Ingold’s own work exemplifies the intricacies of human-animal existence among Lapland reindeer herders (1980). A logic of interspecies intimacy will likewise be familiar to readers with pets or non-human companions, or to those who labor alongside working animals. Such relationships are not so much “encounters” as intimately entwined, morally inflected, and even troubled ways of being in the world (Haraway 2008).
Laboratory animals entail special problems, though, and a rendition of Ingold’s question What is a laboratory animal? provokes us in other ways. The literature that strives to answer such a question is replete with certain assertions and assumptions. Barbara Noske, an animal activist-anthropologist, describes the “object status” (1997, viii) of animals in commercialized contexts, asserting that lab animals are commodified creatures who occupy the outer edge of a continuum she dubs the “animal industrial complex,” a domain likewise inhabited by other creatures exploited by corporatized food production.8 As Noske reflects on these contexts, she offers an insight relevant to my own project, namely, that “unlike the animal food industry, which to a certain extent remains accessible to the general public, animal research tends to take place almost completely hidden from the public eye … behind closed doors and thick walls” (1997, 35).9 As we shall see, the hidden nature of animal labs bears with it repercussions not only for public perceptions, but also for its ability to inspire moral introspection among the humans who work there.
Although Noske writes as a defender of animal rights, her text helps us realize that lab animals can be so transformed that they no longer seem to be animals at all. This notion is captured elegantly by the concept of “biocapital” as first espoused by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (2003) and subsequently adopted by others (see Cooper 2008; Rose 2001; Sunder Rajan 2006; and Helmreich 2008 on the term’s history). Whereas these authors are most interested in molecular forms of life via artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs) and genomic science, similar arguments prove relevant to industrially farmed creatures and still others employed in laboratory research. As Nicole Shukin explains, such animals, as biocapital, evidence the “rendering” of life through associated scientific processes, be it, say, a Fordist-style assembly line at a slaughterhouse (2009) or methods of breeding, handling, and labeling experimental creatures. Within this framework, lab animals are transformed into sources of or, more literally, become (bio)capital.
To grasp this notion, one need only consider the print and online catalogues that inventory the availability of a wide assortment of species that have undergone extensive genetic refinement over many generations. Such efforts are designed to generate reliable, mass-produced, and marketable creatures who are tailor-made for use in, say, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, or toxicology studies and whose sizes and temperaments may be fine-tuned so that they adapt relatively easily to laboratory conditions. Under these circumstances, one might indeed wonder whether we are speaking of “animals” at all. Within lab parlance certain creatures are regularly described in non-animal terms (as numbered occupants of a cage, data points, or lab subjects). Such practices are an important focus of analysis throughout this book; as we shall see, however, this does not necessarily demonstrate their blanket objectification.
It is here that Donna Haraway’s interventions are crucial. Although Haraway has long concerned herself with themes associated with biocapital, she has always simultaneously foregrounded intimacy as an inevitable, inescapable, and equally important consequence of human-animal encounters in science (2003, 2008, 2012, 1989, 1997). Haraway is known for her playful analyses of interspeciality, an approach that, as noted above, has inspired a plethora of projects that challenge the presumed impermeability of species boundaries and human preeminence. Yet such studies sadly overlook Haraway’s assertion that interspecies encounters are all too often life-and-death matters that may well entail the suffering of both the animal and the human caretaker (2008). STS scholarship has similarly breathed life, so to speak, into laboratory domains, where sustained ethnographic engagement in the quotidian corners of science demonstrates how the lab itself is a richly complex world where a range of life forms toil together in the name of furthering scientific knowledge. And like Haraway, the authors of these works are well aware that scientific engagement frequently involves the “sacrificing” of animals for science (see, for instance, Arluke 1991; Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Lynch 1988). Given this often inescapable premise, I admit that after focusing on animal lab research for the last decade or so, I bristle at playful celebrations of “multispecies” encounters (see Kirksy 2014). My concern is that their ludic tenor habitually obscures the deeper (or darker) dimensions of human-animal relations. Research laboratories are high-stakes domains because of the often precarious nature of experimental involvement for non-human creatures.
I am, nevertheless, intrigued by the possibilities engendered by interspecies intimacy (Sharp 2006a, 2011a, 2011c), a concern of long-standing interest in anthropology, as exhibited by now-classic texts (Douglas 1966, 1970; Evans-Prichard 1940; Leach 1964) and subsequently revived in studies of science (Franklin 2003, 2007; Haraway 2003, 1989; Helmreich 2009; Pálsson 2014; Papagaroufali 1996; Strathern 1985; Taussig 2004). Interests I share with these authors include how attention to animals can manifest moral insights and how such insights may well lie beyond an established anthropological fascination with kindredness. Whereas my previous research with bioengineers revealed a propensity to entangle human and calf genealogies in accounts of the discipline’s history (Sharp 2013), such sensibilities did not emerge as a dominant framework for relating to other experimental creatures in other kinds of laboratories. Animals of all sorts nevertheless elicit affective responses among the humans who employ them in experiments. As much of this book demonstrates, the toll that animal suffering takes on both lab animals and human personnel figures prominently in shaping moral thought and action. Efforts to locate sentiment, however, define a significant challenge because suffering and death are widely understood as taboo subjects of discourse.
These sorts of interventions are crucial to Animal Ethos. Unlike Noske, my goal is not to expose or document how science denigrates nature. Instead, I am most interested in how humans who work in labs question, wrestle with, and challenge a range of scientific assumptions and practices in ways that reshape established rubrics of welfare and care. As noted above, an especially troublesome reality concerns animal death as part-and-parcel of research protocols, a tenet of animal welfare, and a key concern in efforts to provide quality care. As I frame this analytically, I draw on the sociology and history of science (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Lederer 1992; Lynch 1988; Ritvo 1987), lab-based ethnographies (Friese and Clarke 2012; Svendsen 2015; Svendsen and Koch 2014), and the works of moral philosophers and bioethicists concerned with lab animal well-being (Donnelley 1989, 1992; Gruen 2013, 2015; Regan 1986). Together, these authors assist in deciphering experimental laboratories as moral domains.
Welfare, Suffering, and Care
As should be clear by now, my purpose is neither to demean nor judge the experimental use of animals. Instead, associated moral claims help answer the question inspired by Ingold, namely, What is a laboratory animal? My research has taught me that lab animals are never solely reified creatures. Instead, they are many things at once: precious commodities; specialized research subjects; skilled working animals; sources of valuable data; and favorite, individual, and named beings. In Mol’s sense, a lab creature is an animal “multiple” (2002). This sensibility emerges as one moves within and across lab labor hierarchies, which include senior research scientists, an array of students and trainees, lab-based veterinarians, and animal technicians or caretakers, each of whom morally (re)configure animals in distinctive ways.
In his essay “The Utility of Basic Animal Research,” former zoo and current lab veterinarian Larry Carbone offers us a quasi-regulatory approach to this conundrum by asking what moral standards must exist to justify “the infliction of animal suffering” in experimental contexts. Carbone—known for his work on the entwined moral and regulatory dimensions of pain in animal science (2004, 2011)—explains that the paired principles of “speciesism” and “utility” must be demonstrated if animal research is to be “morally justified.” As he explains, “(some) animals must be sufficiently different from humans in morally relevant
