directs me to demonstrate passivity because “Rufus likes to be alpha” when, in reality (and to paraphrase Benedict [1969]), in lab science the animal will always be the beta to the human.
The Limits of Lab Affection
In contrast to Jaime, Alicia considers herself a novice slowly becoming adept at working with a single mammalian species while nevertheless focusing on her long-term goal of working her “way up the evolutionary chain.” Yet Alicia and Jaime share something important in common: unlike their animal technician or “caretaker” counterparts, neither of them grew up with house pets. As Alicia’s story reveals, lab work initiated her first intimate encounter with a warm-blooded species, which she now handles, breeds, and culls. Many young and aspiring lab researchers begin, like Alicia, with mice or other rodents (recall that Jaime began with hamsters), and I am often struck by the stark honesty of their reactions to mice especially, in which their descriptions of these animals range from their being “curious” of their surroundings and “skilled escape artists” to “skittish” and “nervous,” or “not very likeable” all the way to “barbaric,” the last two comments made most often to what are in fact stress behaviors, such as “cannibalizing” their young and “barbering” one another.32 To the novice researcher, troubling qualities are nearly always understood as inherent in the species and not springing from one’s own behavior or mismanagement of an animal. As Dr. Rose’s testament about rats reveals, sensitivity to animals’ needs may indeed take time—even decades—to master. Often, too, novice researchers speak of desires to “move on,” as yet another, like Alicia, put it, to another species “higher up on the evolutionary tree” (as has been true of Jaime, who has moved from hamster to pig to macaque). In other words, mice (and other rodents) may be understood as a phase-one mammalian species of sorts: once one cuts one’s teeth on rodent management, one might then move on to, say, ferrets or dogs or monkeys. Such attitudes change with time, however: once one masters working with mice and starts to “think like a mouse,” so to speak, mice may well become a species of choice that dominates the rest of one’s research career. As one lab director explained, the researcher “learns to appreciate the elegance of the mouse model” in science.
I frequently engage senior scientists in discussions about their experiences with and preferences for particular animal models. Lab researchers describe with ease, and in detail, why certain species are best suited to various experimental needs and conditions, and suitable criteria may include size; anatomical, physiological, and/or genetic characteristics; breeding habits; supply and maintenance costs; temperament; regulatory restrictions; and established and historicized patterns of use within one’s discipline. Yet sentimental associations creep in too. Without prompting, scientists often redirect these discussions so they may speak of species with whom they will not experiment for a variety of reasons,33 and non-human primates are certainly prominent in their responses. Many researchers I encountered regard NHPs, in the words of one, as “out of bounds” because they are “sentient” species (a term applied to other animals, but not as frequently as to NHPs). As one lab director explained to me, using primates when other species are just as well suited would be “overkill,” and several researchers underscored that the use specifically of chimpanzees—who are “endangered”—is “criminal” or “altogether unnecessary.” Decisions are sometimes financially driven too. For example, as I am often told, NHPs are exorbitantly expensive to obtain and maintain, and many researchers regard regulatory requirements as increasingly burdensome and even oppressive. During a panel discussion at an East Coast law school on the ethics of primate research, for instance, a bioethicist pushed hard for greater oversight for primate welfare, to which a neuroscientist responded, “I understand what you’re arguing, but I am already required to submit over eighty pages detailing how I care for each individual monkey in my lab!” The exasperating pragmatics associated with the welfare of some animals may lead some lab researchers to turn to other vertebrate models, a trend I encountered in my earlier research on xenotransplantation, in which involved scientists had shifted away from chimps to baboons and, then again, to pigs. As one researcher in that domain explained to me, “you can do a lot more to a pig than a lab rat” because the former is classified as farm and not laboratory animal (Sharp 2013). This shift in species use and preference granted him greater experimental freedom and less regulatory oversight.
Just as frequently, researchers cite sentimental reasons for avoiding particular species, and here those most commonly regarded as domestic pets loom large. In several instances I have visited labs that, long ago, abandoned altogether any research with cats (once an animal of choice for visual cortex research, for example) not merely because of the backlash they anticipated should the public learn of their work, but because the majority of their own in-house staff—consisting of both researchers and animal technicians—were uncomfortable using feline lab subjects. In one lab, cats are used solely, in the words of a staff veterinarian, to “dander up the room” so that research staff can then place human subjects inside and test on them the effectiveness of a range of ocular medications. As she explained, “we keep that room going pretty much for the purposes of staff enrichment” (playing on the importance of enrichment for lab-based animals as a welfare practice), and “all sorts of people go in there just so they can frolic with the cats.”
Dogs, however, define a special category of favored species, overwhelmingly dominating the answers I have received about species preference. Indeed, dogs were mentioned so frequently that I soon learned to anticipate this as an answer from interviewees. Researchers often express an aversion for using cats—or “the other domesticated species,” as one animal technician put it—when speaking comparatively of dogs, either because they have heard cats are uncooperative and temperamental or, more often, because they fear the “backlash” of public outrage, but not because they themselves are fond of felines. A reluctance to work with canine subjects, however, stems not from experiences with pet ownership that occurred in childhood, but those that occurred later in life and, overwhelmingly, once one has established a research career. For instance, during a public talk on the ethical treatment of lab animals, a neuroscientist who works with macaques included a PowerPoint slide that featured his (unnamed) four-year-old twins on a swing set while his two dogs, who we learned were named Astro and Marmaduke, frolicked nearby. As he explained, whereas his work on the visual cortex has meant working with various species for three full decades, “I could never have dogs in my lab because I love these two mutts as much as my own children.” Yet another primate researcher who has a pet Belgian shepherd explained during an interview that he could “never work with dogs because it’s too close to home.”
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