instead, they are “culled,” “sacrificed,” “euthanized,” or “terminated.” These terms can be context specific: one “culls” a “batch” of newborns, “sacrifices” or “euthanizes” a research subject, and “terminates” an undervalued animal. One’s station within a lab’s labor hierarchy might also direct word choice: in the course of my project, researchers generally preferred “sacrifice,” whereas animal technicians and veterinarians more typically spoke of “euthanizing” animals. Finally, the values assigned to particular animals or species affects one’s phrasing: one might speak of “terminating” many mice, but one would never apply this term to a favorite research macaque. This “quotidian oscillation” of specialized language reflects otherwise hidden moral understandings. As Das reminds us, too, taboos associated with various terms expose the “unethical,” where sanctioned and unsanctioned speech, when taken together, enable the anthropologist to access morality “with the help of a vocabulary of rules and infringement” (Das 2012, 134, italics added).
Fieldwork entails mastering key terms and associated vocabulary, and I soon found that speech registers varied as I moved within and across labor hierarchies. In response, I regularly asked interviewees to describe how and when they used various terms for animals, procedures, and other aspects of their daily work. Death talk aside, a term that proved particularly thorny was “experiment(al).” As I describe later in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, animal activism looms large as a serious social threat to lab researchers, and lab personnel are cognizant of and resistant to the visual and rhetorical tropes employed by activists to sway public opinion. Like “kill,” “experimental” exemplifies a moral flashpoint of discourse because of its association with vivisection (a term that connotes the heartless employment of live animals in science).7 Lab personnel are passionate about their work, and animal technicians (also known as “animal care technicians,” “caretakers,” or, far less frequently, “caregivers”) are especially outspoken in this regard. Some animal caretakers I interviewed loathed the term “experimental” and urged me to speak instead of “research” animals to foreground human-animal partnerships. Research scientists, however, regarded “experimental” as a neutral term that describes the essence of their daily activities and highlights the workings of a rigorous, scientific method.
Such terms might well be thought of as “deadly words” (Favret-Saada 1980) because when enacted in speech, they signal troubled moral domains. Throughout the course of writing this book, I have faced my own moral struggles over how best to describe what I witnessed. Word choice matters in a domain as politically charged and volatile as animal research. Within this book, the terms used are context specific in order to reflect the sentiments of the speaker. There are a few exceptions, however. First, animal death emerged as a pervasive theme in how lab personnel frame their activities in moral terms, and so I have chosen not to shy away from death talk. Second, in an effort to find some middle ground, I interchange “research” and “experimental,” with the understanding that I employ the latter term not as an accusation (akin to the activist’s stance) but in deference to the descriptive, or more neutral, connotations that researchers associate with this word.
Finally, labor hierarchies inform rhetorical practices because laboratory research entails both scientific methods and emotional or affective labor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Hochschild 1983; Livingston 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Pols 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Wendland 2010). Although activists assume that scientific studies are predicated on the objectification of animals, my lab-based research taught me early on to be attentive to the affective dimensions of human-animal encounters. Lab researchers, regardless of station, think of many sorts of animals in individual terms. As I discuss at length in subsequent chapters, naming practices abound. A more rudimentary practice involves the use of pronouns. I rarely heard lab personnel describe an animal as an “it”; instead, gendered pronouns were the norm, even where large populations of what I reference as “generic” creatures were concerned (such as sprawling colonies of mice). I adopt this same practice throughout this book, referring to individual animals as “he” or “she.”
Finally, it is important to note that lab research is hard work, not merely because of the repetitive quality of many experiments or the long hours that animal feeding and cage cleaning entail, but because such activities so often require sustained, intimate contact across the species divide. Furthermore, labs are sites where care, and not merely welfare, is central to one’s daily work. A widespread understanding is that no one survives very long in a laboratory if he or she finds no joy in working with animals. Additionally, lab work can be a lonely experience because of the social stigma associated with animal experiments, and thus work dedication is crucial. These principles were taken seriously by staff and guided their quotidian practices in all of the labs where I was fortunate to conduct my own research.
THE BOUNDARIES OF INTERSPECIES ENCOUNTERS
Three broad categories—animals, morality, and affect—are of special analytical significance throughout this work; here I detail an associated overarching framework. In this section I first consider the question, What is a laboratory animal? I then show that this query is informed by historical processes pertaining to the use of animals as experimental proxies and associated lab animal welfare legislation. Although my project is firmly rooted in the United States, I briefly address relevant activities in the United Kingdom when they inform developments in the States. Finally, I consider the analytical significance of “suffering” with specific reference to regulatory concerns for animal “welfare” and consider how this concept is translated into practices of “care” through quotidian laboratory labor.
Testing Human-Animal Boundaries
In his edited volume What Is an Animal? anthropologist Tim Ingold urges readers to question the “capacities” we assign to our own species (such as tool making, symbolic and abstract thought, purposive action, or self-consciousness) in our efforts to assert our own “pre-eminence” in the world. As Ingold explains, “though humans differ but little from other animal species, no more than the latter differ from one another, that difference has mighty consequences for the world we inhabit, since it is a world that, to an ever greater extent, we have made for ourselves, and that confronts us as the artificial product of human activity” (1988, 97). Although his intended audience consists of ethnographers and archaeologists who study the socially enmeshed lives of, say, pastoralists or hunters with a range of animal species, Ingold’s provocations prove relevant to captive animals housed in research laboratories. This is because human “pre-eminence” is a foundational principle of lab research, where experimental animals are used specifically to avoid causing undue harm to (more highly valued) human subjects. In lab parlance, animals stand in as necessary “models” or proxies for humans and, unlike humans, animals’ lives are expendable. Yet Ingold is helpful for other reasons. As an iconoclast, he is intrigued by borders and boundaries, which, to borrow from Evelyn Fox Keller, clearly “constitute irresistible lures” (1995, ix). That is, Ingold is drawn to human-animal distinctions not for their precision, but for their precariousness. These sorts of circumstances, I assert, are what allow lab animals to enable moral projects.
Whereas the rules that govern notions of human-animal difference may be regarded within their respective social contexts as reflecting cultural “truths,” they also flag ambiguities, uncertainties, and anxieties. As anthropologists have long known (Bateson 1972; Douglas 1966, 1970; Evans-Prichard 1940; Leach 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963, 1969), interspecies boundaries are especially ripe in this regard because their integrity hinges on the ability to assert and maintain criteria that may well enable human “pre-eminence.” Ingold’s assertions are informed by long-established ethnographic projects, in which it is not unusual to encounter the blurring of interspecies boundaries, a sensibility widely documented, for instance, in pastoral societies. One discerns this in an assortment of disciplinary classics: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, for example, coined “the bovine idiom” to underscore how deeply enmeshed human lives were with cattle among the Nuer of southern Sudan (1940); June Nash has described in moving terms the affective dimensions of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking miners’
