of species preference in shaping human sentiments toward lab animals? In answer, I offer case examples from my research. I begin with the experiences of an entry-level lab assistant, followed by examples involving more seasoned researchers.
Mastering Detachment
Alicia, a studious and serious Anglo twenty-two-year-old with brassy red hair, recently graduated from a four-year private college in the Midwest with high honors in biology and neuroscience. Although she originally imagined attending medical school and becoming either a pediatrician or obstetrician, by the end of her sophomore year she realized how much she enjoyed the task-oriented culture of the science lab. While interning for a summer in the sleepy emergency room of her rural hometown’s community hospital, she reached the conclusion that she “lacks the enthusiasm needed for a cheerful bedside manner,” a sentiment I have encountered elsewhere among bioengineers who describe their own professional trajectories as being shaped by the self-realization that each of them “is not a people person” (Sharp 2013). Following graduation, Alicia moved not far from her college to a large cosmopolitan city that is well known as a medical research hub. She applied for half a dozen entry-level lab technician jobs at three separate private research universities, and she had the luxury of choosing among several offers. In the end, she opted for a position that would enable her to acquire “hands-on experience with rodents” so that she could “work [her] way up the evolutionary chain” because, to date, her lab experience was “limited to microorganisms.” Although she found this previous research “fascinating in terms of the science,” she felt that involvement with rodents meant “testing whether she liked working with mammalian vertebrates”; also, this would help her decide what her next career move should be. Like the majority of researchers I encounter, she did not grow up with animals. As she explained, “my parents are both chemists and neither one of them likes pets very much, so we never had any.” By the time I met her, she had been fully engaged in a mouse lab for the past nine months, and she had found that she “loves the work.”
Alicia spends nearly all of her hours each day in a vast vivarium, a cavernous, windowless room that, she estimates, “houses close to nine thousand mice” who are associated with a range of university labs engaged in diverse projects. Her activities confine her to a small corner of the vivarium, where she tends to several hundred animals associated with research on various cancers conducted by her lab’s principal investigator (PI or lab director) and his graduate and postdoctoral students. Alicia has been busy mastering selective breeding techniques, in which approximately one-fourth of the offspring in each litter bear the desired traits; the remaining pups are “culled” or “sacked” (from “sac,” a diminutive form of “sacrifice,” or the term commonly used in laboratories for euthanizing animals). She described the learning process to me as follows:
ALICIA: On my first day I learned all of this mouse stuff. The guy I was replacing was leaving [for graduate school], and he taught me how to pick up and handle a mouse [she demonstrates how to do so, as if she is holding an invisible animal by the base of the tail]. At first they’d run away from me. I finally learned how to just reach in and grab them and pick them up. It took me a long time to be able to do this—now I look back on it and wonder why it took me so long—now it seems so obvious to me how to do it. I now regularly do tail snips [for DNA samples] and toe clippings [for numbering]. It took me a long time to learn the numbering—I’d have to go look at my spreadsheets, memorize what to do, and say it over and over to myself as I walked over to where the mice were. Now I can do it without worrying—I know the system now.
LS: How did you feel at first about doing this to the mice [that is, clipping off their toes and tips of tails]?
ALICIA: I’d screw up and do more pain [to them] than necessary. I’d think, “This sucks—these mice have to put up with me as I learn.” It’s very unintuitive.
LS: Can you explain the numbering system to me?
ALICIA: I’ve clipped to 3551. We only clip for the last two numbers. We have a spreadsheet. 3551 tells us parentage, D.O.B. [date of birth], age—today is day 1—sex, genotype. And then it’s set up by cage—we have a cage list. All cages have names. For example, one refers to a knock-out gene; another a black background [referring to the mouse’s coat and colony]. I work with a black mouse. I can make a homogenous background [meaning, she can breed mice so some are born all black. She then describes other codes that designate still other genetic traits.] It takes a mouse six weeks to reach sexual maturity. It’s an eight-week cycle, and a three-week gestation. I do a lot of mouse breeding. The ones we don’t need, I sac [using CO2].
LS: Are you in charge of this? Can you tell me what you do?
ALICIA: “When I sac them”—I know, but it’s what we all say. I used to ask, “Why don’t we call it killing?” We are killing, and it’s not like anyone sees us, but then everyone says it, so, why not? I now say it without thinking about it. Others just said to me [when I’d ask about it], “Sac is the vocabulary we use.”
LS: What does “sac” make you think of?
ALICIA: In football you “sack a player,”—you get rid of it and knock it out of the game…. I feel like animal death is very central to animal research. A lot of people think, “Oh, you kill animals.” So much of your work leads to death. I think about how someone [in our lab] needs neurocells [from these mice], someone else [needs tumors]. We have to think about it a lot. It’s regulated. It’s the endpoint. I do most of my sacking by CO2 exposure. We all do CO2 [in the lab] where I work. [Others I know in other labs] decapitate them—[they say] it’s more humane. With neonates, you decapitate them with scissors. You use a PBS buffer—it’s isotonic with the body.28 I’m scheduled to learn how to do this next month.
LS: Are you comfortable about learning this?
ALICIA: I’m not stoked for it. But it’s necessary for what we’re doing. It’s supposed to be the most humane way. I should get over it. It’s what we’re doing….
LS: Do you like your job?
ALICIA: I like the people. That was the highest priority when I was choosing which job to take. I’m figuring out how I feel about science. Wow. We do this work to prevent tumors! I like going to work every day. I listen to a lot of podcasts [while I work].
In their essay “Transposing Bodies of Knowledge and Critique,” Carrie Friese and Adele Clarke (2012) offer a detailed description of a lab researcher intent on teaching a new recruit the proper—and most humane—method of killing a lab mouse. Throughout the teaching session the researcher grows increasingly frustrated, troubled by the number of animals that must be sacrificed as the student stumbles through the lesson. In contrast, Alicia’s perspective sheds light on the opposite side of the tutorial, disclosing important aspects of neophyte lab training, most notably the importance of demonstrating, and internalizing, emotional detachment. As she explains, mastering the “unintuitive” skills of lab animal management takes time, patience, perseverance, an acute memory, and stamina.
At this point in her training, Alicia focuses exclusively on the method and not the mouse (as typifies interview responses from other entry-level lab assistants like Alicia). Although seemingly mundane, her mastery of the proper way to pick up a mouse is in fact an important technical skill where animal care is concerned. As Dr. Rose, a director of a diabetes rat lab explained to me,
I’m embarrassed to say it took me decades to realize that handling a rat properly is a welfare issue—animals that are hand-trained are not afraid of humans, and so injections and the like, and even euthanasia, are far less traumatic for them because they aren’t afraid and trust us. I had to learn this from my animal technicians, and I am adamant that all junior researchers in my lab master this first before I let them move on to doing anything else.
