Sev Fowles, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Linda Bell, Jennifer Hirsch, Kim Hopper, and Carole Vance, and still other fellow anthropologists and animal experts elsewhere, including Nancy Chen, Stephen Foster, Linda Green, Anja Jensen, Lisa Jones-Engel, Katie Kilroy-Marac, Lene Koch, Mary Beth Mills, Lynn Morgan, Lisa Moses, Todd Nicewonger, Mette Svendsen, Janelle Taylor, and Jen Van Tiem. A host of students—too numerous to count—offered stimulating and provocative readings of much related material over recent years; I am especially thankful to my senior thesis advisees and to others enrolled in my Barnard and Columbia courses “Absent Bodies,” “Animal Matters,” “Animal Ethos,” and “The Medical Imaginary,” alongside a cohort of remarkable Fishkill students from the Bard Prison Initiative, for challenging and destabilizing many of my own assumptions. In turn, still others remind me all the time how dear their friendships are to me, especially Susie Blalock and Al Lyon, Maureen Hickey and Michael Grider, Lucy Painter and Malaga Baldi, Karin and Bill Tuttle, Heather Altfeld and Troy Jollymore, Paula Rubel and Abe Rosman, Zoë Strother and Jonathan Reynolds, The Monkeeys, Erika Doss, Inderpal Grewal, Tovah Klein, Vinita Seghal, Lisa Tiersten, Vanessa Uelman, and Maxine Weisgrau. I punctuate this account with a special set of callouts to the neighbors and strangers who rushed to my aid when I busted my collarbone; to my dear friend Karin who rescued me (and soon thereafter, alongside Mr. Bill, Ms. Zookie); and to Sev Fowles, Fabiola Lafontant, and Miranda Hansen-Hunt, alongside a wonderful orthopedist and a skilled pair of PT experts who together relieved, sustained, and bolstered me as I healed.
At UC Press, I am deeply thankful to Naomi Schneider, a wonderful editor who sets the gold standard for the field; to her assistant, Benjy Malings, who has consistently kept this project on track; to my production editor, Nicholle Robertson; and to Sarah Hudgens, a talented copy editor who strikes the perfect balance between revision and refinement. I also thank Carrie Friese and two anonymous readers who provided invaluable comments on an early draft. Any errors or missteps detected here are my own.
To return once again to the book’s core, as the ensuing chapters reveal, sacrifice, death, and loss are potent sites of moral thought and action, whether one works with or advocates for the rights of lab animals. Related themes reverberate in my own life, and as I sought to complete this work, I lost three people very dear to me. As I drafted this work, my wonderful younger brother, Erik, died suddenly and without warning; the sole blessing amid this terrible tragedy was that I was nearby when it happened. I dedicate this book to him as a tiny acknowledgment of how his love, quixotic sense of humor, and fortitude continue to inspire me each and every day. I am so very blessed to have been part of his extraordinary life. Elizabeth Colson, yet another truly remarkable person, passed too. Upon my arrival in 1983 at the University of California, Berkeley, as a fledgling graduate student, I asked to work with her; during our first encounter she made it very clear she would guide me for only one year because she was intent on retiring. Colson, nevertheless, broke her pledge, tracking my progress and offering bold, unsolicited comments on nearly every bit of scholarship I have produced, thus mentoring me for more than three decades. She died in Zambia in 2016, sitting on her veranda and listening to birdsong, just shy of her hundredth birthday. She, too, defines a significant presence here, most especially as a trustworthy moral compass of ethnographic engagement. A third blow came when a dear, dear mentor, colleague, friend, and surrogate kinswoman, Paula Rubel, died unexpectedly in May 2018. As all who know her can attest, she was a formidable presence at Barnard, Columbia, and beyond. Paula has shaped my professional and personal life profoundly for the last twenty-four years, and without her prodding, guidance, and unwavering support I would not be where I am today. Her warmth, determination, and brilliance have always been, and will remain, reminders of all I would ever hope to be.
Finally, at the beginning and end of every day, I am moved by the love of two lively characters in my life. First and most of all, my son, Alex, who has grown into a strong and remarkable man and whose skills, insights, and empathy inspire both delight and awe within me. And then, trotting alongside us or ricocheting back and forth along the mountain hiking path, is Ms. Zookie, a tenacious and beloved companion who inevitably insists on following her own moral code.
Introduction
Moral Entanglements in Experimental Animal Science
“Why look at animals?” The critic, painter, and poet John Berger, widely celebrated for his attentiveness to seeing as a way of knowing, famously posed this question while pondering captive zoo and other creatures. Animals “are both like and unlike” humans, wrote Berger, and our encounters with them entail an exchanged gaze. Whereas the animal “does not reserve a special look for man … man becomes aware of himself returning the look” (1990, 13, 25). Across this “abyss of non-comprehension … [the animal’s] common language, its silence, guarantees its distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man” and “because of this distinctness … an animal’s life, never to be confused with a man’s, can be seen to run parallel to his. Only in death do the two parallel lines converge and after death, perhaps cross over to become parallel again” (14–15).
Experimental laboratory science necessitates specialized, interspecies encounters marked simultaneously by distance and intimacy, difference and similarity, and by distinct confrontations between humans and animals during those moments when animals die for science. As experimental subjects, lab animals occupy “parallel” lives in Berger’s sense; the intimacy of human-animal encounters in labs fosters troubling entanglements too. The premise that lab animals are simultaneously “like and unlike” us justifies their experimental use, yet the intimacy of quotidian lab encounters troubles the human ability to maintain boundaries of interspecies distance and distinctness. This premise springs from animals’ roles as research subjects: as proxies, animals endure procedures deemed too painful or dangerous for human subjects and, as such, animals are distinct from us. These same conditions elide human and animal bodies, the animal “model” approximating the human body and its associated physiological processes. Laboratory death further disrupts efforts to guard interspecies distinctness: many experiments conclude with the “sacrifice” or killing of the animal, a foregone conclusion that may stimulate moral thought and action among the humans who labor with and alongside lab-bound creatures.
Animal Ethos is an anthropological investigation of the moral complexities of and associated responses to interspecies cohabitation in experimental medico-scientific research. As such, it is neither a study of animals per se nor a critique of lab animal care. Instead, like Berger, I employ human-animal encounters analytically, arguing that through animals one may access the workings of an otherwise obscured scientific morality. In other words, what do lab personnel “see” when they “look at animals” under their care, and how do these ways of seeing translate to moral ways of knowing and reimagining interspecies work? Of key concern to this ethnographic project are the informal and private understandings of the moral use of animals as research subjects among a range of lab personnel—including lab directors (known as principal investigators or PIs), their students and research staff, animal care technicians, and lab veterinarians. The counterpoint voiced by animal rights activists also informs this work.
Much has been written on codified, bioethical frameworks that shape laboratory practices. In an attempt to offset the paucity of other perspectives, Animal Ethos addresses the equally rich, yet poorly understood, realm of “ordinary” or “everyday” ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010) in science, where serendipitous, creative, unorthodox, and self-reflexive thought and action evidence efforts to transform laboratories into moral scientific worlds. Of special concern to me are moments of ambivalence, where relatively clear-cut, standardized frameworks fail to answer deeper and more personal moral questions. I argue that ambivalence may stimulate introspection, shift perceptions of animals, and inspire lab personnel to reconfigure their behavior and that of their coworkers, too. These moral shifts are evident in their personal stories about, and their comportment and behavior with, research animals. In light of this, throughout this work I ask: What does the ethnographic tracking of quotidian—and, often, mundane—human action and thought tell us about how lab personnel remake their moral worlds? How might such an approach uncover hidden aspects of human-animal
