intriguing framework for rethinking human-animal relations in science. Following Zeder, I argue that lab animals, if they are to be successful research subjects, must undergo specialized processes akin to domestication. This occurs on several fronts.
First, species choice and preference permeate the logic of domestication within laboratories. According to Zeder, “certain behavioral characteristics make certain animal taxa, and certain individuals within taxa, better candidates for domestication than others” and “it is [those] sets of behaviors … with the responses of animals to humans and new environments—that are particularly important in animal domestication” (2012, 165, 167; see also her chart on 166). Similarly, researchers often explain that laboratory life comes naturally to or is better suited to some species than others, and, as lab domesticates, some are even described as docile yet eager participants. This logic works on two registers at once: by their very nature and temperament, certain species—such as mice, rats, beagles, and macaques—are understood as adapting especially well to laboratory conditions because, for instance, they enjoy or do not mind human presence, they might be unaggressive with humans or others of their own kind, they can live and thrive in confined conditions, or they reproduce with ease in captivity. In addition, some species are described as not only tolerating but enjoying experimental tasks and procedures, work that some go so far as to consider a form of “enrichment.” (I address the ramifications of this in the next chapter.)
Second, “mutualism” allows for the possibility that both humans and animals, as codependent partners, willingly participate in and reap the benefits of lab domestication, and a common assertion is that laboratory life is superior to a natural one. That is, whereas food, shelter, and safety mount significant challenges in the wild, lab-based welfare practices ensure that animals are provided these basic needs. An associated trope is that lab animals live longer than their wild or feral counterparts (although this statement overlooks the ubiquity of lab-based euthanasia practices). In addition, a logic that legitimates animal experimentation is that both humans and animals profit from successful discoveries and outcomes. Indeed, perhaps the greatest frustration expressed in interviews with laboratory staff is how little recognition their work garners in the world at large, even though a plethora of reliable medical procedures and pharmaceutical advancements relevant to both human and animal clinical care have been made possible by animal research.24 In this sense, mutualism is imagined as a black box of lifesaving work that is nevertheless obscured from public view.
Third, domestication often involves the deliberate transformation of a species, a process Zeder labels “intentionality,” and evidenced, for instance, in the selective breeding of livestock (2012, 163). Research personnel often explain that experimental animals bear little in common with their wild, feral, farm-bred, or household counterparts. Lab science relies heavily on meticulous, highly calibrated, and often deeply bureaucratized processes designed to alter the nature of a species through selective breeding, gene splicing, and the regular culling of unfit offspring by lab researchers, animal technicians of in-house vivaria, and staff at commercial breeding facilities known colloquially as “vendors,”
