utility. Both conditions are necessary, and neither by itself is sufficient to justify animal experimentation” (2012, S12, italics in original). These principles are key to ethical animal experimentation in the United States, where animals stand in as models or proxies for humans, and where an evolutionary hierarchy justifies substituting animals for humans to protect the latter from harm. In turn, mammalian species—be they monkeys, dogs, or rats—approximate humans in a plethora of ways (in terms of, for example, physiology, metabolism, cognition, behavior, and emotion). What makes Carbone’s assertions unusual is his unapologetic use of “suffering.”
Joel Robbins has argued recently that suffering is an overworked and tired category of analysis within anthropology, a field dominated by the study of “the [human] subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression.” This preoccupation informs a paucity of attention “on such topics as value, morality, well-being, imagination, empathy, care,” and others. Robbins argues for a shift “toward an anthropology of the good” and, more specifically, a focus on how “people organize their personal and collective lives in order to foster what they think of as good … and what it is like to live at least some of the time in light of such a project” (2013, 448, 457). My personal quibbles aside (as a medical anthropologist who has written on human suffering and taught courses on affliction for several decades), Robbins’s essay prompts several questions. To start, if we return to Carbone’s assertions, how should we approach contexts where causing pain and suffering is intentional? Or where the object of such action is not human but animal? What are we to make of high-stakes contexts where death is part of everyday life and work? If we embrace Robbins’s assertions and search for the “good,” what would define moral action? What might such an approach entail? What might it erase?
In response, I propose a compromise. Again, as Carbone explains, suffering is an inescapable aspect of laboratory experimentation; and although suffering and death do not figure in the official lexicon of laboratory research, they nevertheless assert a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997). Importantly, lab personnel remain simultaneously cognizant of animal “suffering” while striving for “the good” through quality, daily attention to animal well-being. This tension originates in the history of animal “welfare” and, in quotidian contexts, is evidenced in the “logic” of laboratory “care in practice” (Mol 2008).
Animals as Human Proxies: Origin Stories
In their study of industrialized clinical labor, sociologists Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby underscore the importance of recognizing historical conditions or “lineages” that facilitate what they reference as “the outsourcing of risk” (2014, 19). Although their target of analysis is the offshore movement of clinical trials and reproductive surrogacy, their words prove relevant to animal laboratory research. Whereas Cooper and Waldby address conditions involving the movement of medical technologies and techniques via contracted relationships between inhabitants of affluent and poorer nations, laboratories present an alternative microcosm of sorts, where established human-animal hierarchies sanction the use of experimental animals in lieu of more valued human subjects. Where animals are concerned, the “outsourcing” of labor also entails its own scale of risk.
The number of animals employed in research is frequently cited in a wide range of venues—including animal activists’ websites, scientific publications, and welfare officers’ presentations—to underscore the vastness of animal involvement. Although figures vary widely, a summary prepared by the USDA for 2015 provides a sense of scale: the total number of animals who fall specifically under its purview sits at a precise 767,622, a figure that excludes rats and mice, creatures that, I am often told, comprise around eighty percent of all lab subjects.10 An altogether different account provided by the American Humane Society approximates that “more than 25 million vertebrates … are used annually in research, testing, and education in the United States. Unfortunately, no accurate and comprehensive figures are available on how many animals are used—or for what purposes—in the United States or worldwide.”11 An effort to determine how many humans occupy laboratories also proves elusive; needless to say, they are far outnumbered by their animal charges.
Reconstructing a history of animal experimentation in the United States is a complex affair, and I claim only cursory authority in this regard, deferring to a substantial canon produced from within the fields of the history of science, bioethics, and moral philosophy (Adams and Larson 2016; Blum 1994; Lederer 1992; Ritvo 1987). It is a relatively safe claim that, at the very least from within the historical trajectory of European and, more recently, American medico-scientific traditions, as long as humans have been intrigued by the workings of the human body, animals have inevitably been subjected to investigative procedures, many of which have been painful, invasive, traumatic, life-threatening, or fatal. As Nuno Franco explains, classic ancient Greek and Roman texts provide ample evidence that well-known figures, from Aristotle (fourth century bce) to Galen of Pergamon (second and third century ce) dissected and vivisected animals. Indeed, until the Renaissance, animals often stood in as human proxies in times and contexts in which the use of human subjects or cadavers was prohibited (Franco 2013, 239). Similar claims may be made for the Renaissance, most notably in the revival of animal dissection by the anatomist Vesalius (1514–1564) and in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1625), who championed vivisection as a methodological touchstone of scientific research. During the Enlightenment, René Descartes’s (1596–1650) claims that animals were automata bolstered the arguments of others who sought to justify vivisection. Each epoch also had its critics who on a range of grounds opposed animal cruelty, including Thomas Aquinas (twelfth century), John Locke (1632–1704), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) (Franco 2013). And whereas, as Franco explains, eighteenth-century Europe was marked by “the rise of moral consideration for animals,” the nineteenth century was characterized by a paired “medical revolution and the upsurge of antivivisection societies” (2013, 245–46).
One need only consider the research activities of Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) to realize that by the mid-nineteenth century animals had begun to figure prominently as experimental subjects in such fields as bacteriology, vaccine research, and surgery. Furthermore, practices and associated ethical frameworks traveled between Europe and the United States and informed research design and associated lab practices. An illustration that appeared in an 1884 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which depicts Louis Pasteur’s animal facility, demonstrates an American fascination with animal research in Europe. Entitled “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” the image shows Pasteur standing before a row of caged rabbits and taking notes.12 The artist also included drawings of dogs and rabbits in various stages of experimental use (reproduced in Franco, 254; see figure 1).13
FIGURE 1. “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments.” Harper’s Weekly, June 1884. Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine.
As this illustration and its accompanying article, “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” demonstrate, medical research was a subject of public fascination in the United States. Noteworthy here are the efforts of the reporter who visited Pasteur’s lab to strike a balance between praising medical research while remaining cognizant of animal welfare. The article begins by explaining that Pasteur initiated this research following futile attempts to save the life of a hospitalized five-year-old child infected with rabies four years before. As the reporter explains, “the experiments, cruel as they may appear at first sight, are made in the interest of humanity, and M. Pasteur is careful not to inflict needless suffering on the dumb creatures which he subjects to the operation.” The account concludes as follows: “‘The twenty vaccinated dogs,’ says M. Pasteur, ‘will all die of madness.’ The results of these trials can hardly fail to be largely decisive of the question one way or the other, and will be an unequivocal illustration of the value of experimental pathology.”
What I find most intriguing about this illustration
