Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science 9780520971059

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Animal Ethos

Animal Ethos The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science

lesley a. sharp

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sharp, Lesley Alexandra, author. Title: Animal ethos : the morality of human-animal encounters in experimental lab science / Lesley A. Sharp. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2018014111 (print) | lccn 2018015470 (ebook) | isbn 9780520971059 (ebook) | isbn 9780520299245 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520299252 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Laboratory animals—Moral and ethical aspects. | Human-animal relationships—Moral and ethical aspects. | Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: lcc ql55 (ebook) | lcc ql55 .s532 2019 (print) | ddc 174.2/8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014111 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of my wonderful brother Erik Rodman Sharp, E# — A Great Tree of a Man — December 5, 1958–February 6, 2016 Checkmate

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Moral Entanglements in Experimental Animal Science

1

Accessing Animal Science Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters The Parameters of Ethnographic Engagement

part i: intimacy 1. The Sentimental Structure of Laboratory Life

33 35

Animal Welfare and Species Preference Modeling Human-Animal Intimacy The Intimacy of Laboratory Encounters Affective Politics Conclusion: Sentimental Values 2. Why Do Monkeys Watch TV? A Monkey’s History of Visual Media Primetime for Primates Macaque Care in Practice: Welfare as Domestication Coda

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part ii: sacrifice: an interlude 3. The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals

105 107

Animal Erasures Beyond the Trope of Sacrifice Managed Suffering and Humane Care Reimagining Moral Frameworks of Care Conclusion: The Limitations of Humane Death

part iii: exceptionalism 4. Science and Salvation

155 157

The Politics of Animal Suffering Specialized Practices of Animal Welfare Eclectic Forms of Animal Exceptionalism Conclusion: Totemic Creatures 5. The Animal Commons

195

The Ethos of Sharing Uncommon Creatures The Animal Commons Conclusion: Other Animals’ Fates Conclusion: The Other Animal

224

Notes

243

References

265

Index

287

Illustrations

1. “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1884

22

2. Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Battersea Park, London

25

3. “Scene at a dog dealer’s compound, 1966,” photograph by Stan Wayman for Life

44

4. “Angered by the disappearance of their family pets in Clarke County, Va., Mrs. William Mitchell and her neighbors put up signs to discourage thieves,” photograph by Stan Wayman for Life

44

5. Edinburgh Zoo chimpanzees responding to “Apes as Family,” part of Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema series

103

6. “Who would you RAT/HER see live?” billboard produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research

110

7. “Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer,” poster produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research

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8. “Help the Horse to Save the Soldier,” World War I Blue Cross poster illustrated by Fortunino Matania

117

9. Animals in War Memorial, Hyde Park, London, by artist David Backhouse

118

10. Laika, the Soviet space dog, mural of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Moscow

118

11. Monument to Laboratory Rats and Mice, Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russia, by sculptor Andrew Kharkevich

119

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12. “We Take Care of Our Animals . . .,” advertisement produced by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science Foundation

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13. “This Won’t Hurt a Bit . . .,” billboard produced by Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania

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14. Laboratory animal memorial mural at an East Coast medical school by artist Frank Giorgini

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15. “May We Never Forget . . .,” commemorative card for a memorial to a colony of research macaques lost during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001

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16. The terrier Callie in an MRI scanner

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17. Volunteer with her dog, Kady, after completing a scan session

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18. Mouse Grimace Scale poster for assessing pain, produced by the U.K.-based National Center for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research

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19. Crossing Over, sculpture of three mice in a boat, by sculptor Steve Worthington

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20. Natty sculpture on a lab window ledge, by sculptor Steve Worthington

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21. Sprightly sculpture on a ledge near a staircase, by sculptor Steve Worthington

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Acknowledgments

The first expedition that initiated this research project began with an unanticipated foray during a delightful summer residence in 2010 at the University of Cambridge. For this I have philosopher Michael Banner to blame. At the time, I was making steady progress on a previous work, The Transplant Imaginary, a project concerned with the embodied consequences of non-human forms of organ replacement from the stance of associated inventors, immunologists, and others whose attentiveness to animals surprised me. During this residency, Michael and I collaborated on a smallscale ethnographic project on moral thinking in animal science, which began with the joint supervision of a student assistant. My curiosity was sparked, and I found firsthand engagement irresistible. The ensuing journey has been extraordinary, and I owe it all to Michael for handing me that first ticket, opening the train door, and nudging me off the platform and straight on board. Research on the moral underpinnings of animal science is not a project for the faint of heart. As I demonstrate throughout Animal Ethos, the determination to advance scientific knowledge and practices that could alleviate future suffering in both human and animal patients is laden with moral challenges. My indebtedness to those who have helped me understand this runs deep. Throughout this research I encountered a host of remarkable people, whose generosity of time, patience with anthropological probing, and openness as interviewees have left deep impressions. The rigorous requirements of anthropology’s code of ethics, undergirded by confidentiality, prevent me from identifying individuals and institutions by name. I nevertheless wish to thank the many lab researchers, animal care technicians, veterinarians, animal activists, and bioethicists who participated in this research initially in England and, subsequently, the United xi

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States. Their willingness to engage in sometimes difficult conversations; allow me to shadow them in their labs; and invite me to attend closed training sessions, professional workshops, and specialized conferences have proved invaluable to me. In retrospect, I realize how fortunate I was to conduct ethnographic research in academic labs that adhere to high standards of animal welfare, where humane care and associated innovative enrichment strategies were considered essential aspects of daily lab regimens. This enabled me—and, I believe, research participants too—to partake in complex discussions of, say, the meaning and challenges of quality care rather than lapses in or disregard for animal life. The polarization of animal research and activism nevertheless loomed large as a significant— and important—challenge throughout this project. In this light, I am grateful to every individual—including the institutional gatekeepers—who trusted my assertions of moral neutrality as a professional anthropologist and who let me in the door, introduced me to relevant parties, and granted me permission to duplicate the images that pepper the pages of this book. This book would not have been possible without ongoing financial and associated forms of support. I am forever grateful to my friends, colleagues, and administrators at Barnard College and Columbia University for their wide range of contributions. Funding through several faculty minigrants, alongside annual support associated with an Ann Whitney Olin Chair and, more recently, the Barbara Chamberlain and Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professorship in Anthropology, have done much to sustain this project from its initial phase to its completion. I would not be writing these words now were it not for the generosity of a year-long residency in 2015–2016 as the Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. I am in awe of Judy Vichniac and her staff’s extraordinary gifts in assembling, year after year, a diverse, interdisciplinary array of scholars while fostering community too. (My mother, an alumna, would be thrilled to know Radcliffe lives on in such a vital form.) I am especially grateful to Tina Duhaime, Robert Huber, Raj Pandit, Michael Pollan, Steve Takasugi, and Reiko Yamada, whose work with—or thinking through— animals (and, sometimes, in science) inspired me think more carefully and deeply about my own. I thank, too, Karole Armitage, Maryanne Kowaleski, Mitchell Luskin, Scott Milner, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Athina Tsangari, Sharon Weinberger, and especially Shane Bobrycki, Brenda Chalfin, and Alice Lyons for being sounding boards or just plain good company. I will never forget the kindness of Joyce and Ty Bell, who came to my aid when I was in need. Ashton Macfarlane proved to be a truly gifted Research Partner throughout my Radcliffe fellowship; he has left his mark everywhere in this book.

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Throughout the year, the warm invitations I received from Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Erica James, and Michael Fisher to participate in their very lively joint Harvard-MIT Friday seminar in medical anthropology offered a steady supply of inspiration and a strong sense of community. Additional support the following year, in the form of an intensive Exploratory Seminar called “Beyond the Trope of Sacrifice” through Radcliffe’s Academic Ventures initiative, served as a lovely reminder of how precious time at Radcliffe can be. I do hope those who joined this event found that our two days together inspired their work as much as theirs has inspired mine. On assorted home fronts, many others have sustained and nourished me. I am fortunate to have wonderful colleagues and friends in my life, whose insights, friendly nudges, and general support have sparked both my tinkering with and my overhauling of ideas. Very special thanks are due to those at Barnard and Columbia, including Paige West, 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,

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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 1

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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 humananimal 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 relations in science? The ethics of care—manifest in human thought and action—is a daily preoccupation in experimental lab science. Within a bioethical framework of “animal welfare,” lab personnel must adhere to strict rules of conduct that mandate the humane treatment of animals. All lab personnel I encountered during this project were well versed in and carefully followed regulated, species-specific principles of animal lab use. Animal Ethos, though, is not a study

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of research compliance. Rather, I am most intrigued by the contrast between regulated ethical behavior and the informal, serendipitous, and creative strategies that involved humans employ to bring lab animals into personalized, and humanized, moral spheres. To paraphrase Eduardo Kohn, of what significance are animals in shaping a moral life in science (2014, 460)? As I demonstrate throughout this book, all sorts of lab personnel engage in practices that reveal elaborate sentimental associations between humans and animals. Such practices transform animals from expendable research subjects or “data points” or “things” into prized and, sometimes, beloved creatures. Scientific discipline, the reframing of “matters of care” within a lab’s labor hierarchy (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011), and species preference all figure in this “remaking” (Lowe 2004) of animals for science. Whereas the field of bioethics might lack the tools to identify, uncover, and analyze associated unorthodox practices, quotidian morality defines a longstanding interest within anthropology. Thus, I seek in part to broaden the scope of bioethics—alongside interspecies concerns within science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology—by incorporating new understandings of the morality of care in animal experimentation. How, then, to transpose ongoing anthropological concern about ethical thinking within human moral spheres onto those whose very existence hinges on everyday encounters with other species? A finding that unifies this work is that the affective power of animals— especially mammals—figures prominently in the reshaping of moral worlds in experimental science. Within this framework, ethics of care, interspecies intimacy, and empathy are significant anchors. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (although writing of how to redirect theory, and not of laboratory worlds) offers important insights on the significance of “care” as an analytical category. As she explains, attentiveness to “care” enlivens considerations of what might be possible, how things could be, and how one might make a difference. As I elaborate throughout this work, how humans engage in their work with animals “involves not only detecting what is there, what is given in the thing [or, in this instance, the animal] . . ., but also [thinking about] what is not included in it and about what this thing [or creature] could become” (2011, 96). For Puig de la Bellacasa, “care” signifies “an affective stage, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (9). In lab contexts, any, some, or all of these modes of response are possible. To such assertions, I nevertheless add this caveat: when set within an experiential framework, care is also—and always—a moral enterprise (see Kleinman 2006, 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Tronto 2009). If, then, we embrace Puig de la Bellacasa’s assertion that attentiveness to “care” and “caring” bears possibilities of “re-affecting objectified worlds”

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(97), the character and quirkiness of human-animal cohabitation in labs necessitate that the anthropologist be cognizant of the practices, ideas, and innovations that inform—or demonstrate—the vastly varied ways that “care” and “caring” are imagined in science. The polyvalent and elusive qualities of these terms figure in my efforts to detect moral thought and action. Intimate encounters with animals foster a host of responses: empathy, for instance, might just as easily redirect research design (Berns 2017; Berns, Brooks, and Spivak 2012) as one’s professional trajectory (Gluck 2016). Still other prominent possibilities fall beneath the aegis of welfare, manifested in enrichment practices where one strives to think like a monkey or a fish, sometimes, but not always, engendering a sense of transpecies kindredness (Franklin 2007; Haraway 2008). In other instances, the “reaffecting” of animals reconfirms the self as a moral being, defining notions of self-worth (see, for instance, Buckmaster 2015a) or demonstrating pride in one’s mastery of specialized skills, even in contexts that necessitate killing (Friese and Clarke 2012). With these complex configurations in mind, Animal Ethos is organized around three analytical themes: human-animal intimacy, the dominant trope of “sacrifice” (the most commonly employed term for euthanizing animals), and serendipitous practices that uncover forms of animal preference and exceptionalism. One goal of this three-pronged approach is to avoid the polemics of asserting what is right or wrong, just or criminal, or kind or cruel, as typifies works that set activists’ condemnations of animal use against scientific assertions that animal experimentation spares and saves human lives. On such fronts I strive to remain neutral (and readers who seek guidance on how best to behave, respond, act, or think will be sorely disappointed). My stance springs in large part from the ethics of ethnographic engagement, informed by an understanding that suspending one’s judgment generates richer data and fosters deeper understanding. Throughout this work I found myself wrestling with an overarching question best phrased as follows: How do scientists think in moral terms about their work with animals when they go home at the end of the day? (Or, as activists might phrase it, How do they live with themselves, knowing what they do?) As such, my purpose is neither to justify nor to condemn animal experimentation. Instead, I focus on unscripted, personal, and often private understandings across a range of professional fields (from researcher and student, to animal technician and veterinarian, to activist) as a means to uncover and decipher the complex logic that informs, shapes, and transforms intimate, interspecies encounters. As I demonstrate throughout this work, these sorts of moral entanglements have complex histories. In preparation for what follows in subsequent

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chapters, this introductory chapter covers a wide swath of terrain, and so I pause here to provide readers with a rudimentary roadmap. This chapter comprises four overarching sections. First, in “Accessing Animal Science,” I offer a brief history of the project and the premises that inform it. In the second section, “Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice,” I consider anthropology’s longstanding interest in morality as informing my own efforts to study quotidian thought, word, and practice in experimental science. Third, in “The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters,” I situate my work on human-animal encounters in science within the broader field of animal studies (Waldau 2013); I then turn to the paired themes of animal care and welfare, which, I argue, are informed by the entwined histories of scientific research and animal activism. The final section, “The Parameters of Ethnographic Engagement,” includes an overview of the methodological approaches from which data were derived and concludes with a chapter-bychapter summary of the book’s organization and scope.

accessing animal science Animal Ethos marks my most recent ethnographic engagement with moral realms of science. Initiated formally in 2010, Animal Ethos builds on two previous projects: the first, Strange Harvest (Sharp 2006b), spanned thirteen years of research (1991–2004) and addressed the sociomoral consequences of cadaveric organ transplantation (or the human-to-human transfer of viable organs, technically known as allotransplantation) in the United States. The second—based within five anglophone countries1—involved a decade (2003–2013) of comparative research in two competing realms of highly experimental transplant science, xenotransplant (henceforth, xeno) science and bioengineering. Practitioners within each are intent on alleviating the chronic shortage of human organs and associated human suffering, and imagined solutions include deriving parts from animals for human use or fabricating “artificial” or mechanical devices (most notably for the heart) in ways that might one day augment or fully replace the need for parts of human origin (Sharp 2007). As an ethnographer, I am fascinated by how quotidian processes within domains of science evidence moral thought and action. For instance, midway through the first project I was struck by the preponderance of widespread, contradictory, and often unspoken moral premises that pervade transplant medicine, in which organs extracted from the dead are valued for their capacity to rejuvenate sick and dying patients struggling with organ failure. Transplanted organs—though widely regarded by involved parties

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as precious goods—are never openly commodified but, instead, are reconstituted through rhetorical refashioning as gifts that require no reciprocation. Whereas these transfers of much-needed body parts entail loss, intense grief, sorrow, and suffering, such sentiments—and talk of them—are obscured, silenced, and denied relevance by a host of involved parties who celebrate such body transfers as forms of rebirth. I initially conceived the second project as an investigation of how xeno experts and bioengineers imagined the remaking of the human form. As I soon learned, specialists in each field had relatively little experience with human patients, which informed their respective imaginaries. I learned, too, that the day-to-day lives of experts in both fields were heavily populated with research animals. Animals figured prominently not only in research design, purpose, and outcome, but in how xeno scientists and bioengineers framed their work in distinctive historical, social, and promissory terms. Here, species mattered. Within xeno science, for example, simian and, more recently, porcine subjects proliferate, and the values assigned to each category of animal hinge on a species’ perceived proximity to us as appropriate human models or proxies. Bioengineers, on the other hand, have long relied on ruminants (especially ewes and male calves). The presence of these animals in laboratories shapes an altogether different moral trajectory.2 Baby bulls dominate engineers’ accounts of their profession’s history, how they imagine the field’s promissory future, and their own personal life narratives too. In essence, prized calves map out a temporalized progression of a profession’s mandate to eliminate human suffering and death. Together, these two previous projects define the substrata upon which Animal Ethos rests.

Boundary Work This arc of anthropological engagement with clinical medicine and science has taught me to be alert to boundaries because it is at such sites that professional and personal dilemmas are likely to surface and, thus, where moral imaginaries proliferate (Beidelman 1993; DelVecchio Good 2007; Tronto 2009). Of longstanding interest to me are the border zones that demarcate the living from the dead, where sanctioned thoughts, words, and deeds contradict others that are (often deliberately) obscured, silenced, or rendered taboo, and, most recently, exist in research domains marked by an entanglement of humans with animals. Whereas my first project was anchored by transplanted organs and my second was framed by inventive non-human alternatives, Animal Ethos is moored to the moral possibilities engendered by the human-animal divide that typifies experimental laboratory space. Three boundaries specifically frame this current project, as reflected in the

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book’s three main parts: interspecies difference and intimacy, care and death (or “sacrifice”), and animal generics and exceptionalism. In light of these foci, several premises inform this study. First, if—as Joan Tronto (2009) asserts—boundaries are sites where moral dilemmas proliferate, then one must also be alert to obscured aspects of everyday life. I maintain that ethnographic engagement, in which associated methodologies are designed to uncover the deeper structures of quotidian life, is especially effective in such contexts. An investigation of scientific morality presents special challenges because, as noted above, experimental lab science (not unlike organ transplantation and still other realms of clinical medicine) lays claim to a specialized lexicon that can effectively erase competing sources of knowledge. For example, whereas emotional attachment may be an inevitable outcome of human-animal encounters in research, one learns early in one’s career that affective responses are discouraged and, even, taboo. Death presents still other quandaries: although research animals die or are killed at the end of many experiments, death talk is strangely absent from laboratory contexts. In turn, whereas research procedures may be physically or emotionally painful for animals, these realities inevitably fall under the rubric of animal welfare but not suffering. These examples do not simply define unquestioned regimes of practice; as I demonstrate throughout this work, they also expose moral quandaries and spark moral action. In light of this, I follow the lead of Monica Casper and Lisa Moore: Animal Ethos strives to be an ethnography “of that which is not always observable” (2009, 10), and of the entangled themes of absence and presence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010) that pervade lab personnel’s efforts to wrestle privately with moral principles, thought, and sentiment. A second premise concerns a disciplinary boundary, involving an important distinction I make elsewhere (see Sharp 2013, 3–9, 15–19) between (bio) ethics and morality. As I am often told by lab-based researchers, codified, bioethical principles determine what can or should be done (or not done) in animal science; in contrast, “morality” does not belong within the scientific lexicon but instead is regarded as the purview of philosophy and religion. As a result, morality defines an elusive category of analysis. As I demonstrate, moral thought and action—manifested as personal, private, informal, and serendipitous—nevertheless proliferate in science. Whereas much has been written on the ethics of animal welfare, we know very little of quotidian moral thought in science. Animal Ethos is an effort to rectify this discrepancy. This distinction between ethics and morality informs a third key premise. As my previous research demonstrates (Sharp 2009a, 2011b), highly experimental realms prove to be especially productive sites for investigating

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morality precisely because associated thought and action have yet to be schematized under the regulatory apparati of bioethics. As such, the quotidian dimensions of morality expose what otherwise remains a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997) of sorts in lab science. This stems from a lack of sanctioned vocabulary and concepts for speaking in moral terms about one’s research endeavors. In essence, codified frameworks bear the power to dominate, obscure, and devalue informal, private struggles and concerns. Yet the presence of animals in laboratories—mammals especially, I maintain— frustrate blanket acceptance of ethical codes of conduct. Animal Ethos illuminates the productive power of interspecies encounters to provoke moral thought, introspection, and reflexivity.

everyday morality in laboratory practice The local stops at many stations; it is the slow train. It does not race above ground but moves along it. As it crosses the terrain it slows our gaze and concentrates our attention. It allows us to see what is in-between. michael lambek, “Catching the Local”

Morality, as an analytical category, has long preoccupied anthropologists, where localized, ethnographic research is driven by the desire to decipher the deeper meanings and structures of human thought and action.3 The discipline has, nevertheless, witnessed an effervescent revival or “renewed vigor” (Keane 2014, 3) of theoretical interest in morality, especially within the last fifteen years or so.4 Animal Ethos falls within a growing canon of specifically ethnographic projects that address what is variously known as “local,” “everyday,” or “ordinary” moralities and ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Lambek 2010, 2011; Zigon 2008), in which analyses focus most keenly on contexts marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, or incongruity. The goal is not to find resolution based on widely accepted, sanctioned principles of conduct within a circumscribed community (as would be the objective, for instance, of a bioethics consultant). Rather, associated scholarship posits that quotidian experience invigorates moral responses. Indeed, resolution may not be possible nor, even, be an immediate goal, a situation Thomas Beidelman identified as the “moral imaginary” (1993) and Cheryl Mattingly, more recently, termed the “moral laboratories” of daily life (2014). An important point here, in the context of my own work at least, is not that resolution remains out of reach but that the wrestling associated

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with moral conundrums is context specific, temporal, ever evolving (and, thus, rarely static) and, often, open-ended. These processes entail questioning, struggle, and self-examination, evidenced in quotidian life. Throughout this work I draw a sharp distinction between “ethics” and “morality.” In medico-scientific contexts, I have found it helpful to situate the former within the field of bioethics, whereas the latter involves special forms of imaginative introspection. In the United States, bioethical behavior is informed by mandated training and regular (re)certification, and it is subject to inspection and oversight by regulatory bodies. (In animal research, this often involves the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, which inspects laboratories, and USDA-mandated Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, or IACUCs, which are institution-specific ethics review boards). For the purposes of this study, bioethics defines the parameters of what one may and may not do in a lab (or to a lab animal). In contrast, moral behavior, I maintain, is creative and serendipitous, encompassing existential realms of experience (Jackson 2012) whose effects may loop back (Hacking 1995) and inform subsequent deeds and ideas. And whereas bioethical principles unquestionably define the boundaries and bedrock of professional behavior, throughout this book I am most interested in the quirkier realm of morality, where one encounters evidence of how a range of personnel within a lab’s labor hierarchy grapple with the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of “everyday” or “ordinary” practices that comprise experimental animal use. This focus on the “ordinary” entails, by way of Michael Lambek’s metaphor, taking “the slow train” as a means to perceive the “in-between.” Ethnographic engagement necessitates sustained attention to the localized, quotidian, and mundane aspects of life in order to discern how people make sense of their worlds. Attentiveness to the mundane is especially well suited to the study of science, as exemplified by ethnographically inspired sustained engagement within the field of science and technology studies (STS) as championed by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, John Law, and others (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010).5 Latour exemplifies this approach in his essay “Circulating Reference,” within which he pays meticulous attention to the various ways that members of an interdisciplinary research team engage in studying a swath of Amazonian terrain, driven by a shared desire to determine whether the savannah or the forest is retreating. Together, they map out their findings not merely on, say, pieces of paper and grids of soil samples, but by transforming a café—along with its tables and chairs—into a map of the domain under study. In the end, their shared assessments hinge on a lowly earthworm whose subterranean

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activities alter the soil and make it conducive to forest growth (Latour 1999). One encounters the same meticulous quality in Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis as evidencing a “body multiple” (2002) and, again, in Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch’s work in a Danish research lab, where their attentiveness to a range of quotidian practices reveals how premature piglets are sometimes vulnerable baby animals and at other times research objects, proxies for human neonates, data points, or deceased creatures ready for necropsy. Such painstaking approaches to detail expose otherwise obscured domains of scientific practice, such that laboratories emerge as complex, ontological projects whose entwined categories of knowledge and meaning are always evolving. In short, labs are moral worlds. STS similarly exemplifies the power of being alert not only to people and their actions, but to things. This approach derives from early ethnographic studies. To realize this, one need only consult the canonical works on Trobriand society by Bronislaw Malinowski (considered the foundational ancestor of sustained ethnographic engagement) on the making of a canoe, the circulating items and trade partnerships that comprise kula exchange networks, or horticultural practices and associated magic (1922, 1935).6 Nevertheless, a shift in recent years—unquestionably inspired by STS scholarship—has resulted in a new level of absorbed attention to material objects not merely as artifacts (made or designed by humans, for instance) but also as “actants” (whereby innovative action and associated, often emergent, knowledge are evidenced in networks that include both persons and things) (Latour 1987; Law and Hassard 1999). Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the “biography” of things (1986) further enriches these methodological concerns. Taken together, such approaches enhance anthropological studies of science, where the “in-between” might encompass mundane practices, moral principles, techne, and animals, all of which might then transform analyses of everyday worlds of science.

“Figure and Ground” in Studies of the Everyday In her essay “On Space and Depth,” Marilyn Strathern proposes the “commonplace technique . . . of figure-ground reversal” as an effective mode of anthropological analysis (and, I would argue, ethnographic engagement). According to Strathern, this approach “by itself simply draws on habits of perception. It may, however, be combined with certain conceptions of the act of interpretation itself. The result is then an oscillation between perspectives that appear to summon quite different approaches to the world” (2002, 88). As she explains (in ways reminiscent of Lambek’s slow train), “If interpretation ‘stops’ movement in the attention to the movement around it,

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then in that attention the world also appears full of stopped, singular . . . ‘things’ or ‘events’ or ‘relations,’ ” thereby “bringing entities, human or abstract, into play with one another” (2002, 92). This attentiveness to the “quotidian oscillation” of ground and figure fosters an analytical stance that is alert to “either depth or surface” (109). The effectiveness of “localized” attention to figure-ground reversal is beautifully realized in Veena Das’s essay “Ordinary Ethics,” in which she tracks everyday evidence of the vagaries of human vulnerability (2012, 133). As Das explains, “In the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi . . . I came to recognize the delicacy of maintaining regard for others through the minutest of gestures” (135). An especially poignant example involves a woman leaving an upturned stool on a “threshold as a sign that she intended to resume [a neighborhood quarrel] . . . the next day,” once the men of their households left for work in the morning, because “it did not seem right to many women to confront a tired man who had braved the heat and dust of the streets to be confronted with an atmosphere of discord.” As Das underscores, women’s efforts to protect the serenity of home life were informed by an array of other moral principles (including deference to patriarchal household structure and the threat of domestic violence). When Das foregrounds, in Strathern’s sense, the moral relevance of an ordinary, upturned stool, she proffers an important intervention pertinent to my own project. As she explains, “The possibility of speaking of ordinary ethics allows us also to think of the unethical as growing with the forms of life that people inhabit—it is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions” (2012, 135–36). These “ordinary” “forms of life” are methodologically discerned through silent gestures, speech, and personal narration (136; see also Das 1997). As Jarrett Zigon, in turn, asserts, “special attention to forms of everyday language-use is essential to anthropological studies of local moralities” precisely because language “allows for the enactment of a certain range of possible moral worlds” (2008, 152). As we shall see, Animal Ethos is in many ways a study of how people talk about the everyday aspects of their work-related lives.

Sanctioned Speech and Lab Labor Hierarchies The analytical challenges associated with this “quotidian oscillation” (Strathern 2002, 107) between figure and ground, or “view . . . and counterview” (89) of the “ordinary” (Das 2012; Lambek 2010), are soon realized in

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the ways lab personnel talk about the worlds they inhabit. A sanctioned lexicon and associated taboo terms and topics together present a case in point. Sole attention to the former would effectively erase any evidence of the latter, and herein lies a conundrum that troubles my current study. Throughout Animal Ethos I strive to counteract this phenomenon by recognizing the synergistic relationship between absence and presence (Bille, Sørensen, and Hastrup 2010; Casper and Moore 2009; Leder 1990), paired with the understanding of “entities, human or abstract” as potentially “multiple” (Mol 2002). Rephrased, sanctioned words and actions might signal still others that are absent or prohibited. Alongside the linguistic and behavioral tropes of quotidian laboratory life, attention to the animals and objects that populate and clutter such worlds similarly reveals complexities of meaning and value that might otherwise be overlooked and, thus, obscured. For instance, and as noted earlier, death talk is carefully monitored in labs. Many laboratory experiments are designed as “terminal,” entailing the killing of the animal in anticipation of necropsy. Detailed protocols mandate how, when, and by whom such procedures are performed, and they fall under the rubric of animal welfare laws, regulations, and guidelines at national, state, local, institutional, and disciplinary levels. How one speaks of and describes an animal’s death is likewise circumscribed by a fixed lexicon of permissible terms. One never speaks of “killing” animals; 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

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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

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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 selfconsciousness) 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

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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; EvansPrichard 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’ attachments to llamas during underground ritual sacrifices in Bolivia (1973, 1979); and 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.

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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

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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 lifeand-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.

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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

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“morally justified.” As he explains, “(some) animals must be sufficiently different from humans in morally relevant ways to allow the morality of speciesism, and (some) animals must be sufficiently similar to humans biologically for cross-species extrapolation to have 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).

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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

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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 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

figure 1. “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments.” Harper’s Weekly, June 1884. Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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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 is its mundane quality. Unlike the canon of Western paintings that depict medical specialists in the midst of discovery or accomplishment, this image shows Pasteur absorbed in a quotidian task. With notepad in hand, Pasteur studies a cage of rabbits, jotting and recording his observations. The fact that the image appeared in Harper’s Weekly is likewise notable: this text targets not experts but lay readers, who, though they might condemn the use of animals in science, are nevertheless invited to witness the scientist at work. The essay signals, too, an American interest in European lab research. Through the efforts of Harper’s Weekly, Pasteur crossed the Atlantic. The Harper’s piece reveals the interplay of transcontinental research and associated animal welfare practices, themes that emerged regularly during the course of my research for Animal Ethos. Researchers often asked me “where” my work was based, a vague question that could signal an inquiry into anything from which or whose labs (for privacy issues I declined to provide names), what kinds of labs (university, not pharmaceutical), and which countries (predominantly the United States, with occasional forays to the United Kingdom for comparative purposes). The last response always inspired further commentary. Both U.K.- and U.S.-based researchers regularly underscored that the respective welfare restrictions imposed on their activities were among the “strictest,” “most confining,” or “toughest” in the world.14 What is important here is that research and welfare protocols travel internationally, and thus, generally speaking, U.S.-based welfare practices share common origins with those that originated in the United Kingdom, a factor that has proved helpful in my own efforts to track their respective histories.

Laboratory Labor and Animal Welfare The paired histories of contemporary laboratory research and animal welfare movements are deeply entwined in both the United States and United Kingdom. In the words of lab personnel and activists, animal rights movements in the United Kingdom lay claim to a history of more “heated,” “vehement,” “sustained,” “militant,” and “effective” strategies; nevertheless, strategies that originate there have been known to inform subsequent legislative and other interventions in the United States. The United Kingdom’s

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Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, for example, is widely regarded as a precursor to subsequent initiatives in other countries. (The first piece of legislation to protect research animals in the United States was the Animal Welfare Act of 1966; I discuss this in a subsequent chapter.)15 An early icon of the animal rights—also known as the anti-vivisection— movement in the United Kingdom is the monument to the “little brown dog.” This memorial was erected in Battersea Park, London, in 1906 to memorialize a small terrier who was subjected repeatedly to surgical and other procedures during medical school lessons at University College, London.16 The “Brown Dog Affair” (1903–1910) was instigated when two feminists of Swedish origin, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schnartau, managed to make their way into the university as spectators during a lecture by physiologist William Bayliss, who regularly employed canine subjects in his research and lectures. The two women, who founded the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden after visiting animal labs at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1900, publicly accused Bayliss of performing illegal (and repeated) vivisection demonstrations. During the lecture in question, the surgical procedure was deemed terminal and the dog was killed with a knife to the heart by one of Bayliss’ students, Henry Dale. (Dale was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1936.) The Brown Dog Affair pitted feminists, anti-vivisectionists, and sympathetic labor groups against medical students, and at various points confrontations required significant police intervention. In 1907, for instance, around a thousand medical students marched through London’s streets carrying effigies of brown dogs, an event that escalated to the point that it became known as the Brown Dog Riots. The monument itself was regularly targeted by vandals (who, presumably, were medical students), and by 1910 the district of Battersea chose to remove the sculpture (doing so at night and under heavy police protection). The Brown Dog Affair sparked a trial in which Bayliss sued for libel and won; it led, too, to the establishment of a royal commission charged with investigating the experimental use of animals in medicine and science (Gålmark 2000; Lederer 1992; Mason 1997) (see Figure 2). I present this story as a means to highlight certain historical threads relevant to this present work, where several key themes will reemerge in the chapters that follow. Although the Brown Dog Affair is part of British history, its conspicuousness assists in foregrounding several issues of equal relevance to the United States. The first concerns the early, coterminous, public display of medical research as a public good, set alongside the rise of animal activism. This pairing will lead to the retreat of animal research to

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figure 2. Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Latchmere Recreation Ground of Battersea Park, London, erected 1906 (presumed destroyed in 1910). Joseph Whitehead, sculptor. National Anti-Vivisection Society (U.K.), 1906, photographer unknown. Source: Wikicommons. Wikicommons image derived from Encyclopaedia Britannica entry “Advocacy for Animals,” 2010.

secured corridors of laboratory space. Second is the importance of realizing that research practices, animal welfare policies, and activism travel. Not unlike the Harper’s illustration of Pasteur in his lab, the animal rights movement likewise made its way across the Atlantic. Throughout the twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries, both activists and medical researchers in the United States have been known to turn to, consider, and draw inspiration from parallel developments in the United Kingdom. The third theme concerns the varying affective power of animal species. As I demonstrate later in this book, the dog looms as an iconic figure of medical research, and in the United States, not unlike in the United Kingdom, the social values assigned to dogs inspired significant welfare reforms over half a century after the Brown Dog Affair. Finally, the original monument (along with another that replaced it in 1985), offers a compelling entry point for considering the moral underpinnings of animal science. The monument to the little brown dog not only attests to the affective power of canines but also provides a relatively rare example of a public monument honoring lab animals. As I illustrate in subsequent chapters, memorials to experimental creatures proliferate in labs, mounted neither by activists nor in public parks but by lab personnel within the sheltered enclaves of research laboratories.

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the parameters of ethnographic engagement The focus for Animal Ethos emerged slowly, taking several unintended turns along the way. During the summer of 2010, while I was in residence as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, I partnered with philosopher Michael Banner on a pilot ethnographic project concerned with morality in lab animal science. This joint endeavor helped me realize a desire to delve more deeply into day-to-day practices involving lab animals in the United States. Off and on for the next seven years, I grounded my research in university-based laboratories that employed mammals as research subjects. My reasons were as follows. First, as my initial work in the United Kingdom taught me, localized histories of animal rights activism, subsequent welfare legislation, and daily laboratory practices can vary significantly as one moves from one national context to another. My initial foray into laboratory science involved shadowing and interviewing lab staff of a range of origins in the United Kingdom, a country regarded elsewhere as home to the most stringent animal welfare and care policies. Staff explained that this reputation was tied to the country’s sustained history of animal activism. (My purpose is not to defend or refute such claims but, instead, to track how such assertions inform moral reasoning.) U.K. standards of care and ethical frameworks have a tendency to drift elsewhere (most notably in the form of what is widely known as the Three Rs—“replacement, reduction, refinement”—first proposed by Russell and Burch in the 1950s [1959]). As I later learned, laboratory practices are simultaneously similar and distinct as one moves within and across national boundaries. The United States also dominates the world stage in setting standards of welfare, care, and quotidian practices that might in some instances mirror those in the United Kingdom and in others reveal very different trajectories. Experimental science likewise has, at the very least, an uneasy relationship with animal activism, and, again, trends in the United Kingdom sometimes shadow accounts of what transpires in the United States. As a means to maintain control over the parameters of data collection, I chose early on to base the bulk of my research for Animal Ethos in the States, with occasional forays to the United Kingdom for comparative purposes. As noted above, during interviews, I was often asked where and with whom I conducted my research. Here I must underscore that, given the politically charged nature of working in animal laboratories, I strictly adhered to promises of confidentiality at all levels of reporting. Specialized fields of experimental research can involve relatively small communities of

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scientists and other staff (in the words of one neuroscientist, “We all know each other”), and thus my written and verbal assurances (via my institution’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB-approved informed consent process) that I would not disclose names of specific labs, institutions, individuals, or animals was an important step in winning trust and acquiring permission to conduct lab-based ethnographic research. Although my movements were sometimes redirected to block my access to trade secrets and the like, this was relatively rare (nor of any interest to me). A significant focus of concern was reflected in questions about any ties I might have to animal activists, who are widely perceived among lab personnel as an ongoing threat to the safety and security of scientific property, animals, and people. I learned early on to underscore that I was neither an investigative journalist nor an activist, although I made clear that I was involved in interviewing individuals who self-identify as such. In line with standard anthropological ethical practices, all names in this work are pseudonyms; I have also obscured geographical locations of research sites. I am grateful for the assistance and support I received: throughout this project I was welcomed as a guest and curious interloper who was encouraged to engage in and witness a range of day-to-day lab activities. Laboratory research encompasses vast realms of experimental science, and thus two additional parameters circumscribed my own activities. The first involved the decision to work exclusively in academic, universitybased laboratories. Although some lab personnel move back and forth throughout their careers among industry (e.g., pharmaceutical), government (at, say, the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, or branches of the military), and university research, these are nevertheless fairly distinct domains of experimental animal science. Unlike the first two, academic research tends to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what is often referenced as “basic” or “pure” research most concerned with the advancement of knowledge (as opposed to, say, the profit-seeking pursuits of pharmaceutical companies). The bulk of my research occurred in evolutionary biology and neuroscience labs, although interviews involved specialists drawn from an even wider array of fields (including genetics, immunology, and primatology). Another key difference between academic and other contexts is scale. Academic labs tend to be substantially smaller than their counterparts in government settings and the pharmaceutical industry, and given that a core purpose in academic settings involves training scientists (ranging from undergraduate to postdoctoral students), the same personnel—regardless of station in a lab’s labor hierarchy—typically work together as a team for

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several years at a stretch (if not for a decade or more). Although academic labs might partner with pharmaceutical corporations, they tend to be sustained by multiyear grants most often from government sources. These grants fund research space, the costs associated with breeding and housing animals, and lab payroll. Personnel typically consist of the lab’s director or PI, students of an array of ranks, technicians whose duties can range from cleaning cages and breeding animals to providing basic medical care and training research subjects, and veterinarians who specialize in lab animal health. In academic labs, such personnel are arranged in clearly delineated labor hierarchies; they also define small communities of specialists whose work together is driven by the scientific need to use animals as experimental subjects. Because teams are typically relatively small in size (ranging from half a dozen to twoscore employees), they generally work fairly cooperatively in the day-to-day management of animals. (Pharmaceutical employees, on the other hand, speak of much stricter hierarchies.) As will become clear in subsequent chapters, cooperativeness can give rise to creatively serendipitous moral responses. As I learned from my earlier work with bioengineers, animals bear the power to inspire affective responses in human lab personnel. Driven by past experience, I chose to focus exclusively on mammals, informed by the assumption that lab workers would respond most strongly to warmblooded creatures. This decision did not reflect my personal attraction to certain species over others—those who know me can attest that my affective responses to a hound, boa, shark, and cephalopod are equally strong. Rather, they reflect dominant understandings of species’ worth across wide domains of experimental science. During the course of this research, certain animals emerged as inspiring especially strong affective responses in lab personnel: most notably, dogs (specifically, beagles), primates (especially macaques), and other, smaller animals (most frequently rats and ferrets). I came to understand these as iconic species of laboratory science, and they figure prominently in the chapters that follow. Now that I have reached the end of this study, I admit I sometimes question whether this focus on mammals was necessary, and in the book’s conclusion I circle back and reconsider the affective power of non-mammalian species. Animal Ethos officially spanned seven years of ongoing research (2010– 2017); supplemental data are derived from earlier research with transplant surgeons (some of whom had worked with animals in the course of their training), xeno experts (for whom chimpanzees, baboons, pigs, and the occasional rat or hamster were preferred research subjects), and bioengineers (whose professional histories are entwined with calves, ewes, and sometimes

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dogs). Just as animals matter, domains of specialized knowledge and training do too. As I learned from my work on organ transplantation, although surgeons are most often celebrated in the literature as the true experts of this clinical realm, my research findings would have been shallower, I maintain, had I not worked in sustained fashion with nurses, social workers, procurement specialists, patients, and donor kin. Likewise, throughout this current project, I have made a point of moving up and down labor hierarchies, across research domains, and among different species. Researchers and animal care technicians eventually emerged as those most likely to face and wrestle with moral quandaries. I nevertheless worked with a host of experts. Methodologically, the bulk of data were derived by shadowing lab personnel and conducting structured, open-ended interviews, informal group discussions, and life narratives that involved sixteen lab PIs, eight postdoctoral students, twelve undergraduate lab researchers,17 three lab technicians, twenty-two animal technicians or “caretakers,” six veterinarians, four animal activists, two animal law experts, two investigative journalists, two historians of science, three moral philosophers, and four bioethicists. These methods of data gathering were enhanced by additional sustained participant-observation within a range of sites consisting of labs based on five separate university and college campuses; three veterinary schools; and a wide range of specialized conferences in the United States and abroad that were focused on transplant-related research, animal husbandry and lab care, and animal welfare legislation. I have also spent significant time combing through historical archives, seeking advertisements and other public relations materials, and visiting a host of sites that memorialize animals in and beyond scientific domains.

The Organization and Scope of the Work Animal Ethos consists of five core chapters, written as critical essays, framed by three analytical themes: intimacy, sacrifice, and animal exceptionalism. Part I, “Intimacy,” is informed by the premise that humananimal encounters are part and parcel of everyday laboratory life, a reality that engenders both standardized and creatively serendipitous responses. Whereas animals are categorized, labeled, counted, and cared for in ways determined by regulatory apparati, personal (versus coded) names and other unorthodox practices abound, indicative of a scholarly need to understand animals as being more than research objects or “data points” (as they are so frequently described in existing critiques of science). In chapter 1, “The Sentimental Structure of Laboratory Life,” I demonstrate how dogs’ affective power shaped welfare legislation in the United States, informing

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processes I describe as sentimental structures of laboratory life and associated affective politics. Throughout the chapter I draw on the personal narratives of lab personnel to explore how dogs, alongside other animals, engender strong human emotions, especially in response to protocols that require staff to harm, cull, and kill animals under their care. I ask: How do moral responses arise and extend beyond the scope of mandated bioethical codes of conduct? How might we begin to uncover a hierarchy of animal preference? Under what circumstances do lab personnel privilege a sense of kinship across the species divide? Why do scientists typically privilege “sentient” species, and what, precisely, is meant by this term? Throughout this chapter I draw on the history of canine research and the rise of the beagle as a specialized research animal to demonstrate the importance of “charismatic” species in my efforts to identify and decipher otherwise obscured moral values. Chapter 2, “Why Do Monkeys Watch TV?” addresses other iconic species of science. Here I consider the charismatic status of non-human primates, who, by virtue of their evolutionary proximity to humans and highly “sentient” natures, epitomize favored research species. Their use in science is nevertheless fraught with moral quandaries. For several decades, primates have served as a barometer for animal welfare debates, frequently inspiring spirited, heated, or caustic encounters between lab personnel and activists. Throughout this chapter I focus specifically on macaques— perhaps the most widely used of all lab-based primate species—to navigate the complex world of animal welfare and associated “enrichment” practices. I draw on observations in monkey labs to interrogate the significance of a common refrain, namely, that monkeys like to watch TV. I tackle this assumption head-on by considering the history of primate engagement with visual media via experimentation. I then trace how these research practices cross over to the domain of “enrichment” and as a presumed “welfare” practice during “down time” when animals are not actively engaged in experiments. These practices and assumptions have significant consequences for shaping the everyday lives of captive, lab-based primates, and they uncover still other understandings of the moral values of the humans who circulate in laboratory space. Part II, “Sacrifice,” comprises chapter 3, “The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals.” This section is intended as an interlude, where I pause to consider the inescapability of animal death in laboratories as predetermined by standardized research protocols. When informed of the focus of my research (a study of moral thinking in laboratory science), lab personnel of all stripes regularly responded by speaking of animals’ deaths and acts of

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killing. This chapter probes the unsettling significance of these unsolicited responses. I explore how lab personnel make sense of the need to “sacrifice” or kill animals for science and the moral consequences of animal death as an inescapable aspect of laboratory work. Set against the ubiquity of killing in science, I consider the significance—and limitations—of animal “sacrifice” as an overworked trope in theorists’ assessments of lab research. A dominant argument that pervades the literature is that this term flags an unspoken, sacred contract between human and animal. I propose other readings as a means to loop back to the relevance of interspecies intimacy. Part III, “Exceptionalism,” considers how animal technicians and researchers grapple with the affective power of animals. As I show in chapter 4, “Science and Salvation,” a widespread public assumption is that lab animals are systematically objectified and always considered to be expendable creatures. Throughout my research, however, I regularly encountered lab personnel who sometimes rescue animals from culling in ways that demonstrate forms of animal exceptionalism. At times in full view of a supervisor, a lab employee might spare a creature destined for culling and take this favorite animal home as a house pet; another might stage a backdoor meeting with animal activists to find new homes for animals destined for euthanasia. In turn, the remains of favorite deceased animals might be retrieved from disposal and lovingly preserved and displayed as memorials to honor them. These unorthodox practices provide evidence both of alternative understandings of the charismatic qualities assigned to various creatures and of how the moral responses that prompt them facilitate possible human redemption. In chapter 5, “The Animal Commons,” I consider other forms of animal rescue that emerged from data associated with researchers’ practices. Whereas animal technicians might save animals from culling or preserve their remains in memorial form, researchers demonstrate occasional attempts to share animals, especially in contexts marked by scarcity. I consider such specialized efforts to be moral actions that foster an emergent “animal commons” reminiscent of, say, the open-sourcing of data in other quarters of science. In the book’s conclusion, “The Other Animal,” I revisit the boundaries that have circumscribed my research. As noted earlier in this introduction, Animal Ethos is concerned exclusively with contexts that employ mammals, a decision driven by the assumption that they are most likely to inspire affective—and, therefore, moral—responses in human lab personnel. I consider the affective power of “the other animal,” employing zebrafish as an analytical foil. Throughout this book I demonstrate the

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dialectical relationship between welfare and care; in the conclusion, I strive to move along another elusive boundary of interspecies empathy, asking in the end why, how, or even whether a dog, monkey, or ferret inspires stronger affective responses than does, say, a school of fish. As with welfare and care, attentiveness to empathy can unmask otherwise obscured, everyday practices that might deepen our understanding of morality as a significant social dimension of science.

part i

Intimacy

1. The Sentimental Structure of Laboratory Life

Experimental scientists inhabit a world bereft of both a lexicon of affect and venues for expressing emotions for laboratory animals. In contrast, among animal technicians and lab veterinarians, “compassion fatigue” (Kelly 2015; Scotney, Mclaughlin, and Keates 2015)—especially in response to animal “sacrifice” or euthanasia—has garnered attention, and terms such as “grief,” “loss,” and “anger” alongside “pain” and “distress” figure prominently in associated literature, workshops, and symposia that target lab animal caretakers.1 When I ask lab researchers about the emotional burdens associated with lab animal suffering, without fail they reference the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), their in-house ethics boards (known as institutional animal care and use committees or IACUCs), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requirements, alongside disciplinary bioethical codes of conduct, to underscore that proper experimental design and animal management prevent acts of undue harm (and, thus, by association, their own emotional distress). Such responses are not unique to animal research: they echo those that typify physicians’ responses to the subject of patient “suffering” in clinical settings (Sharp 2009a). Actions that cause excessive or unwarranted harm are deemed unethical. This black-boxing of suffering does not preclude affection and concern for lab animals, however. As I learned during my previous research on artificial heart design, experimental bioengineers rarely regard the research calves and sheep with whom they work as mere work objects. Rather, many develop strong emotional attachments to creatures they recall fondly decades later, their personal histories as scientists entwined with those of longdeceased research animals (Sharp 2013). More recently, while working in a range of other laboratory domains, I regularly encounter affective responses 35

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to myriad species ranging from zebrafish and mollusks to rodents and monkeys. In essence, laboratories are affective menageries. Throughout this chapter I navigate the complexities of interspecies intimacy in experimental science, focusing on the muted presence of affective registers as evidenced in researchers’ actions and thoughts regarding animals. (In subsequent chapters I consider the sentiments of animal technicians and veterinarians.) Early in their careers researchers become well versed in standards of animal “welfare” and “enrichment” while simultaneously mastering emotional detachment when working with a range of species. Their personal actions and private concerns nevertheless reveal that research animals engender strong emotional responses. Procedures and protocols that require injuring, culling, or killing animals are especially significant in shaping what I reference as the sentimental structure of experimental science. In my efforts to discern affect and sentimental structure in laboratories, I ask: How do the moral practices associated with animal welfare extend beyond the boundaries of mandated and standardized ethical codes of conduct? How are various species imagined? That is, how might animal categories, certain species, or hierarchies of value and preference shape responses among scientists? How does one master detachment, and what are its consequences? How do encounters with at least some animals perhaps foster a sense of kindredness across the species divide? As I demonstrate, wider public sentiments for certain kinds of animals have had a profound effect in shaping animal welfare legislation. These ongoing reforms are dialectically entangled with laboratory practices, a process that informs—and transforms—scientists’ personal responses to animals they understand as falling under their care.

Harm and Animal Value Human-animal intimacy is a variegated domain of quotidian laboratory life. In an effort to bring order to this complex realm, I pause here to map out the overall logic of my analysis. To begin—although the term itself is rarely, if ever, spoken—the notion of “harm” is an inescapable aspect of laboratory research, where standardized protocols might involve depriving animals of sleep, water, nourishment, bedding, room to move, and companionship. In addition, death is widely accepted as the inevitable outcome of many experimental procedures. Researchers and their staff are regularly involved in culling and killing animals through selective breeding; in response to illness, injury, or failure to thrive; and as a precursor to necropsy at the conclusion of an animal’s experimental involvement. Many procedures bear the very real potential for causing physical injury or emotional distress to animals

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by way of, for example, injections, incisions, surgeries, handling procedures, restraints, housing practices, aural stimuli, and weaning protocols. Even very basic procedures associated with numbering systems—including ear notching, toe clipping, and tattooing—harm or mar animals’ bodies. In response, ethical lab science requires extensive training in and a keen awareness of how best to prevent, dampen, or respond to pain, fear, and suffering in animals, where enrichment strategies are key.2 As all researchers know, animal welfare is central to ethical experimentation. When put into practice, it defines the core of moral science too. Public awareness of (and sometimes outrage over) this peculiar conflict— that quality research often necessitates harming animals—has proved pivotal in shaping lab animal welfare reforms in the United States, especially since the 1960s. Various iconic species—most notably non-human primates (NHPs) and dogs—dominate widely publicized efforts for legislative and regulatory reform. My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive social history of lab animal activism, welfare initiatives, and associated legislative outcomes (but see Jasper and Nelkin 1991, 1992; Lederer 1992; Ritvo 1987, 125–66). Instead, I am intrigued by how public sentiments for certain kinds of animals, as evidenced in the discourse of welfare reforms, loop back (Hacking 1995) and transform researchers’ own professional practices and, more significantly, their personal moral frameworks. The widespread use of animals as experimental subjects is based on a “model” approach in which animals stand in as human proxies. Within this framework, decisions to work with particular species demonstrate a standardization of animal preferences, where researchers’ choices are informed by scientific principles that shape understandings of which animal model provides the best match for solving a particular experimental problem. Standard parameters include, for instance, body mass or overall size, life span, reproductive capacity, anatomy, mutations achieved through selective breeding and genomics, and species temperament. A range of overarching principles drives the model approach, namely, that working with animals avoids causing harm to humans; that because animals are captive subjects, scientists have greater control over conditions that can influence experimental outcomes; that short gestation periods, rapid maturation, litter size, and histories of domestication render many animals ideal lab subjects; that animal studies are more economical than those involving humans; and that, presumably, animals are easier to manage than are human patients. More broadly, contemporary, federally mandated research protocols generally require extensive animal research before new surgical methods, drugs, and other procedures can be attempted on human beings.3 The fact that many

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experiments conclude with euthanizing animals (a procedure that is often understood as done for the animal’s welfare to prevent future or further suffering) precludes human experimentation.4 Yet, as I demonstrate throughout this chapter, researchers’ personal preferences for particular species likewise shape choices regarding which models to use. This private logic is most often informed by a researcher’s personal history with different sorts of animals, and it surfaces as one of both preference and aversion. For example, one researcher might find crabeating macaques more manageable than rhesus monkeys, her career marked by decades of working with the former even though colleagues in the same field typically employ the latter. Others may flag “sentience” as a reason for choosing certain experimental paths that enable them to work with say, dolphins, ferrets, or crows over flies and fish; still others express an aversion for these same species because they equate sentience with the animal’s ability to anticipate physical harm, and thus they consider it immoral to employ them in experiments. Young, inexperienced researchers especially express a strong dislike for mice, whose skittishness or social habits under duress trouble them, and so they gravitate toward rats because they find them more affectionate and trainable.5 Certain species, however, stand out as generating the strongest personal, moral struggles: throughout my interviews, NHPs, dogs, and, though lagging in third place, pigs surfaced regularly as species with whom researchers often faced the toughest decisions about whether to use them in experiments because of “sentience,” a term that elides intelligence with self-awareness and, most recently, an animal’s capacity for empathy.6 Another determinant involves the sentimental attachment to pets at home, an experience that often precludes a researcher’s ability to work with these same species (most frequently, dogs) in the lab. Within the broader framework of ethical scientific practice, affective responses flag the existence of a personal and private moral register. Throughout my fieldwork I asked researchers not only about the species they considered ideal models, but to explain if and where (or when) they might draw the line to exclude animals with whom they would not work. As I learned, whereas the former discloses the logic of modeling as a standardized scientific practice, the latter uncovers eclectic and personal forms of animal preference and sentiment. Although I had anticipated that NHPs would surface as a common exception, in fact dogs proved more significant as icons of moral practice (a sentiment shared, interestingly, by both researchers and animal activists).7 With this discovery in mind, throughout this chapter canine lab subjects will serve as important guides in my efforts to navigate the moral landscape of experimental science.

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A core concern of this chapter is how species preference informs the sentimental structures of science. I begin by considering the significance of affect and sentiment as analytical principles, turning next to a discussion of how public notions of harm—as evidenced in animal welfare legislation— have reconfigured researchers’ moral frameworks. As I demonstrate, certain “iconic” species have proved pivotal in facilitating reforms by invigorating public awareness and, in turn, altering scientific practices. Here, dogs figure prominently. I then pause to consider how researchers develop “best practices” in experimental science. This involves, most notably, an ability to master emotional detachment when performing tasks that injure lab animals, demonstrated by a novice research assistant based in a mouse vivarium. In turn, I explore what building a successful working partnership between a human researcher and non-human experimental subject entails, in this instance with a rhesus macaque. By way of conclusion, I loop back and focus on the laboratory’s favorite working canine, the beagle, who has long been a choice species of scientific research and the flashpoint for longstanding political battles over humane care in labs.

Affect and Sentimental Structure In my efforts to expose researchers’ obscured affective responses to animals, I argue for the need to focus on the “sentimental structure” (Needham 1962; Wilson 1971) of laboratory science. I employ this expression in a distinctly anthropological sense. Earlier schools of British and French anthropology were marked by lively debates over the significance of “sentiment” in human relations (most often in reference to marriage rules) when individual feelings and desires successfully circumvented jural, normative, and sanctioned codes of conduct, enabling unorthodox, undesirable, or forbidden unions. As Rodney Needham, Peter Wilson, and others demonstrated, emotional attachment could trump, redirect, or short-circuit orthodoxy (Evans-Prichard 1929; Lévi-Strauss 1969a; Needham 1962; Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Wilson 1971; see also Hutchinson 1996, 237–70). Notably, Wilson was especially sensitive to the flexible, temporal nature of affect and sentiment, in which the social station of the actor, the context, and relational factors both mattered and could shift over time (1971, 207). I argue that similar patterns emerge in contemporary laboratory contexts: on the one hand, standardized methods of animal care codify proper decorum, yet on the other, researchers nevertheless regularly reframe ethical standards in ways that can incorporate private moral codes of conduct. As such, the concept of “sentimental structure” is especially helpful because it provides a clear path for realizing the emotional power of human-animal

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encounters to reconfigure laboratories as not merely ethical but moral domains. Burton Benedict, who displayed a lifelong interest in the values assigned to captive subjects (1983), encouraged anthropologists to consider how the study of human societies might translate to animals’ worlds. Benedict was alert to the affective dimensions of social relationships; he was troubled, though, by the ineptness of the popular term “bonding” to capture the complexity of affection, asking, “Yet what is it that makes up the bond?” (Benedict 1969, 211). Benedict asserted that relationships fall “at least in pairs” (1969, 204)—a basic social unit that served as a building block of sorts for mapping the structure of affection—and that dyads were central to both human and animal behavior.8 As he explained, “to discuss the behavior of an alpha animal implies that there is at least a beta. To discuss the role of a mother implies the existence of offspring” (1969, 204). Within the laboratory (what Benedict might well have considered an intriguing “novel situation” or “context”) (1969, 206–07), the same might be argued for encounters across the species divide. Much has been written in recent decades on human-animal encounters in science (Franklin 2003, 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Svendsen and Koch 2014; Taussig 2004), most notably in response to Donna Haraway’s inspiring scholarship. As Haraway demonstrates, scientific research frequently necessitates very particular forms of intimacy between humans and animals (1989, 1991, 1997). As such, an affective framework pervades much of her work (most recently that on companion species) (2003). I confess, however, that I balk at the playful “promises” (1992) borne by dyadic humananimal encounters as imagined by Haraway. This is because her celebratory assertions at times overshadow the serious realities that pervade lab animals’ lives, whose emotions remain elusive, for whom “sacrifice” or killing is an inescapable endpoint, and whose needs are eclipsed regularly by those of researchers. Anthropologists have long been interested in the affective qualities of human-animal partnerships, work that predates Haraway, of course. Classic scholarship includes Evans-Prichard’s analysis of the bovine idiom in Nuer society (1940); Leach’s marvelously playful essay on verbal abuse (1964); and the work of French theorists, from Mauss and Hubert to LéviStrauss, who were intrigued by the importance of animals in totemism and exchange systems (Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; Lévi-Strauss 1963). Indeed, anthropologists have long recognized that pastoralist societies especially are marked by richly fluid forms of sociality among humans and animals (Ingold 1980). Yet another longstanding interest concerns the

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social consequences of the human domestication of ungulate, canine, porcine, and other species (Marshall Thomas 2010; Morey 2006, 2010; Schwartz 1997; Zeder 2012). I reference this older literature to underscore that, as an anthropologist, I am by this point in my career hardwired to think of animals in social terms or, at the very least, as domesticates, a sensibility, I intend to demonstrate, that lends itself well to the laboratory. A significant aspect of Haraway’s interventions is her astute assertion that interspecies intimacy defines an inescapable tension in scientific contexts, where encounters bear possibilities of transformation for each party across the species divide. Thus, when I employ the concept “sentimental structure,” I entangle two registers of knowledge: the first involves professional notions of species proximity (as embedded, for example, in the “animal model” approach as a specialized form of domestication), whereas the second concerns individual or private forms of animal favoritism. This first register is structural, the second affective. As I will show, certain species are especially effective (and affective) at occupying both registers, most notably dogs (more particularly, beagles), who have long been simultaneously favored research subjects and house pets, and who bear significant moral weight (a finding that certainly resonates with Haraway’s own dogged pursuit of this species) (Haraway 2003). My intent, then, is to delve into the hidden crevices of ethical science to consider how the complex logic of animal value loops back and informs an individual researcher’s private sense of moral worth. A study of affect and sentiment is itself plagued with quandaries. Ongoing research on affect, for instance, has a tendency to presume methodologically that one can readily spot emotions without the need to pause and define the category, an unmarked sensibility once described by Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White as “commonsense naturalism,” or the presumed universality of emotional language (Lutz and White 1986, 414, 416). Fortunately, the paired foci of suffering and care are well established within medical anthropology, in which the body is understood as a silent yet potent somatic landscape open to anthropological analysis (Csordas 1994; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Lock 1993; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).9 Whereas associated theories of embodiment are extraordinarily effective in uncovering hidden forms of suffering, they may prove impotent in contexts devoid of illness (not to mention where involved parties are nonhuman). Of special relevance to this project is research that recognizes how ethical quandaries generate moral—and emotive—responses, as recognized, for instance, in Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good’s now-classic research among patients enduring experimental procedures on oncology wards

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(DelVecchio Good 2001; DelVecchio Good et al. 1999), Carolyn Rouse’s work on the “uncertain suffering” of children with sickle cell disease (2009), and Cheryl Mattingly’s recent argument that the perilousness of unclear health futures transforms families into “moral laboratories” of science (2014). In these contexts, the affective register is revealed through individual struggles with quandaries that offer no easy solutions. As the training of neophyte researchers reveals, however (and as I discuss below), the affective register of laboratory science is marked, ironically, by the absence of emotion. Efforts to master emotional detachment are most readily evident during day-to-day, hands-on, intimate encounters with lab animals. And when favorite animals are euthanized, one is likely to enter a lab emptied of involved researchers who have gone home early to avoid witnessing an animal’s death. I must underscore that laboratories are not emotive domains, however, and this is precisely why I favor such terms as “affect” and “sentiment.” A methodological premise at work here is that affective responses to animals are evident not in how involved researchers use animals, but in how they talk and think about them. An especially effective entry point involves focusing on the values assigned to favored or iconic species. As I illustrate in the following section, dogs lay claim to a special affective history.

animal welfare and species preference On February 4, 1966, Life magazine ran a story entitled “Concentration Camp for Dogs” (Silva 1966) that focused on the efforts of police and animal rescue organizations to locate dogs ensnared in a commercial trade that funneled lost and stolen pets into research laboratories. The essay featured the now-iconic photo of an emaciated English pointer named Lucky, one of many dogs recorded by staff photographer Stan Wayman (and described by writer Michel Silva) who accompanied members of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) as they seized sickly animals living under atrocious conditions. A central focus of the story was the compound of Lester Brown, a dog dealer based in White Hall, Maryland, who epitomized “random source” sellers who supplied laboratories with animals bred without oversight, purchased from pounds and auctions, or acquired by questionable means. Many of Brown’s animals were emaciated, and some—not unlike Lucky—were too weak to stand or even crawl; still others had already died from starvation or exposure while confined in filthy, overcrowded, and unsheltered conditions. Especially prominent within Brown’s compound were beagles and other hunting hounds, the former regarded as a “hot item”

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(Silva 1966, 25) because of the high demand for them in research labs. Many of Brown’s animals were presumed to be stolen from neighborhood streets and backyards, a story line underscored by a segment of the article that focused on a photo of a little girl hugging Reds, an Irish setter who disappeared one night from her Philadelphia home and was later spotted—and returned to her family—by a doctor in a New York hospital who was alert to the stolen pet trade. The article told of other people similarly reunited with their stolen dogs, the most poignant tale perhaps being that of a mongrel named Lancer, who escaped from a Harvard Medical School (HMS) lab by chewing through his leash and who managed to make his way back home over twenty miles away to Newton, Massachusetts. Photographed with a boy named Thomas Connollys, Lancer sported a metal tag that read “H.M.S. M-680,” a haunting memento of Lancer’s harrowing journey. Unlike other sickly dogs who had to be euthanized, Lucky the pointer was successfully nursed back to health and, as a moving photo attested, adopted by a family that happily whisked him away in their spacious sedan. (See figures 3 and 4.)10 “Concentration Camp for Dogs” followed on the heels of an earlier essay by Coles Phinizy that appeared in the November 29, 1965, issue of Sports Illustrated (Phinizy 1965).11 As with the Life article, Phinizy’s essay provided details of several households whose members had searched for stolen pets in a wide range of states, often encountering obstacles from the law and pound employees who appeared to be in cahoots with dog dealers and, in turn, medical school labs. Phinizy’s story opened with the tale of “the martyred Pepper,” described as “a five-year-old Dalmatian bitch of affectionate disposition” (36) who had disappeared from her home on a farm in Slatington, Pennsylvania, and whose owner, while hospitalized, recognized his dog in a news photo of a random source dealer’s truck. When the dealer was arrested for “improperly loading a shipment of dogs and goats,” the animals were seized and held overnight in a shelter, where they were photographed by members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), who then passed the images on to a local newspaper. Pepper’s owner’s wife—aided by U.S. Representative Joseph Resnick of New York—attempted in vain to rescue Pepper. Records indicated that Pepper had exchanged hands four times before arriving at Montefiore Hospital in New York, where she was euthanized and cremated following a research procedure. As Phinizy underscored, “her death and disappearance have made [two things] quite clear: 1) many pet dogs are being stolen from the front lawns and sidewalks of this country, and 2) the thefts in large part are motivated by science’s constant and growing need

figures 3 and 4. Images from “Concentration Camp for Dogs,” Life magazine, February 4, 1966. Stan Wayman, photographer. The captions read as follows: (top) “Scene at a dog dealer’s compound, 1966” and (bottom) “Angered by the disappearance of their family pets in Clarke County, Va., Mrs. William Mitchell and her neighbors put up signs to discourage thieves.” Courtesy of Getty Images.

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for laboratory animals” (36). Phinizy was more willing to condemn the dealer than the researcher, yet the culpability of the latter was palpable. He concluded his article by describing the fate of a policeman’s German shepherd named Peanuts, who was stolen from her front yard in full view of local residents. In Phinizy’s words, the “pet passed—for a price—through progressively cleaner hands until, in what may well have seemed a perfectly legitimate deal to the man in charge, he ended up in a laboratory and there was used to fill some scientists’ very real need for experimental animals” (44–45). As noted by USDA welfare staff writers today, Life and Sports Illustrated successfully alerted the public to a predatory trade in snatched pets that fed the needs of laboratory research (Adams and Larson 2016). Indeed, as several members of Congress reported, letters from constituents expressing outrage after reading these articles outnumbered those protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam (Stevens 1990). Together, they generated a groundswell of support behind a campaign for lab animal welfare reform. Representative Resnick, alongside Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, sponsored bills in each house of Congress that required the licensing of animal dealers and the labs with which they worked by the USDA, which was also empowered to conduct on-site inspections of both (Adams and Larson 2016). Needless to say, opposition to the proposed legislation arose in some quarters of laboratory science. Phinizy summarized the arguments as follows: “1) it would hamper research, 2) it was playing into the hands of antivivisectionists [the contemporary term for animal rights activists] and 3) it was unworkable, unconstitutional and discriminatory, since in its original form it legislated only against dealers who sold to laboratories” (1965, 41). One pro-science lobbyist, Dr. Robert Estep, asserted that reports of dog-napping were far exaggerated from the actual numbers and, thus, did not warrant reform, to which Phinizy shot back that if such logic were applied to the Lindbergh kidnapping—that “there are really very few children stolen annually”—there would be no need to seek stricter punishments for those who abduct children. Phinizy defended the legislation by underscoring the affective power and social worth assigned to dogs in American society, arguing that “what Dr. Estep seems to overlook is the further fact that, almost as much as a child, the domestic dog is part of the human heart and the human home and has been since lost time, for reasons no one can or need explain” (1965, 41–42). The affective dimensions of Phinizy’s essay are evident, too, in a sheriff’s account of a horse trailer found crammed with dogs piled on top of each other, some of whom were

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dead—an account eerily reminiscent of a slave ship (1965). PL 89-544, known today as the U.S. Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966, was signed into law by President Johnson on August 24 of that year (Adams and Larson 2016). These were hardly the first such stories to appear in the mainstream press regarding the role of pet-snatching as a means to supply animals to science. As historian Susan Lederer chronicles, the media mogul William Randolph Hearst was an avid supporter of anti-vivisectionism, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, his newspapers chronicled many stories of pets stolen for research purposes in an effort to bring about legislative reforms (Lederer 1992, 63–64).12 Nevertheless, Life, well known for its persuasive photojournalism, proved especially effective in rallying public sentiment behind welfare reforms to protect animals used in research. Indeed, fifty years later, “Concentration Camps for Dogs” was credited during my interviews with activists, lab veterinarians, and animal law experts as facilitating the passing of the AWA. In addition to gut-wrenching images of suffering animals, the photos in the Life essay especially relied heavily on powerful tropes of race, age, class, and regional difference, playing up conflicts in moral sensibility between an innocent public and elite research establishments, where the Humane Society and other animal welfare agencies served as powerful intermediaries in a clash between American families and experimental science. Indeed, the full array of Life photos taken by Stan Wayman (some of which did not appear in the original article) featured white families and, not unlike Phinizy, placed a special emphasis on traumatized children and home lives torn asunder.13 The icon of these injustices was the dog as family pet, as opposed to, say, a cat (a species widely used in laboratories at the time) or various types of working animals. The loving environment of family life stood in stark contrast to the research goals of large, private universities and medical schools, alongside pernicious middlemen who capitalized on the vulnerabilities of the former and the professional needs of the latter. As a result, Lucky, Lance, Red, and Pepper played pivotal roles in alerting the American public to a darker side of medical research. And whereas Phinizy’s essay reported examples from diverse locations around the country (illustrated by way of an artist’s drawings, not photographs), Life starkly portrayed regional class distinctions, most evident in the shocking images of Lester Brown’s hardscrabble compound in rural Maryland (located south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a region still tainted by Jim Crow), set against the upscale Boston suburb of Newton or the luxuries in store for a dog adopted into a household able to afford a comfy family car.14

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Legislating Affective Welfare Today, the AWA defines the bedrock of contemporary welfare practices in the United States involving the use, management, and treatment not only of dogs, but of an even wider array of animals in laboratory settings. Although not the first effort at animal welfare, it is widely regarded in the United States as the most effective and comprehensive form of legislation to date specifically in reference to the well-being of lab animals. The law— subsequently amended and refined in 1970, 1976, 1985, 1990, and 2002— empowers the USDA (which also oversees farm animal welfare) with oversight of “refined standards of care and extended coverage to animals in commerce, exhibition, teaching, testing, and research” (Adams and Larson 2016). USDA inspectors may arrive at a lab without warning and, when they identify infractions, impose sanctions, levy fines, suspend activities, or close down operations. As the Life and Sports Illustrated articles make clear, special concern during the original drafting of the AWA was the traffic in stolen pets and, more generally, widespread use of animals of unknown origin in medical research. This concern led to the licensing of two categories of animal suppliers by the USDA: Class B (or “random source”) dealers, who acquire animals from auctions, shelters, and private breeders, and Class A (or “purpose bred”) commercial facilities that specialize in a range of creatures selectively bred specifically for lab use (Adams and Larson 2016). Indeed, during the course of my own career in the early 1980s, when I held an office job in the research wing of a major East Coast university, postdoctoral students took advantage of there being no leash law and regularly drove around at night in an unmarked van to capture both stray and pet dogs spotted on the city’s streets. These dogs became research subjects in a cardiac lab several floors below my office for projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense.15 Today this same city has among the strictest animal welfare laws in the country, and such “random source” practices are now prohibited. Although laws have long varied from state to state regarding the legality of acquiring presumably abandoned animals from streets and shelters for lab use, recent actions at the federal level might well sound the death knoll of the Class B dealer. In 2012 and 2014, the NIH ceased funding research involving, respectively, cats and dogs acquired from Class B facilities, and in December 2015 Congress approved an amendment to the 2016 Agricultural Bill that prohibits the USDA from relicensing Class B facilities.16 The proliferation of Class A facilities—referred to today by lab personnel as “vendors” and research “partners”—defines a specialized commerce in animals that, ironically, was

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spurred on in large part by efforts in the 1960s to save abducted house pets from science. As we shall see later in this chapter, whereas the AWA helped to eliminate many house pets from the equation, the Class A–bred experimental dog increases in moral value when labs transform “retired” animals into pets by “adopting” them out or “rehoming” (rather than euthanizing) them once they cease to be of use experimentally. In turn, the AWA not only lays claim to lasting effects on welfare practices in labs; it has transformed how researchers acquire and think about animals. Personnel I encounter who currently work for the institution where I once worked generally are unaware that their predecessors conducted street sweeps for “strays” or that dogs ever occupied the building. Those with similar research interests have shifted their attention to less charismatic species in deliberate efforts to avoid hostile reactions from the public. Thus, whereas forty years ago a cardiac researcher might well have worked with captured stray and pet dogs, a decade or so later a postdoctoral student trained in that same lab might have gone on to purchase beagles from a Class A dealer when setting up her own lab. In turn, even more recent graduates in the same field might work with animals classified as “livestock,” such as sheep and calves or hybrid piglets, who attract far less attention as warranting rescue.

Canine Sentiments Today, much of the current literature on animal welfare in science focuses squarely on the rights of non-human primates, instigated by participants in The Great Ape Project (Cavalieri and Singer 1993) alongside such welfare and activist groups as the SPCA, HSUS, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and still others, all of whom have argued forcefully and convincingly for the rights of great apes (namely, gorillas and chimpanzees) as sentient species.17 These efforts have been credited with several groundbreaking developments. A joint report issued by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council (Altevogt et al. 2011) informed recent decisions at the NIH, under the directorship of Frances Collins, to pare back substantially and then bring to an end all use and funding of chimpanzees in laboratory research (Kaiser 2015; Reardon 2015). The NIH is now scrutinizing research involving an even wider range of primate species (Grimm 2016).18 In May 2015, only a few months prior to my arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to write this book, the Harvard-affiliated New England Primate Medical Research Center (one of eight such centers in the United States) was shut down in the wake of numerous animal welfare infractions (Johnson 2015; Klein 2015). In the wake of such decisions, two significant

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shifts have occurred that are relevant to my discussion here. The first involves concerted efforts among activists to prevent labs from euthanizing these animals by assisting in their relocation to primate sanctuaries; the second consists of attempts within labs to identify other animal models. The paradox, though, is that whereas many primates may be spared further research involvement, these reforms will not necessarily reduce animal use but merely shift the burden of experimentation to other species.19 Among researchers, NHPs—especially chimpanzees—figure prominently in discussions and debates on the ethics of science. Most often, associated arguments are framed by understandings of the Three Rs, or the welfare principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement. The Three Rs originated in the United Kingdom (Russell and Burch 1959) and were codified into practice there some time ago (Balls et al. 1995; Fraser 2008) and continue to inform standard welfare practices in lab settings. Very recently the Three Rs approach has made significant headway in the United States, where interviewees in my own study frequently cited the National Research Council’s 2011 revised edition of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the standard handbook for lab research, as altering their own behavior (Council 2011).20 (There is, nevertheless, significant evidence that the Three Rs have been around much longer in the United States; see, for instance, Conover 2000.) Briefly, whenever possible, research scientists should strive to replace animal experimentation with alternative techniques, use as few animals as possible, and remain ever alert to creative approaches to improving animals’ lives and living conditions so as to minimize their distress, pain, and suffering (Balls et al. 1995; Fraser 2008; Russell and Burch 1959).21 The Three Rs are now codified as standard approaches in academic labs in the United States. In this country, during both public discussions and formal scientific presentations, the chimpanzee is regularly put forth as the species most deserving of such attention and care. In contrast, when researchers speak one-on-one during interviews of their own private, moral concerns for lab-based animals, they are far more likely to speak of dogs (and this is just as pronounced among those who work with all sorts of animals, ranging from rodents to macaques). In other words, if one only pays attention to the dominant discourse on scientific ethics, subtler yet equally significant moral sensibilities remain obscure. I ask, then: What processes, beyond the passing of the AWA, render the dog an iconic species of moral encounters in science? In response, I consider how researchers understand species proximity and its moral consequences within the framework of quotidian laboratory life.

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modeling human-animal intimacy Within laboratories, proximity assumes a range of forms where humananimal encounters are concerned. In the most basic sense, interspecies encounters are most clearly evident in the daily rhythm of animal management, care, and experimentation. In turn, and as noted above, interspecies proximity informs the logic of animal models. The ethical practice of employing animals as human proxies relies on hierarchies of similarity, whereby our species shares evolutionary, behavioral, and cognitive histories and qualities with other creatures. But the quotidian tasks associated with laboratory research also necessitate intimate encounters with individual creatures, a complex reality that varies according to the type of animal used and the parameters of experimental design. Consider NHPs, whose human “proximity” or “sameness” is glossed in evolutionary terms. This notion of relatedness references interspecies kindredness: as I am often told, apes and monkeys are our primate “cousins.” In other instances, researchers may speak of “sentience” as a guiding factor for determining proximity. This factor is most notable (again) where NHPs are concerned, yet similar language is likewise applied to canine, cetacean, corvid, and, increasingly, porcine research subjects. Sentience flags a creature’s cognitive abilities to puzzle through experimental challenges in ways reminiscent of how humans think, serving as ethical evidence that supports using members of a particular species as research subjects. Yet sentience also figures in researchers’ quieter, more personal efforts to puzzle through the moral conundrums that confront them, flagging their private concerns about the detrimental effects of experimental research on various species. Within the United States, chimpanzees and an assortment of monkeys have long been involved as experimental proxies for humans, sometimes at the penultimate stage before exploring human subjects. (This is perhaps best exemplified by the early years of the Space Race; see Haraway 1989; Sharp 2007.) The use of other sorts of research primates readily foregrounds our understanding of interspecies encounters, as have decades of sustained research on primate communication, especially in teaching sign language to great apes (Fouts 1972; Gardner, Gardner, and Cantfort 1989; Haraway 1989, 1991; Patterson et al. 1988). Again, evolutionary proximity naturalizes this logic and legitimates such scientific practices. As a colleague once volunteered, “after all, aren’t we 98 percent chimpanzee?” But as Jonathan Marks reminds us, we are also 35 percent daffodil. Marks describes this logic of genetic proximity to highlight our propensity to privilege evolutionary and, more recently, genetic thinking as a dominant logic of similarity (2003).

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In turn, as science historian Nancy Leys Stepan argues in her now-classic essay on the “role of analogy in science,” the unrecognized metaphorical power of “complex,” “intertwined,” and “overlapping” analogies that pervade evolutionary science informs an “analogical reasoning” then embraced as scientific givens or truths (1986, 264). Whereas Stepan is concerned specifically with how gender and race become entwined with evolutionary theory, she, like Marks, likewise offers a means to step back and rethink assumptions that inform the logic of species proximity. In other contexts, animals are understood as ideal models for physiological reasons, a different sort of analogy that informs yet another logic of kindredness. Pigs (perhaps most often, fetal piglets) have long served as proxies for human anatomy in high school and undergraduate biology programs in the United States. Fetal piglets make for ideal dissection subjects because, like humans, they are mammals and thus have such features as hair and mammary glands, their soft tissue is easy to cut and penetrate, they are readily available from slaughterhouses and the like, and they are cheap to obtain. As I am often told, “when you open them up, they look just like a human body” (a point sometimes disputed by anatomists because, as quadrupeds, their organs are aligned differently than humans’). Again, the logic of porcine proximity is defined as physiological rather than evolutionary.

Domesticates of Science Domestication defines yet another dimension of human-animal intimacy that pervades the logic of laboratory encounters. Domestication has long been understood as a hallmark of the evolutionary history of our species, involving the specialized transformation of flora and fauna for human use. As archaeologist Melinda Zeder reminds us, “pathways” to domestication—understood as an interspecies “partnership”—are varied and include animals understood “as livestock, working animals, household pets, and companions” (Zeder 2012, 161–62). Typically, as Zeder explains, “Domestication is seen as a process in which humans deliberately and with forethought assume control over the domesticate’s movement, feeding, protection, distribution, and, above all, its breeding—directed at achieving specific clearly identified goals. . . . Domesticates within this perspective are usually characterized in economic terms as productive capital . . . or by the way in which they become integrated into the social fabric of human society” (2012, 162).22 Refinements to this definition—reminiscent of Benedict’s dualism and Wilson’s temporality—recognize domestication as a “mutualistic relationship, in which both partners, human and domesticate, reap the benefits” in “codependent relationships” (2012, 162).23 For

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Zeder, domestication is “a sustained, multigenerational, mutualistic relationship” that affects “both the domesticate and the human side of the equation”; furthermore, it “is a fluid and nonlinear process that may start, stop, reverse course, or go off on unexpected tangents, with no clear or universal threshold that separates the wild from the domestic” (2012, 162–63, 166). As an archaeologist, Zeder is unconcerned with contemporary laboratory research. Nevertheless, her assertions offer an intriguing framework for rethinking human-animal relations in science. Following Zeder, I argue that lab animals, if they are to be successful research subjects, must undergo specialized processes akin to domestication. This occurs on several fronts. First, species choice and preference permeate the logic of domestication within laboratories. According to Zeder, “certain behavioral characteristics make certain animal taxa, and certain individuals within taxa, better candidates for domestication than others” and “it is [those] sets of behaviors . . . with the responses of animals to humans and new environments—that are particularly important in animal domestication” (2012, 165, 167; see also her chart on 166). Similarly, researchers often explain that laboratory life comes naturally to or is better suited to some species than others, and, as lab domesticates, some are even described as docile yet eager participants. This logic works on two registers at once: by their very nature and temperament, certain species—such as mice, rats, beagles, and macaques—are understood as adapting especially well to laboratory conditions because, for instance, they enjoy or do not mind human presence, they might be unaggressive with humans or others of their own kind, they can live and thrive in confined conditions, or they reproduce with ease in captivity. In addition, some species are described as not only tolerating but enjoying experimental tasks and procedures, work that some go so far as to consider a form of “enrichment.” (I address the ramifications of this in the next chapter.) Second, “mutualism” allows for the possibility that both humans and animals, as codependent partners, willingly participate in and reap the benefits of lab domestication, and a common assertion is that laboratory life is superior to a natural one. That is, whereas food, shelter, and safety mount significant challenges in the wild, lab-based welfare practices ensure that animals are provided these basic needs. An associated trope is that lab animals live longer than their wild or feral counterparts (although this statement overlooks the ubiquity of lab-based euthanasia practices). In addition, a logic that legitimates animal experimentation is that both humans and animals profit from successful discoveries and outcomes. Indeed, perhaps the greatest frustration expressed in interviews with laboratory staff is how little recognition their work garners in the world at large, even though a

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plethora of reliable medical procedures and pharmaceutical advancements relevant to both human and animal clinical care have been made possible by animal research.24 In this sense, mutualism is imagined as a black box of lifesaving work that is nevertheless obscured from public view. Third, domestication often involves the deliberate transformation of a species, a process Zeder labels “intentionality,” and evidenced, for instance, in the selective breeding of livestock (2012, 163). Research personnel often explain that experimental animals bear little in common with their wild, feral, farm-bred, or household counterparts. Lab science relies heavily on meticulous, highly calibrated, and often deeply bureaucratized processes designed to alter the nature of a species through selective breeding, gene splicing, and the regular culling of unfit offspring by lab researchers, animal technicians of in-house vivaria, and staff at commercial breeding facilities known colloquially as “vendors,” who often specialize in patented animals. These selective transformative efforts “render” (Shukin 2009) animals into viable forms of research biocapital (Franklin and Lock 2003). As such examples reveal, human-animal relations in science are indeed, as Zeder asserts for other contexts, dyadic, cooperative, mutable, fluid, and capable of transforming both animal and human participants. As she reminds us, domestication is neither a static event nor a state of being; rather, it “is a fluid and nonlinear process that may start, stop, reverse course, or go off on unexpected tangents, with no clear or universal threshold that separates the wild from the domestic” (2012, 166). Disciplines, too, display species preferences: whereas archaeologists’ analyses of domestication most often focus on ungulates (including horses, cattle, llama, reindeer, sheep, etc.), dogs, pigs, and fowl, many contemporary lab scientists are engaged with rodents, NHPs, dogs, and pigs.25 The research mouse is the quintessential example of the laboratory domesticate. As Lisa Raines has documented, lab mice were derived initially from wild field mice and subsequently refined by mouse fanciers (most notably through the efforts of Abbie Lathrop of Granby, Massachusetts, who bred mice—alongside other animals such as ferrets and guinea pigs—for mouse fanciers and, in turn, laboratory researchers) (Raines 1991; Shimkin 1975). Today a plethora of strains are available for purchase from specialized, licensed vendors, as demonstrated by their supply catalogues. One need only consult a web page entitled “Find a Model” of Charles River Laboratories—among the largest suppliers of laboratory rodents in the United States—to encounter an impressive catalogue of mice bearing such names as NIH-III Nude, 129-Elite, B6 Albino, GLUT4, RIP-HAT, THE POUND MOUSE® and Immortomouse®. These are highly specialized genetic mouse strains fashioned for applications

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in immunologic, transgenic, xenotransplant, cancer, fertility, diabetes, or obesity research.26 Similarly, a competitor, Jackson Labs, produces its own strains of JAX® Mice, offering specialized “portfolios” for cancer transplantation, metabolic, and lupus research.27 In each case, domestication is most certainly driven by, in Zeder’s words, the “intentionality” to transform animals into “productive capital” through selective breeding and genetic manipulation, so that humans indeed assume “a significant level of control” over the reproduction of “resource” animals (2012, 163). Finally, domesticates have histories. Whereas the archaeologist frequently maps the incorporation of dogs and horses into human societies, lab scientists construct very similar narratives that legitimate the human use of other species. In other words, human-animal partnerships in a range of contexts inspire narratives of natural coevolution. Zeder, for instance, describes the dog as “a classic example of a domestic animal that likely traveled a commensal pathway into domestication” (2012, 172). Yet, as lab narratives attest, one might easily replace the dog with the laboratory mouse. Consider this overview from a widely circulated guide to rodent colony management that can be found on the bookshelves of many laboratories: Laboratory mice and rats are domesticated animals, as a comparison with wild-caught mice or rats will quickly show. Laboratory mice and rats are fatter, slower, less aggressive, and more amenable to handling than their wild-caught counterparts. As an organism that lives commensally with humans, there have been many opportunities through time for people to establish relationships, good or otherwise, with small beings living in their homes and fields. Mice originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread throughout the world with agriculture and human movement. The original habitat of the Norway rat is the steppes of northern China and Mongolia, and, like mice, rats have spread throughout the world with human migration. (Pritchett-Corning et al. 2015, 6)

Here, mice and rats are understood as coexisting in partnership (or “commensally”) with humans for millennia, their incorporation as valued domesticates enabled by the specialized pursuits of “mouse fanciers” in locations as distant as Japan and China with deep histories that extend back “at least [to] 1100 bce, and perhaps earlier.” Through such narratives, humans and rodents are entwined in a natural progression marked by coevolutionary partnerships. To return to Zeder, the recent “directed” (or, perhaps better phrased here, “redirected”) “pathway” of the lab mouse’s domestication has occurred through a “deliberate and directed process . . . initiated by humans with the goal of domesticating a free-living animal to obtain a specific resource or set of resources of interest” (2012, 176).

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At work here is a retelling of the mouse’s tale through the prism of human-canine bonds, and so we return once again to the dog as an iconic species within science. That is, the dog sets the pace for how to massage the language surrounding the specialized use of mice and other species who are then seen as legitimate, naturalized partners of science whose evolutionary potential seems to push them willingly into laboratory life. During interviews, all sorts of species have been described to me in ways that underscore this process (and in terms that resonate with how we speak of dog breeds): lab animals of a range of species are “docile,” “easy to handle,” and “good natured,” and even those known for their “strength” or “stubbornness” display their “willingness” to “cooperate” and “enjoy the work” that characterizes hours of experimental engagement. I am often told that lab rats, rabbits, ferrets, and monkeys, alongside beagles, “take naturally to” or have been “bred to thrive” in lab settings. In the context of laboratory domestication, research animals are readily imagined as willing partners entwined in a “mutualistic” relationship with humans, an old dog story that has been retooled to incorporate mice and other creatures.

the intimacy of laboratory encounters Successful encounters with lab animals require significant training and practice. This springs in large part from the realities that one must follow strict protocols when managing, handling, and working around experimental subjects, and that learning takes time and can take a toll on both animal and researcher (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Macdonald 2014). Lack of familiarity with other species plays a significant role too. Whereas nearly all animal technicians and lab veterinarians I have interviewed grew up around animals (who might have been house pets, hunting breeds, or livestock), few researchers could make such claims. In turn, whereas animal technicians and veterinarians gravitate to lab work because they are inspired by a deep affection for non-human species, researchers are drawn to their work because of the science itself. And although many of their respective activities overlap, an animal technician’s primary concerns are animal care and enrichment, while a researcher’s is mastering approaches that facilitate the generation of quality data. Animal research entails a specialized set of skills that ultimately shapes one’s professional arc as a scientist. Such mastery never really rests for long in a stable state. One may claim this is so because no two animals are really alike, but research ethics plays a significant role too. To draw on the language of the Three Rs—replacement, reduction, and refinement—quality

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animal research is constantly undergoing change, and these guiding concepts are equally relevant to research design, species preference, and experimental activities. At the onset of their careers, lab researchers must master a two-pronged approach to animal experiments: as they master specialized skills, they must also learn to do so with emotional detachment. Not unlike novice clinicians, strong sympathetic responses of queasiness, sorrow, guilt, or fear signal that one lacks the emotional backbone to work productively in a lab environment. Although lay readers might assume that seasoned researchers become hardened to animal welfare, my findings demonstrate the opposite. Instead, my data demonstrate that the most experienced lab personnel often prove to be the most empathetic toward the animals with whom they work. In the words of one senior lab director, he eventually learned over the decades to “to think like a monkey,” a sensibility he strives to impart to his graduate students. This affective register, however, is easily overlooked because it tends to be embedded in the mundane, patterned behaviors of quotidian laboratory practices. Close attention to researchers’ thoughts and actions nevertheless reveals how presumably standardized, orthodox routines can also offer compelling evidence of still other eclectic, contradictory, and affective thought and action. With this in mind I ask: How does one learn to master emotional detachment? How might this affective order shift over time? In turn, how do ideas about the morality of animal welfare transform lab space or enable researchers to expand the boundaries of care that correspond to mandated codes of conduct? Of what significance, too, are hierarchies of species preference in shaping human sentiments toward lab animals? In answer, I offer case examples from my research. I begin with the experiences of an entry-level lab assistant, followed by examples involving more seasoned researchers.

Mastering Detachment Alicia, a studious and serious Anglo twenty-two-year-old with brassy red hair, recently graduated from a four-year private college in the Midwest with high honors in biology and neuroscience. Although she originally imagined attending medical school and becoming either a pediatrician or obstetrician, by the end of her sophomore year she realized how much she enjoyed the task-oriented culture of the science lab. While interning for a summer in the sleepy emergency room of her rural hometown’s community hospital, she reached the conclusion that she “lacks the enthusiasm needed for a cheerful bedside manner,” a sentiment I have encountered elsewhere among bioengineers who describe their own professional trajectories

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as being shaped by the self-realization that each of them “is not a people person” (Sharp 2013). Following graduation, Alicia moved not far from her college to a large cosmopolitan city that is well known as a medical research hub. She applied for half a dozen entry-level lab technician jobs at three separate private research universities, and she had the luxury of choosing among several offers. In the end, she opted for a position that would enable her to acquire “hands-on experience with rodents” so that she could “work [her] way up the evolutionary chain” because, to date, her lab experience was “limited to microorganisms.” Although she found this previous research “fascinating in terms of the science,” she felt that involvement with rodents meant “testing whether she liked working with mammalian vertebrates”; also, this would help her decide what her next career move should be. Like the majority of researchers I encounter, she did not grow up with animals. As she explained, “my parents are both chemists and neither one of them likes pets very much, so we never had any.” By the time I met her, she had been fully engaged in a mouse lab for the past nine months, and she had found that she “loves the work.” Alicia spends nearly all of her hours each day in a vast vivarium, a cavernous, windowless room that, she estimates, “houses close to nine thousand mice” who are associated with a range of university labs engaged in diverse projects. Her activities confine her to a small corner of the vivarium, where she tends to several hundred animals associated with research on various cancers conducted by her lab’s principal investigator (PI or lab director) and his graduate and postdoctoral students. Alicia has been busy mastering selective breeding techniques, in which approximately onefourth of the offspring in each litter bear the desired traits; the remaining pups are “culled” or “sacked” (from “sac,” a diminutive form of “sacrifice,” or the term commonly used in laboratories for euthanizing animals). She described the learning process to me as follows: alicia: On my first day I learned all of this mouse stuff. The guy I was replacing was leaving [for graduate school], and he taught me how to pick up and handle a mouse [she demonstrates how to do so, as if she is holding an invisible animal by the base of the tail]. At first they’d run away from me. I finally learned how to just reach in and grab them and pick them up. It took me a long time to be able to do this—now I look back on it and wonder why it took me so long—now it seems so obvious to me how to do it. I now regularly do tail snips [for DNA samples] and toe clippings [for numbering]. It took me a long time to learn the numbering—I’d

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have to go look at my spreadsheets, memorize what to do, and say it over and over to myself as I walked over to where the mice were. Now I can do it without worrying—I know the system now. How did you feel at first about doing this to the mice [that is, clipping off their toes and tips of tails]? I’d screw up and do more pain [to them] than necessary. I’d think, “This sucks—these mice have to put up with me as I learn.” It’s very unintuitive. Can you explain the numbering system to me? I’ve clipped to 3551. We only clip for the last two numbers. We have a spreadsheet. 3551 tells us parentage, D.O.B. [date of birth], age—today is day 1—sex, genotype. And then it’s set up by cage—we have a cage list. All cages have names. For example, one refers to a knock-out gene; another a black background [referring to the mouse’s coat and colony]. I work with a black mouse. I can make a homogenous background [meaning, she can breed mice so some are born all black. She then describes other codes that designate still other genetic traits.] It takes a mouse six weeks to reach sexual maturity. It’s an eight-week cycle, and a three-week gestation. I do a lot of mouse breeding. The ones we don’t need, I sac [using CO2]. Are you in charge of this? Can you tell me what you do? “When I sac them”—I know, but it’s what we all say. I used to ask, “Why don’t we call it killing?” We are killing, and it’s not like anyone sees us, but then everyone says it, so, why not? I now say it without thinking about it. Others just said to me [when I’d ask about it], “Sac is the vocabulary we use.” What does “sac” make you think of? In football you “sack a player,”—you get rid of it and knock it out of the game. . . . I feel like animal death is very central to animal research. A lot of people think, “Oh, you kill animals.” So much of your work leads to death. I think about how someone [in our lab] needs neurocells [from these mice], someone else [needs tumors]. We have to think about it a lot. It’s regulated. It’s the endpoint. I do most of my sacking by CO2 exposure. We all do CO2 [in the lab] where I work. [Others I know in other labs] decapitate them—[they say] it’s more humane. With neonates, you decapitate them with scissors. You use a PBS buffer—it’s isotonic with the body.28 I’m scheduled to learn how to do this next month. Are you comfortable about learning this?

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alicia: I’m not stoked for it. But it’s necessary for what we’re doing. It’s supposed to be the most humane way. I should get over it. It’s what we’re doing. . . . ls: Do you like your job? alicia: I like the people. That was the highest priority when I was choosing which job to take. I’m figuring out how I feel about science. Wow. We do this work to prevent tumors! I like going to work every day. I listen to a lot of podcasts [while I work]. In their essay “Transposing Bodies of Knowledge and Critique,” Carrie Friese and Adele Clarke (2012) offer a detailed description of a lab researcher intent on teaching a new recruit the proper—and most humane—method of killing a lab mouse. Throughout the teaching session the researcher grows increasingly frustrated, troubled by the number of animals that must be sacrificed as the student stumbles through the lesson. In contrast, Alicia’s perspective sheds light on the opposite side of the tutorial, disclosing important aspects of neophyte lab training, most notably the importance of demonstrating, and internalizing, emotional detachment. As she explains, mastering the “unintuitive” skills of lab animal management takes time, patience, perseverance, an acute memory, and stamina. At this point in her training, Alicia focuses exclusively on the method and not the mouse (as typifies interview responses from other entry-level lab assistants like Alicia). Although seemingly mundane, her mastery of the proper way to pick up a mouse is in fact an important technical skill where animal care is concerned. As Dr. Rose, a director of a diabetes rat lab explained to me, I’m embarrassed to say it took me decades to realize that handling a rat properly is a welfare issue—animals that are hand-trained are not afraid of humans, and so injections and the like, and even euthanasia, are far less traumatic for them because they aren’t afraid and trust us. I had to learn this from my animal technicians, and I am adamant that all junior researchers in my lab master this first before I let them move on to doing anything else. I do not want my animals fearful of what we do. This is the foundation of what “moral” means to me.29

Alicia’s emotional detachment is most evident precisely at these moments when animals must be euthanized because, as she puts it, “so much of your work leads to death.” Early on in her job, she questioned the rhetoric of “sacking,” stating, “We are killing, and it’s not like anyone sees us, but then everyone says it, so, why not?” Within such a framework she now elides the depersonalization of animals with humans, as evident in her analogy of the

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“sacked” animal and the “sacked” football player in which she says, “You get rid of it and knock it out of the game” (italics added). To be honest, I had a strong averse response to her description of how mouse pups must be decapitated with scissors. Although this is indeed widely understood as among the most humane ways to kill mouse neonates,30 unlike descriptions provided by other, more seasoned lab personnel I know, Alicia emphasizes that she is “not stoked for it” while realizing that “it’s necessary for what we’re doing” and that she “should get over it.” Of equal importance to Alicia is her ability to respond and think like a young scientist, most clearly demonstrated by the excitement she expresses in being part of important research that could “prevent tumors.” As she learns the necessary hands-on skills, she simultaneously masters the emotional stance that makes one’s total immersion possible, even though, at least at this very early stage in her career, she may well be listening to “a lot of podcasts” while she works as a means to ease the process of emotional transition. If she proves successful, she will indeed “figure out how [she] feel[s] about science.”

Training the Monkey As she begins her intended career as a research scientist, Alicia is still in the process of learning the basics of animal handling, breeding, and “sacking.” As Dr. Rose reveals, though, successful experimental work requires patterned, predictable precision on the part of the researcher and the animal. This patterned precision of human-animal partnerships is most apparent in the actions of seasoned researchers, and especially in contexts involving “sentient” species such as dogs and NHPs. The carefully calibrated motions that enable a researcher to work often for hours beside or in close proximity to a macaque, for example, demonstrate the exquisitely fine-tuned calibration of what might be thought of as paired habitus, or what Brendan Hart, in his work with parents of children with autism, describes as “joint embodiment” (2014). Consider this description from my field notes based on my observation, over the course of much of a day, of an encounter between Jaime, a third-year postdoctoral student in neuropsychology and a five-year-old adolescent male macaque named Rufus. Jaime and Rufus have worked together on average four hours per day, five days per week, for the last two years: Before entering the lab, Jaime issues a set of instructions to me, articulated clearly and calmly, and in a quiet voice. As he explains, Rufus “likes to be alpha,” and whereas not all monkeys are like this, Rufus is most comfortable and happiest in this position vis-à-vis others. This experimental session (which includes preparing the research apparati, donning proper protective attire, retrieving Rufus, running the

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experiment itself, and returning Rufus to his enclosure) spans close to six hours. Throughout, Jaime’s instructions and actions to me reflect carefully thought out and applied best practices where Rufus’s needs and comfort zone are paramount. Because of Rufus’s alpha orientation, Jaime stresses, “Don’t look Rufus in the eye” because this would be read by Rufus as a threatening posture. Instead, I am instructed to look away or look down. Jaime explains this approach is generally a good idea with all the monkeys in this lab (and when I stand outside the door to the monkey enclosure room, I avert my gaze when the other curious inhabitants look straight at me). Jaime explains, too, that I should be quiet and not make any sudden movements. I was on the alert. I was thinking about my habitus. After preparing a small, hand-held container of rewards for Rufus acquired from a fridge in a large storage room, Jaime retrieves a “chair” or boxy Plexiglas enclosure from a row of these lined up against one wall, checks to make sure all parts are in working order, and then weighs it. (He will soon reweigh it once Rufus is sitting within the “chair.”) We then cover our heads and faces with surgical caps, masks, and face guards and don lab coats, latex gloves, and booties; we will remain dressed this way as long as we are in Rufus’s presence. I then follow Jaime down the hall to the housing unit, a spacious room where both sides are lined with “enclosures” or cages that house approximately a dozen pairs of rhesus macaques. Rufus is located near the door (I remain in the outer hallway and peer through an observation window), and Jaime squats down before Rufus’s enclosure, slowly and methodically feeding Rufus grapes, each time waiting for Rufus to stretch out his arm to request food, palm up. (Earlier that morning Jaime had encouraged Rufus’s cage mate, Hatty, into another enclosure.) Jaime explains he had trained Rufus step by step to move from cage to chair, actions I am able to watch through the window. First, Jaime threads a long metal rod with a hook on the end into Rufus’s cage. Rufus, who wears a dog collar, slips the rod’s lead line through his collar ring and then, once Jaime opens the cage door, he gently guides Rufus, who slides with ease into the Plexiglas chair. All of this is done with a syncopated rhythm: Jaime’s and Rufus’s actions are strikingly methodical, consisting of small gestures, miniscule movements, and important tasks, each of which is punctuated with a reward of another grape. As Jaime explained later, Rufus is happiest when his routine is not disrupted. I write in my notebook, “by 8:30 am, the monkey is in the box.” I note, too, that I am witnessing not just Jaime’s but Rufus’s habitus, paired actions that strike me at the time as “a methodical, prescripted dance” highly reminiscent of the work I was once trained to do long ago with dressage horses, where, if well calibrated and properly executed, observers should not be able to detect the rider signaling the horse. Indeed, as Jaime tells me later, the lab vet who trained him on how to

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train Rufus was an expert horse and show dog trainer who applies similar approaches to working with research macaques. Throughout all of this, Jaime remains silent in Rufus’s presence and Rufus, in turn, does not vocalize, nor do any of the other monkeys in the room. I think later, just as the “paired monkeys” in the housing room are quiet, Jaime and Rufus are paired and quiet together, too. Jaime keeps Rufus calm by remaining quiet himself; they consistently mirror each other’s demeanor. Jaime wheels the “chaired” Rufus down the hall, sets up the experiment, and then instates Rufus in the experiment booth, a windowless, and relatively soundproof, black box sort of enclosure that is about the size of a spacious utility closet. Once Rufus is wheeled in place, he will sit for several hours before a computer monitor, rewarded with drops of water or diluted fruit juice (dispensed from a plastic tube mounted near his mouth) each time he successfully accomplishes the tasks put before him. (Tasks are tracked by way of eye movements by cameras mounted in the booth.) Rufus and Jaime remain silent in one another’s presence throughout the next four hours, save for two pivotal moments. The first is when Jaime, ready to initiate the experiment (where Rufus will be “put to work” in front of a computer screen), says to Rufus before closing the door to the somber and soundproofed room, “Have a great session, buddy!” and, again, once the experimental session has concluded, he says before opening the door, “Good job, Rufus!”— two phrases he explains he always says in the same way at the start and conclusion of every session to signal methodically and predictably to Rufus the onset and endpoint of the experimental encounter.

As paired researcher and research subject, Jaime and Rufus epitomize the process of lab domestication as a mutualistic process that binds them in a quasi-intimate and codependent relationship. In stark contrast to Amelia, who is only just now learning how to master the very basics of lab animal husbandry, Jaime’s actions exemplify the expertise that is required to work with a sentient species, and Rufus responds in kind. The skills required of Jaime in training a macaque like Rufus are built on years of earlier experience with other species: first hamsters, then pigs, and within the last three years, macaques. In contrast to another researcher who described “giving up on monkey work,” explaining, “I was never really sure whether I was training the monkey, or the monkey was training me,”31 Jaime draws on his apprenticeship with a horse and dog trainer to perfect a research partnership that demonstrates his ability to “think like a monkey.” This framework has its limits, of course: Rufus’s cooperation is always framed within the context of gathering quality data, and the flip side of his patience or cooperation during the experimental session can just as easily be read as tolerance in a context where he has learned there is no escape route. Yet Rufus’s

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demeanor when he is with Jaime is indeed calm and patient (and tolerant). The contradictory qualities of this partnership are nevertheless palpable when Jaime 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

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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

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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.” Roughly eighty percent of the researchers I interviewed did not have pets when they were growing up, so their first close-up encounters with animals (most notably frogs, rabbits, cats, and fetal pigs) were during dissection assignments in biology labs in secondary school and, later, with live animal subjects in college and beyond. Although the mastery of animal breeding (with rodents especially), running experiments (with a range of species), and euthanasia (where first experiences most likely involved, yet again, rodents) can be bumpy, researchers, as young recruits, readily learn to see lab animals as research subjects. A mantra of lab animal research often voiced in interviews is that lab animals “are neither pets nor wild animals,” and if one is to “master,” “accept,” “survive,” or “thrive” in lab research, one must establish a certain emotional distance from, say, the mice, rats, ferrets, rabbits, dogs, and monkeys who populate one’s experiments. Researchers who do have animals at home describe realizing the joys of pet ownership later in adulthood (most often involving both purebred

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and mongrel dogs), and rarely did I find someone who would voluntarily work in the lab with a species they had at home. Animal technicians and lab-based veterinarians display radically different biographies.34 Nearly all grew up in homes or on farms where sometimes a variety of species were present. Researchers often told me that their parents had no interest in animals or had a pronounced distaste for them, so, in the words of one lab director when speaking of his childhood, “we never even thought about getting a dog.” In contrast, lab-based animal technicians and veterinarians, or those who share the tasks associated with the daily upkeep, welfare, enrichment of animals, and other aspects of “caretaking” may well have grown up with a near-constant stream of animals around them. In turn, pet ownership emerges among animal technicians and veterinarians as an assumed aspect of home life and, for some, even a badge of honor. As one lab veterinarian explained, “vets are very suspicious of other members of our clan who don’t have animals at home— we tend to think there must be something really wrong with them,” a sentiment echoed in the words of a veterinary school professor who told me, “We strongly encourage our students to have pets.” Interestingly, too, whereas veterinarians might raise and show purebred animals (especially dogs, horses, cattle, and sheep), animal technicians typically have pets they “rescued,” “fostered,” “adopted,” or “rehomed” from animal shelters and even labs (I address these themes later in this chapter and again in chapter 4). In one instance, I witnessed an animal technician apologizing to her coworkers for having just bought a purebred dog from a breeder instead of adopting one from a shelter. She nevertheless—like others in her line of work—volunteered several weekends a month at a local animal rescue organization. As a rule, these sentiments and extracurricular activities do not typify the lives of researchers and more junior lab research recruits.

Exceptional Species These sorts of home-based experiences are indicative of animal exceptionalism. By way of example I turn to two vignettes drawn from my fieldwork. The first involves Samantha, a retired Anglo-American neuroscientist and surgeon who is an expert on the effects of head injuries from automobile, motorcycle, and bike accidents. As she explained to me, throughout her career she structured her research design around procedures with the wellbeing of her animal subjects in mind, always making sure those housed in her laboratory sustained the least amount of post-surgical physical debility and thus, as she puts it, “less suffering.” Her species of choice figures prominently in facilitating this decision. Although at the onset of her career she was

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trained to use rhesus macaques, once she became an independent researcher she abandoned primate research altogether because she considered the laboratory conditions for monkeys reprehensible, evidenced in the monkeys’ “unfriendly” and “nasty” temperaments around humans and with each other. Throughout the last two decades she has worked exclusively with pigs because caging requirements allow them to roam in a shared enclosure in the company of others of their kind. She preferred working with swine to other species because she regards them as intelligent creatures who, especially as piglets, are playful and affectionate with humans. Whereas her research required that she administer brain injuries to young lab pigs, she shied away from experiments that render an animal unable to walk without pain, preferring more subtle cues of impairment as evidenced, for instance, in the (in)ability to visually or aurally recognize food, objects, actions, and sounds. In her words, this is where she is “morally most comfortable,” and studies designed by colleagues that render animals more significantly incapacitated caused her to lose sleep at night. She is a strong proponent of ending an animal’s life if there is any sign of suffering, or if suffering might arise in the future, because “death is a better option for the animal” (see also Svendsen and Koch 2014), a sentiment Samantha expresses with equal fervor when speaking of the injuries sustained by human patients, be they adults or children. The second example emerged during a conversation with Will, an IrishAmerican now his fifties, the son of a cardiologist who had an active research career when he conducted cardiovascular surgeries on canine subjects. Whereas at first Will’s father’s laboratory housed Class B or “random source” dogs acquired from city streets or the local pound, he eventually settled on beagles he could purchase from Class A vendors. As Will (and others) explained to me, beagles are a favored breed in many laboratories because of their size and temperament and because they offer a sense of standardization across an animal research colony. When I asked Will if his father ever brought any of these dogs home, the answer was an emphatic “no.” As his father argued, such dogs belonged strictly in the laboratory. Nevertheless, Will grew up with a string of dogs as house pets, and the family always had beagles, and no other breed, at his father’s insistence that they made ideal companions. As such, laboratory and home life bled into one another.

affective politics Following Will’s lead, I conclude this chapter by looping back to the significance of the domesticated dog as lab subject. Dogs exemplify what might best be understood as an iconic or “charismatic” species set within

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the sentimental structure of laboratory science.35 As Claude Lévi-Strauss might say, dogs are “good to think” (1966). As I have demonstrated, lab boundaries are permeable and fluid where human sentiments toward animals are concerned. That is, their affective values in everyday life blend with and inform moral thinking in the lab. Lab researchers, alongside other personnel such as veterinarians and animal technicians, must learn to navigate the moral landscape of animal use, and dogs, as creatures who score especially high on the affective meter, present especially glaring dilemmas. Not only do dogs facilitate a discussion of how animals are denatured and transformed into valuable lab subjects, but they are also among the few species that are now regularly transformed back into companion species through overlapping practices referenced by various parties—from activists to animal technicians to researchers—as “rescue” work, “adoption,” and “rehoming.” Currently, no animal figures more prominently in these initiatives than the lab-based beagle. Beagles serve as an ideal analytical model for exploring the moral imaginary of lab research precisely because, as a recognizable breed, they saunter back and forth with ease between scientific and social worlds.

The Iconicity of Dogs in Science Over a century ago accounts of the treatment of mine or “pit” ponies—who were born, raised, and inevitably died in coal mines—inspired public outrage in Victorian England, leading to legislation that protected these laboring animals in the wake of earlier protections for carriage horses (Peace 1888; Ritvo 1987). A range of other species—from rats and rabbits to monkeys and cats—have similarly inspired public backing of welfare reforms in science. Particular species nevertheless prove to embody especially potent affective powers. What the horse was to harsh Victorian era labor practices in the United Kingdom, the dog is to lab animal welfare in the United States. In such contexts, beagles have proved effective as charismatic creatures worthy of humanitarian rescue. As described above, the widespread practice of stealing (or what some called “kidnapping”) dogs off the streets and from backyards in an era that predates leash laws had a catalytic effect on public support. It is important to note that dogs have long defined a preferred species for laboratory research, as evidenced by Louis Pasteur’s rabies research (see figure 1), William Harvey’s (1628) pathbreaking work in the seventeenth century on blood circulation, and Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s activities in the field known as “classical conditioning” in the late nineteenth century (Asratyan 1953; Windholz 1997). The widespread use specifically

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of stray dogs is a long-standing, standard practice in science, playfully illustrated, for example, by the “biting satire” Heart of a Dog (1925) by Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov,36 where Sharik, a stray from Moscow’s streets, is lured into the home and laboratory of physician Filip Filippovich Preobrazhensky, who temporarily transforms Sharik, through a fantastic act of transplant surgery, into an uncouth, pugnacious, and generally obnoxious canine-human hybrid.37 The entangled fates of Sharik and Dr. Preobrazhensky trouble deeply historicized assumptions within medicine that dogs are reliable, docile, and relatively easy to manage research subjects because of their penchant as a domesticated species to bond with humans—either as pets or as working animals—and because of the ease with which they can be trained, and grow to trust, human companions and handlers. (In Sharik’s case, the dog bites back.) Sharik’s story also foregrounds the long-standing use of “random source” animals and the midcentury shift in the United States (not to mention elsewhere) to Class A–bred dogs like the beagle. Efforts to determine the numbers of dogs employed in American research face significant challenges; here I offer a cursory overview that gives a rough sense of scale. As I am often told by animal welfare experts, lab veterinarians, and researchers, dogs and other animals comprise only a small fraction of the total number of mammalian research subjects. A figure frequently cited in professional talks is that rodents account for somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all lab animals used in the United States today. If we track back to late 1965—just prior to the passing of the AWA— Phinizy reported that, “in an on-the-spot survey five years ago a committee of the National Research Council found that 57 of the medical schools and research centers around the country were using more than 60,000 dogs annual,” and he emphasized that this was probably only a partial representation of even wider use, with numbers varying from one institution to the next (for instance, around 5,000 to 9,000 per year at the University of Minnesota, approximately 4,500 at the NIH, and a few hundred at Montefiore Hospital in New York). Phinizy estimated that “at least 100,000 dogs are used for experiments each year in the laboratories of the nation. The consumption may very well be five times as great. Some dare to say it is more than a million.” Of these, the vast majority were derived from pounds or were stolen “strays” who went for ten to twenty-five dollars each. As he learned, “random sourcing” could be extraordinarily profitable: according to Phinizy, one such supplier, Dierolf Farms, “reputed the biggest seller of unwanted dogs in Pennsylvania, grosses more than $150,000 annually” (1965, 41). Only a fraction (estimated at around 20,000) came from

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specialized “beagle breeders, and their going price is about $100 for a oneyear-old specimen.” (Researchers today tell me they cost around $700 each.) In the wake of the AWA, the use of dogs in research did not cease, though it decreased substantially. Currently, according to the National AntiVivisection Society (NAVS), “dog use in science has declined by two-thirds since 1973,” and the total current figure, according to the USDA, is in the “tens of thousands.” Seventy-five percent of these animals are used in pharmaceutical testing. These figures mark a substantial drop from forty years ago, when numbers exceeded 200,000 in 1976, 1979, and 1984.38 In the wake of welfare reforms, beagles and other hounds (both purebred and mongrel), alongside other breeds (such as schnauzers, Labrador retrievers, pit bull terriers, and greyhounds) continue to be employed in research, where, again, the dog’s size, temperament, tolerance for kennel life, and ability to live in close quarters with other dogs shape researchers’ breed choices.39 Although Canis lupus familiaris is not the most ubiquitous creature in science, it has long reigned as an iconic species of great sentimental value both within and beyond the confines of lab research. In spite of their relatively low numbers compared to mice and rats, dogs—alongside non-human primates—are best understood as a charismatic species of great sentimental value and potent affective power (Lederer 1992). Although their status as companion species (Haraway 2003) helps explain their charisma, the lab beagle’s history is rife with paradoxes. Most significantly, species-specific sentimentality simultaneously facilitates the experimental use of dogs as known, predictable, and familiar animals; informs decisions to employ other species resulting from one’s strong affection for dogs because they are too familiar; generates elaborate transformations that denature or derail them as domestic familiars so as to render them cooperative experimental subjects; and finally, leads lab personnel later to retrain (rather than euthanize) some of them on how to be domestic companions in the world outside the lab once they cease to be of experimental use. Beagles expose still other layers of value: as a purebred species with qualities that render them temperamentally predictable; as a “working” breed (a quality that is prized in lab contexts); and as an American icon of the middle-class American household (after all, Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s independent dog, was a beagle).40

Conflicting Registers of Welfare and Care: The Battle over the Beagle Sid and Nancy—also known as Surf and Turf—are a pair of four-year-old beagles who are variously described as having been “rescued,” “adopted,” and “rehomed” from the same research lab (whose location remains undisclosed).

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This tail-wagging duo has popped up as a pair of poster children (or pups) for not one but several organizations intent on publicizing the lives of laboratory dogs. Oddly, their photos have shown up on websites, in PowerPoint presentations, and in glossy advertisements produced by opposing factions. On one side of the kennel fence stand animal activists, and on the other stand lab professionals, each of whom claim rights to recount these dogs’ stories. Alert audience members and readers must struggle to determine the veracity of their respective accounts: were these two dogs rescued in the dead of night from a lab before they could be euthanized and then whisked off and restored to health in a lab animal safe house before being adopted into two households? Or were they released openly and amidst great fanfare, surrounded by loving lab personnel who together celebrated their lives thus far as medical heroes and as inseparable mates, and then rehomed them as a pair under the roof of an animal technician who already has several other pet dogs? I am less interested in determining these dogs’ provenances and destinies than in exploring how their tales shape moral understandings of animal use in science. I rely on Sid and Nancy—or Surf and Turf—to lead me along the path and assist me in concluding this journey through realms inhabited by iconic lab species. Competing narratives of animal “rescue,” “adoption,” and “rehoming” rely on common tropes that signify welfare efforts in which all parties, regardless of affiliation, strive to underscore their respective mastery of the humane handling and treatment of lab animals. For over half a century, dogs, and especially beagles, have persisted as effective—and affective— iconic species of scientific experimentation. If we first consider the activists’ stance, they always underscore their efforts to “rescue” lab-based beagles who all too often have been “debarked,”41 and although several years old, they have yet to be housetrained and have never “touched grass” or climbed stairs—qualities, abilities, and activities that are regarded as signs of any domesticated dog. In other words, activists seek to demonstrate how lab life denatures dogs in substantial, heartbreaking ways. In counterpoint, labbased personnel have begun to challenge activists’ rescue narratives through their own public efforts to “rehome” their hounds once experiments end, always underscoring the loving care their animals receive within labs and the close attachments they form with one another and with staff members. In this context, “adoption” emerges as a misnomer because the lab is already seen as a legitimate “home” and therefore just one stage along a continuum as these animals move from the USDA-certified Class A dealer where they were bred and born, to the laboratory where they played important roles in advancing scientific knowledge, to a private residence where they will spend

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the rest of their tail-wagging lives as pets (and, notably, frolic on grass and learn to climb stairs). Whereas activists consider beagles to be victims of research, these same animals are celebrated among research staff as medical “heroes.” And whereas among animal activists a “rescued” dog’s lack of house and leash training, inexperience in “touching grass,” and inability to manage stairs evidence neglect and lab cruelty, when lab personnel teach these same skills to “retired” lab dogs, such efforts are emblematic of ever-changing welfare practices that demonstrate an animal’s flexible nature and ability to adapt quickly to a range of new environments. Within the latter register, dogs are not “freed” from labs, they are merely redomesticated so that they may transition from a kennel- to a house-based life. These sorts of competing narratives—regardless of who does the telling—insist on transforming beagles into a certain kind of house pet (whose retraining is eerily reminiscent of human toddlerhood). Interestingly, these efforts overlook the reality that beagles were originally bred as working hounds who would be housed in kennels, not homes, would have no need to be housebroken (or even leash trained), and would have little need to navigate stairs, much less trot across a well-manicured suburban lawn. Such accounts of the victim’s salvation versus the hero’s reward share one crucial element in common: although told as dogs’ tales, they also serve to demonstrate the moral fiber of each stripe of human. There is, in addition, a third pathway that redirects these same dogs to a temporary, liminal position of care prior to release. Whereas several decades ago, for training purposes, veterinary schools, like research labs, obtained lost and abandoned animals from pounds or relied on a steady supply of, say, greyhounds acquired from racetracks, many vet schools now “partner” with industrial labs that wish to “retire” rather than euthanize at least some of their dogs and “donate” them to vet schools where they can be of further educational use. As the director of one such program explained, his team watches for announcements on several professional Listservs that alert them when animals are available for “adoption.” Labs provide their dogs free of charge, the vet school covering the cost of transportation (and this might involve coast-to-coast travel and several days of specialized intransit care). Beagles dominate the lab-to-vet school dog donation trade, and once the animals arrive they are kenneled for several more years at the school, where they are used to train students in relatively noninvasive procedures associated with small animal medicine, including proper handling and how to check vital signs, conduct a thorough medical exam, administer vaccinations, and, sometimes, neuter them. Whereas the use and location

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of lab-based dogs is carefully guarded so as to avoid activist attention, vet schools engage in a more open-access approach to dog use. Typically, inhouse programs engage at the very least members of their institutional community in dog care, posting notices that enable students and staff to sign up for playtime, help teach the dogs new behaviors (especially stair climbing and house- and leash-training), and take them out for daily walks on institution grounds. Following a few years of “service” in the school, these dogs are microchipped and then “adopted,” most frequently by school personnel.42 Some vet schools—alongside vet technician programs—boast having been involved in beagle training-to-adoption for several decades. Through such practices, beagles are certainly, at least in part, sources of redemption for institutions that bear the moral weight of bygone days when both labs and vet schools relied on a steady stream of animals who were taken from pounds, racetracks, or the street and who often died during terminal surgeries or other procedures. (Today, much veterinary school training consists of using anatomical models and haptic training devices, or shadowing staff in animal hospitals.) Such redemption is nevertheless marked by a certain level of skittishness, for whereas animal rescue groups widely employ dogs in part as marketing tools by seeking homes among the public at large (and, when possible, among well-known personalities), vet school programs more typically rehome their dogs to the households of other employees. In other words, beagles are frequently adopted “inhouse.” And whereas animal rights groups consider any dog worthy of salvation, in reality some animals are unable to make a smooth transition from lab to home. As Susan, a vet school employee who has trained a long string of dogs over the decades and who adopted one of her school’s beagles two years ago, explained, “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Homer’s never going to be housetrained. He’ll always prefer his special corner of my carpet.” In other words, it can be hard for at least some seasoned lab dogs to learn new house-based tricks. Stories of rescued beagles may foreground (among activists) or erase (during lab release events or by way of vet school donations) accounts of other animals who were “sacked” as part of research protocols. Those animals who emerge from labs and then make their way to vet schools and private homes are, in the words of one vet technician, “the lucky ones.” Today, the beagle reigns supreme as an icon of welfare in one final sense. Whereas this breed is hardly the only one employed in science, vet training, and activist rescue work, the breed is by far the most popular poster child on all fronts. Beagles are regularly described to me as “affectionate,” “cute,” “adorable,” “tolerant,” and “forgiving,” and whenever I have sought to

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redirect interviews to focus on other kinds of dogs, the discussion inevitably gravitates back to beagles. On several occasions I have encountered lab beagles housed alongside other larger, lankier dogs sometimes described as “mongrel hounds,” whose presence is all but erased in discussions of dog welfare and rescue.43 Indeed, in one vet technician training center, the beagles had been given names upon arrival, whereas staff continued to refer to the larger hounds by the numbers tattooed inside their ears. And unlike the beagles who resided across the aisle in group kennels, over a dozen gangly and gregarious “mongrel” hounds were penned individually, where several exhibited behaviors, such as pacing, that were indicative of former lives devoid of quality “enrichment.” School staff regularly signed up to walk the beagles, but fewer expressed much enthusiasm for working with these large, unruly mongrels.

conclusion: sentimental values Throughout this chapter I have examined the embeddedness of the affective power of particular species. The investigative essays that appeared in Life and Sports Illustrated prove instrumental for several reasons. First, they foreground the pivotal role dogs play in reconfiguring the moral landscape of lab science. Second, dogs themselves demonstrate the catalytic qualities of certain charismatic species to inspire outrage, debate, and action in ways that prove equally important for instigating welfare reforms. And third, by rallying public support behind welfare reform, these foundational essays paved the way for a far more recent, and, indeed, surprising blending of activist and research efforts to rescue animals from science. Within these contexts, dogs, as domesticates of science par excellence, are especially effective in exposing the otherwise hidden affective register of animal research. Public sentiments that instigate welfare reform then loop back to the lab, where the beagle inspires introspection about what is entailed in practicing (im)moral science. The complexity of this moral terrain is most evident in the animal model approach, where a range of species from rats to macaques are regarded as ideal experimental proxies for humans. Not all animals are created equal, however. Within this framework the canine subject is a model of a very special order, exemplifying species preference and thereby foregrounding the complexities of human-animal intimacy in science. The troublesome sentimental power of laboratory dogs has inspired long-standing activist, media, and public pressure to renaturalize them so that they may adapt to post-laboratory life, and no other species, save chimpanzees, has garnered

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this level of specialized attention. Dogs are nevertheless troublesome creatures because they must be (re)domesticated to master new, house-bound behaviors when activists, lab personnel, and vet schools strive to “rescue,” “adopt,” “retrain,” or “rehome” them, thereby flagging the workings of competing moral registers.44 Dogs are akin to foundational ancestors of science: historically, they dominate the archaeological record as early human companions and they figure prominently as a favored domestic species in the home, on the farm, and in the field; within science they are simultaneously prized experimental subjects and catalysts for welfare reform. As model “working” animals, one encounters a bit of the dog in other species who, as neither pet nor wild animal, must be trained (not tamed) for experimental use. Within this framework, activists argue that researchers train dogs to be docile so they will submit to invasive procedures that inevitably harm the animal, and that conditioning techniques can break a creature’s spirit, causing irreparable harm. No doubt this is true in some quarters. On the other side, lab personnel assert that methodical and carefully directed training transforms an animal into a cooperative and even enthusiastic working partner who, when cared for properly, can thrive in a lab (where welfare practices both protect an animal from harm and generate quality data). As Dr. Rose maintains, this approach proves key even at the moment when an animal must be euthanized. My purpose has not been to defend the value, strengths, weaknesses, or pitfalls of lab animal use and practice. Instead, I focus on these debates to expose the complexities of the sentimental structure that undergirds lab research. Beagles, situated within a dialectic of animal welfare and care, reveal a politics of species preference within the affective menageries of science. They are, in short, moral barometers of lab experimentation. With their ear tattoos and implanted microchips, at least some of these canine subjects, as the honorary descendants of Lucky, Lancer, Reds, alongside “the martyred Pepper,” might well go “home.”

2. Why Do Monkeys Watch TV?

In 1978 a pair of experimental psychologists showed a seasoned research chimp named Sarah videos of a male human actor presented with a series of challenges in which, for example, he struggled to reach an inaccessible banana,1 tried in vain to free himself from a locked cage, and sat shivering next to a malfunctioning heater. In each case the researchers, David Premack and Guy Woodruff of the Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory at Emory University, provided Sarah with a set of cards, only one of which offered the appropriate solution: a stick to retrieve the banana, a key to open the cage door, a flame to light the heater. Of special interest was whether Sarah’s responses demonstrated analogic—or symbolic—thought and, thus, “theory of mind” in a non-human primate (Premack and Woodruff 1978; cf. Lincoln, Andrews, and Rosenblum 1995, 515). Within cognitive psychology and animal behavior studies, this research generated lively debates— and plenty of skepticism—that persist to this day.2 At stake was whether Sarah could think and reason like us. What intrigues me most, however, is Premack and Woodruff’s decision to show Sarah a video of a human challenged by various problems as a means to test her non-human primate abilities against those of humans (Harris et al. 1999, 40–41). Embedded within the experiment’s design were the paired assumptions that Sarah could reason like humans (and perhaps even sympathize with a human’s plight) and that visual technology could mediate the species divide. Today, the living quarters of captive primates—be they zoo, sanctuary, or laboratory inhabitants—are often equipped with television screens that display repetitive video loops, devices human personnel describe to me as preventing, for instance, pacing and rocking, behaviors that signal distress or psychological illness. Television is ubiquitous in primate labs, widely touted by cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and other experimental 76

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researchers as an important form of “enrichment” and “best practice” that some even presume to be a standard of non-human primate care mandated by animal welfare legislation. As a prominent neuroscientist explained during a panel on NHP welfare hosted by an elite law school, “[the macaques] in my labs spend two to three hours [a day] playing video games” and, in addition to having social housing (the gold standard of lab animal welfare), “our monkeys watch TV.” Even after a decade of studying laboratory worlds, I remain curious and somewhat flummoxed by television’s ubiquity, where its widespread use exemplifies a normative “logic of [animal] care” (Mol 2008). Berger once asked, “Why look at animals?”—a provocative question in contexts where scientists watch monkeys watching TV. In the United States and United Kingdom, where my work has been based, contemporary lab personnel— from lab directors and graduate students to animal technicians—recognize television as a legitimate research tool for accessing and assessing the human-like cognitive abilities of a variety of NHPs. They also regard television as an appropriate creature comfort when these same animals are not actively engaged in research experiments. For simplicity’s sake, throughout this chapter I will focus primarily on the laboratory lives of rhesus macaques, a species widely regarded as the quintessential research monkey.3 Why do lab monkeys watch TV? Where lie the origins of television’s presumed worth as a technology of care and animal welfare? How might lab-based television be understood as a moral project, one that shapes the entwined lives of captive primates and human lab personnel? Such questions are simultaneously historical and ontological. In response, this chapter consists of three parts: in the first, I trace the historic arc of the scientific use of visual technologies in primate labs, where the logic of scientific research—and thus of researchers—is the primary focus. Between the 1930s and 1970s, a handful of scientists employed motion pictures, television shows, video loops, and computer games as research tools; thereafter, a shift occurred when lab personnel began to espouse the value of these same technologies as forms of “enrichment” during hours when NHPs were not actively engaged in experiments. Today, many lab-based monkeys track back and forth between lab space, where they actively engage with television and computer screens during experiments, and their housing enclosures, where TV is provided for their amusement during “downtime.” The second section serves as an interlude of sorts. I argue that this blurring of experimental and downtime television engagement exposes a quirky blending of research knowledge with a more general societal fascination with simian subjectivity-qua-humans. I home in on the proliferation in

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popular culture of claims that NHPs are fascinated by TV. In the third and final section, I return to the laboratory, this time considering mundane, quotidian practices informed by my ethnographic engagement in a lab housing rhesus macaques. Here I focus on lab animal technicians, or “caretakers.”4 They, like the monkeys themselves, straddle diverse domains of lab space, prepping animals for experiments while also overseeing their care during downtime. Within a framework of animal welfare, animal technicians blend scientific and popular understandings of what monkeys most need and desire. I pay special attention to the moral values they assign to television in their efforts to “enrich” monkeys’ lives, a form of domestication that I argue shapes the lives of both animals and humans. With these goals in mind, I ask, How does television—alongside other related visual technologies—figure in the “making” of the monkey (Lowe 2004; cf. Sharp 2011c) as a moral project in laboratory science? What might the widespread propensity to use television for purposes of distraction tell us about lab-based humans’ understandings of monkeys’ needs and desires? Finally, how might a television’s presence transform laboratory space into something other than a research domain? I assert that lab-based television is doubly moral: it evidences the “humanness” of monkeys alongside the “humane” qualities of their human caretakers, who together are entwined in a “double helix” (Chen 2014, 88–89) of scientific domestication.

a monkey’s history of visual media When, then, and under what circumstances did monkeys begin to watch TV?5 Historically, one encounters a slow, gradual elision between the video monitor as research tool (as with Premack and Woodruff’s work with Sarah) and assumptions that chimps and other NHPs enjoy and somehow understand visual media (as reflected in the neuroscientist’s testimony of his lab’s enrichment practices). Robert Butler, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, is widely credited as being among the first to conduct controlled experiments on NHPs’ responses to visual media (1958, 1961). However, as Butler explained in 1961 in his seminal publication “The Responsiveness of Rhesus Monkeys to Motion Pictures,” preliminary research in fact dates back to the 1930s, when his colleague Heinrich Klüver, a psychologist and animal behaviorist, showed film clips to various species of restrained monkeys and recorded their reactions.6 According to Butler, Klüver . . . suggested that a study of monkeys’ responses to motion pictures could provide interesting and valuable information about their emotional and perceptual world. He exposed several species of monkeys

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to motion pictures and observed their reactions. There was little or no behavioral evidence indicating that a Lemur and a Java monkey were attending to the film and Klüver was doubtful whether spider monkeys and squirrel monkeys were responding selectively to the motion pictures. The reactions of Cebus monkeys, on the other hand, indicated that they were attending to the projected images. One animal displayed unmistakable signs of fear when a large African Python appeared on the screen. Another reacted similarly when confronted by a close-up of a lion.7 (Klüver 1933, 305–06, as described by Butler 1961, 239)

In other words, at the same time that American audiences were viewing early talkie films in theaters, Klüver’s monkeys were, in parallel fashion, subjected to films in experiments. This elision of human and monkey viewers is significant because it signals early scientific efforts to observe primates’ reactions to discern clues for understanding human psychology and perception. During periods of experimental engagement, films enabled an observant monkey to be just like us. Butler’s experiments, conducted thirty years later, involved showing various images to a dozen restrained juvenile and adult rhesus macaques. Butler focused on the monkeys’ “responsiveness” to a range of “visual incentives,” consisting of moving versus still images that were either in or out of focus, some of which were clearly inspired by Klüver’s original experiments. As Butler explained, Experiment I [involved] . . . (a) a 16 mm. motion picture, in color, showing a male and a female rhesus monkey together in a large, wired enclosure. During filming, the animals engaged at one time or another in eating, sex, threatening the photographer, and climbing on the wire netting; (b) colored 35 mm. slides of the same animals participating in each of the four behaviors listed above . . . [In] Experiment II . . . the [research subjects] were shown four motion pictures in the following order: Film A—“Social Behavior of the Rhesus Monkeys,” Film B—“Indian Whoopee” [a Woody Woodpecker animated cartoon],8 Film C—Behavioral Characteristics of the Rhesus Monkey,” and Film D—“Snakes.” (1961, 240)

Butler concluded that “changing scenes” of moving pictures helped maintain the monkeys’ gaze for longer periods of time, and that “well-articulated figures” seemed to hold their attention more than less clear ones. This was so even with the cartoon, which was “chosen for its artificiality,” though, interestingly, two monkeys were more attentive when the snake film was out of focus. A key question that arose was whether the images provided enough incentive for the monkeys to remain interested in the projected images for a sustained period of time. Butler concluded, “These preliminary

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studies suggest that rhesus monkeys are attentive to motion pictures. But more important, they add evidence to the contention that the motion picture technique is a feasible tool to use in studying the perceptual and emotional reactions of monkeys. Superficially, response durations appear to be sensitive to changes in the incentive conditions and can, of course, be precisely measured. Repeated observations of monkeys performing in this test apparatus suggest that brief response durations are associated with fear or anxiety on the part of the monkey” (1961, 244). Butler thus underscored that attention did not necessarily signal, say, a monkey’s pleasure or curiosity. In an effort to detect such responses, he recommended future research involving “fear evoking and non-fear evoking situations as incentive conditions,” in which incentives included “motion picture, photographs, homogeneously illuminated screen, and darkness” (1961, 244, 245; see also Butler and Woolpy 1963). Even at this early stage, television is its own reward. Whereas one encounters a paucity of evidence of television’s lab presence between the 1930s and 1960s, Butler’s work eventually inspired others to revisit these questions. A decade later Nicholas Humphrey, a theoretical psychologist and animal behaviorist at the University of Cambridge, conducted research designed, again, to track monkeys’ responses to visual stimuli. In one key experiment, Humphrey employed two adult male macaques to whom he showed still images of “ ‘men’ (a portrait of the chief assistant), ‘monkeys’ (two infant monkeys playing), ‘other animals’ (a cow, a hen), ‘flowers’ (a clump of violets), ‘foods’ (a bunch of bananas), and ‘abstract paintings’ (Mondrian: Composition, 1920)” alongside 8 mm “cine films” (1972, 401; see also 1971). The latter consisted of either fifteenminute loops or full-length shorts of Disney cartoons “featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and a supporting cast of lions, chipmunks, ghosts, etc.” (1971, 403). Like Butler, Humphrey employed both focused and unfocused projections; he also tested the monkey’s responses to “bright” black-and-white images versus “red” ones (the same images were projected through a colored filter). Humphrey’s account of his research design provides rich details on the conditioning and thus the “making” of the monkey as a reliable viewer of photos and films. Briefly, after the monkeys were trained how to hold down a viewing button, they were placed individually in a testing chamber consisting of a small, rectangular box fitted with a screen and slide and cineprojectors, alongside another camera that recorded the monkey’s actions. This chamber was designed so that the animal could control the projections and their duration, the experimenter tracking which images each monkey observed and for how long. The setup itself is loosely described as a tiny

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little theater of sorts, the monkey entering the chamber when the “house lights” were on; once switched off, the monkey could control one hundred seconds of viewing. The “house lights” were then switched back on, and the monkey was rewarded with two peanuts during a twenty-second break before the “house lights” were dimmed again. An individual session allowed for up to ten cycles of viewing, consisting overall of more than 250 sessions for each animal, occurring six days a week and often twice a day. According to Humphrey, each monkey changed images in rapid succession, regardless of the stimuli, and each soon showed clear preferences. A key factor in shaping a monkey’s “interest” appeared to be information content, where interest faded with time and with repetitive viewing of the same images. That is, “novelty” mattered. “Pleasure,” on the other hand, remained stable in response to such preferred qualities as brightness and color. Humphrey was intrigued that the monkeys in this and an earlier experiment demonstrated “almost identical” preferences under certain conditions (1972, 413; see also 1971). When shown still images, the two macaques preferred those of animals over the human, flowers, and inanimate objects. Apparently, too, they preferred the full feature cartoons over the spliced loops, and blackand-white over reddened images (1972). Sadly, perhaps, Humphrey does not specify whether the monkeys demonstrated a penchant for certain cartoon characters over others, a theme that will reemerge in my discussion below on how contemporary lab personnel privilege specific televised images as evidencing a logic of care. Klüver, Butler, and Humphrey are certainly not the only psychologists of this era to test monkeys’ interests in visual media (see Butler and Woolpy 1963; Haude and Detwiler 1976; Haude, Kruper, and Patton 1966; Sackett 1965; Swartz and Rosenblum 1980). Nevertheless, I dwell on their experiments because they exemplify crucial moments in science to comprehend the willingness among NHPs to engage with visual technologies. Especially important is the regular pairing of perception (What do they watch?) with emotion (What do they desire?). Of special interest to me, too, are genres of visual imagery that pervade these experiments: serendipity characterizes monkeys’ television options from the very start, most evident, for instance, in Klüver’s decision to show a close-up of a lion and an African python to lab-bred monkeys of Asian origin; Butler’s selection of a Woody Woodpecker cartoon that featured animals and Indians; and Humphrey’s use not only of Mondrian’s geometric art, but, more important for my discussion here, Disney cartoons, whose main characters are archetypes of American television and film familiar to young and older audiences in the United States and elsewhere. Here one encounters a

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bold, clear elision between the human (and child) and (sometimes juvenile) monkey, and, more broadly, between known human and presumed animal delight. On a visit to the ape house at the zoo, John Berger once mused that it is not always clear who is being observed and who is the audience. As he explained, “on both sides the drama begins with resemblance and the uneasy relationship that exists between resemblance and closeness” (1990, 41). This principle holds true among scientists, too: whereas other laboratory animals such as fish, mice, rats, or pigs are readily employed as “models” or proxies for—and thus instead of—humans during a host of experimental procedures, the logic that informs scientific engagement with NHPs is far more complicated because, as scientists themselves often tell me, they are so “like us.” This tension is evident in the experimental presence of visual media: the television as research tool inverts the “uneasy relationship” precisely because the monkey’s presumed desire bears the prospect of mirroring (and not merely modeling) our own. That is, during these moments of viewing, we stand in for the monkey as we watch him view stills and films originally produced solely for human pleasure. This fluidity is a defining principle that informs the logic of primate lab experimentation: we are the monkey, and the monkey is us.

Visual Technologies and Primate Desire Just as human engagement with film and television informed research strategies with apes and monkeys, by the 1980s computer games began to make similar inroads within laboratory space. This is a story that begins with quirky innovations that have profound, long-term effects on primate welfare practices. In her now classic work The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum recounts how the early adoption of video games as tools for studying chimpanzee cognition subsequently informed efforts to deter research macaques from acts of self-harm during extended periods of experimental confinement. Not unlike the introduction of film as a research tool, the first step of this process yet again involved the conflation of chimp and human, or what Blum identifies as interspecies “boundary blurring” (1994, 31). According to Blum, in 1984 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a psychologist and primate specialist based at Georgia State University, went shopping during the Christmas season for computer games: “Savage-Rumbaugh didn’t want the computer for a toy, though. Her mind wasn’t on the holidays at all; she wasn’t planning a gift for her son. She wanted to find out if her two research chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin, could play computer games, that pastime of modern human adolescence. She wondered if they could hold a

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joystick in their hairy, dexterous hands and use it to shoot down targets” (Blum 1994, 32). After designing a simple program where a joystick enabled the user to move a cursor toward a “box-like target,” SavageRumbaugh demonstrated it to Sherman and Austin, and “within ten minutes, they’d literally pushed her out of the way. . . . In the beginning, [Sue] and Sherman competed quite a bit, and he did extremely well. The first time he beat her, she pretended to be very disappointed. And after that, there was a suggestion that he was deliberately slowing down his responses sometimes, letting her win” (Blum 1994, 32–33). Within two years, SavageRumbaugh and her then-husband and research collaborator, Duane Rumbaugh, inspired an American-French team at NASA’s Ames Research Center to test the viability of giving video games to rhesus macaques on space shuttle flights. The Rhesus Project, as it was called, focused on bone mass loss during prolonged periods in space; unwilling to impose extended confinement on human astronauts, researchers wished to use restrained rhesus macaques as experimental surrogates (Blum 1994, 38–39; see also Meunier, Duktig, and Landi 1989). Blum describes macaques as “tough monkeys” who “held the promise of being good space travelers.” The research involved two weeks of isolation where individual monkeys would be “completely closed in a metal and Plexiglass box so that they could see each other but not touch.” Researchers worried the conditions would induce harm, and “the last thing NASA scientists wanted was to have their astronauts step triumphantly out of the space shuttle followed by technicians carrying two bloody and neurotic monkeys.” Rodney Ballard, Rhesus Project director, reached out to the Georgia team for help. Rumbaugh introduced a computer game to some macaques to see what they would do (Blum 1994, 35–37; see also Washburn and Rumbaugh 1992). As he explained to Blum, “we had two rhesus macaques already here, Abel and Baker. We showed them the joysticks and it was just like falling off a log. We started in March, and by June, I was giving a presentation to a joint NASA-French symposium. It just blew everyone’s mind . . . Thank God we didn’t let the rhesus into the library to read the literature” (Blum 1994, 37). Blum continues, paraphrasing Rumbaugh: Not only did the rhesus macaques take to the computer games, but they were good, really good. Holding the joystick in their small hands . . . they learned to operate the equipment with precision: to chase, to capture, to pursue moving targets, to shoot bullets of light and hit targets. It wasn’t only the joy of the chase. They received food rewards . . . but . . . the monkeys liked the work, the challenge, even more than the food. When the scientists left Abel and Baker in front of a computer,

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they would return to find the monkeys absorbed in the work, holding a monkey biscuit absently in one hand while plying the joystick with the other.9 (Blum 1994, 37)

This NASA-inspired step facilitated a leap for monkey-kind in laboratory domains elsewhere, marked by an expansion in the use of visual media from mere research tool to monkey distraction. The subsequent phase in this process—whereby television especially figures within a moral logic of animal care—arises in conjunction with animal welfare reform. This logic is conveyed today in the widespread claim that television “enriches” the lives of captive monkeys when they are not actively engaged in research. By now, television, originally imagined as a research “incentive,” has now come full circle, widely understood by lab personnel as something NHPs willingly watch during downtime.

Animal Welfare and Monkey Wisdom How, then, does television become a presumed object of monkey desire? Simultaneous with NASA’s efforts to subdue restrained macaques, researchers elsewhere who were interested in animal welfare took up Butler’s charge and conducted experiments designed to determine whether a monkey’s attention to television demonstrated interest and, if so, whether this signaled pleasure or fear. As NASA’s efforts reveal, this research emerged in response, too, to scientists’ desires to keep monkeys calm, focused, and docile. These desires were driven by concerns for animal safety and well-being in the name of successful research outcomes, an approach that informs a contemporary lab-based logic of care. An implicit understanding here is that the inescapable conditions of laboratory life are in and of themselves detrimental to a monkey’s well-being. In an effort to explore the origins of this transition, I offer a cursory review of primate-related animal welfare reforms in the United States. A key item of legislation is the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, subsequently revised each decade since 1985. The 1985 amendment focused explicitly on definitions of “humane care,” a category of practices that encompassed proper housing and sanitation; exercise (e.g., for dogs); guidelines on animal euthanasia; and the provision of “an adequate physical environment to promote the psychological well-being of nonhuman primates” (Bayne and Camacho 2014, 657).10 Subsequently, in 1999 the USDA, which oversees, for example, animal housing requirements and conducts health inspections, issued a detailed report authored by Fajzi, Reinhardt, and Smith with a strong emphasis on “environmental enrichment,” specifically for captive primates (Fajzi, Reinhardt, and Smith 1989). The report recognized the

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difficulties in measuring primate psychological well-being (or PWB), as evidenced by its comprehensive literature review. The authors explained, “There is a consensus emerging in the literature on primate enrichment that ‘species-typical’ or ‘species-appropriate’ behavior should be the goal of enhancement programs, and that it is important for the animal to be able to express a ‘normal repertoire’ or a ‘full range’ of normal behavior—a range that is complete and balanced. . . . Environments should be complex enough to allow a variety of activity and stimulus-response options. Also, it is difficult to interpret an animal’s behavior and activity levels if it has relatively few realistic choices of behavior in that environment” (1989, 8). This report enables us to witness how television is eventually refined as a species-specific technology that figures more generally within increasingly complex understandings of what defines a healthy environment for a range of NHPs employed by science. Because captive animals generally lack the “ability and/or motivation to move about freely and carry out many of the behaviors their species normally exhibit in a natural environment” (1989, 8), by this point enhancement programs are touted as important, if not essential. Fajzi et al. recognized the complexities of determining what made for appropriate stimuli, given that not all species’ needs are the same, as evident, for instance, in diverse forms of social organization, foraging activities, dexterity, etc. (see especially 1989, 14–24).11 An underlying assumption that informs the report is that prolonged, generally lifetime, captivity is psychologically harmful to primates and requires deliberate and systematic forms of human intervention to safeguard their well-being. A cornerstone of the report was the “critical element concept,” whereby its authors employed the analogy of a food pyramid as a means to explain proportions of need, which they mapped out as the “five elements” of care, consisting of social grouping, the special social needs of infants, “structure and substrate” (that is, enclosure design), foraging opportunities, and “manipulanda” (a technical term for materials that encourage sensory engagement, such as climbing structures, grooming boards, toys, and food variety). As the report stressed, “a minimally acceptable program of environment enhancement will contain all five” (1989, 9). The report identified yet another five domains of sensory stimulation—visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory—with detailed discussions of each. The critical care concept underscored that no single stimulus is sufficient. Instead, enrichment programs should be comprehensive, varied, sensitive to species-specific needs, and recognize that animals may respond individually to given stimuli (1989, 8–10). Interestingly, a significant portion of the report addressed visual stimuli, a category that incorporated primate posturing and facial signals; sensitivity

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to light, color, and movement; and visual engagement with manipulanda. More specifically, its authors cautiously recognized the potential value of visual media, citing evidence that some animals, including NHPs and other species (most notably domestic cats and dogs), responded to moving images on television screens. Of concern was that daily practices too often failed to recognize the importance of individual variation. The authors elaborated as follows: Motion can be used as visual stimulation in various forms such as TV, videos, or video games. . . . Television should only be presented in a way that primates have the choice to watch it, as some television images may be disturbing. Several studies have evaluated the ability of audiovisual and computer media to increase the complexity of the environment, especially for singly-caged primates. . . . [some] chimpanzees [express] individual preferences . . . [and those] who observed “real” world events on TV seemed to understand the TV monitor . . . [others] have demonstrated they can learn to use a joystick. . . . [as have] rhesus macaques.12 (Fajzi, Reinhardt, and Smith 1989, 28)

This is the wedge that pries open the cage door and enables the introduction of television and computer games as standardized practices of downtime stimulation that, nevertheless, all too often target a generic monkey. Although the report was intended to provide cautionary and innovative advice, on several occasions during interviews, research scientists have alluded to this section as justifying and, although misread as such, mandating the provision of TV in primate solitary and group enclosures. Although elsewhere the report stresses the importance of “environmental complexity” in which human caretakers need “to provide the animals with some degree of novelty and control over their environment” (1989, 31), once visual technologies enter lab monkeys’ enclosures, all too often a television’s presence demonstrates uncritical interpretations of what entails animal “welfare” shaped, I argue, by the pleasure humans themselves derive from watching a monkey watch TV.

primetime for primates Americans have long been captivated by the possibility that non-human primates might understand, or, at the very least, find pleasure in television viewing. For example, one can locate with ease exemplary images and videos simply by typing “Koko the Gorilla” into the search tab of one’s web browser. Koko, a western lowland gorilla born in 1971 at the San Francisco

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Zoo, is best known for her lifetime work with Francine “Patty” Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation in California and her knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL),13 alongside her ability to understand a wide range of spoken English.14 This basic search generates a plethora of photographs and videos of Koko watching news programs, television sitcoms, and movies. Indeed, Koko herself is a well-known television personality in her own right who, over several decades, has attracted a range of media stars— including child show host Mr. Rogers (Fred Rogers), comedian Robin Williams, and TV sitcom star Betty White—all of whom have visited and posed for pictures with Koko within her lab, where there is inevitably a television set or, more recently, a computer monitor in the background. In this context, television is a mundane aspect of captive primate existence, something that comes to life, so to speak, when Koko receives well-known ambassadors of American mass media programming. Such images of the pleasure Koko derives from television offer an intriguing entry point for thinking more critically about the proliferation of visual technologies in laboratory domains. (One should not forget that Koko has spent her life as a lab subject.) Koko’s love of television is hardly considered unique among NHPs: as we have already seen, the history of primate television viewing extends back more than eighty years and involves chimpanzees, macaques, squirrel monkeys, and still other primate viewers. As Koko’s story reveals, alongside that of other NHPs described earlier, television does indeed begin as a research tool that then also becomes a presumed object of primate desire. As television undergoes this transformation, scientific knowledge of primate cognition gives way to anecdotal and lay readings of what NHPs see and understand. Amid these processes, television as research technology is transformed into a favored form of environmental enrichment, whereby its use in lab settings exposes human desires that loop back to inform quotidian animal welfare practices. As I have learned from interviews with lab personnel, the cinematic tastes of lab-based apes and monkeys define a specialized genre of storytelling, exposing a quirky realm of urban laboratory folklore that circulates within the world of captive primate care. I have been told on numerous occasions, for instance, of a lab whose captive chimps love watching Planet of the Apes (1968), a story rich in inversions, given that this movie tells the tale of a marooned space-traveling human, George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston), who becomes the captive lab subject of two chimpanzee researchers, Drs. Zia and Cornelius (played by Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter) within a hierarchical, multispecies primate society that enslaves humans. (I have yet to encounter anyone who can identify the lab where

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this story ostensibly originates.) Indeed, the presumed popularity of the film among chimp audiences is a trope of American popular culture. For example, a more recent rendition of this story was played out as a publicity stunt in 2014 when human animal handlers took two juvenile chimpanzees to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, an event that was aired on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”15 As we shall see below, it also informs welfare practices with lab monkeys. Associated lab-based practices that target research subjects during downtime reveal a cascade of understandings and assumptions: first, that television makes sense to a range of primate species because, like us, they somehow cognitively understand what they are watching; second, because they presumably understand television, that it is an object of pleasure and desire among gorillas, chimps, macaques, and still other species; third, that this presumed desire then informs understandings among lab personnel that television is a suitable form of environmental enrichment, thereby reframing it as a health-inducing technology that belongs in ape and monkey enclosures. As such, television viewing is understood as a “humane” form of primate “care.” Informed by this logic, the television set has become a natural feature of lab space intended for monkey inhabitants. But what is really known, in scientific terms, about how NHPs watch TV? And how does such knowledge inform, or become conflated, with care practices? That is, what counts as evidence of enrichment in the research literature versus in the context of everyday laboratory life?

The Enriched Lives of Laboratory Monkeys As noted earlier, a now widely understood, though often unstated, premise in science is that captivity is unnatural and stressful for primates, even among those who know no other life than research labs where they were born and raised. Whereas, as Harris et al. explain, the amended Animal Welfare Act “requires that research facilities provide environmental enhancement adequate to promote the psychological well-being of nonhuman primates. . . . This mandate has posed a formidable task to researchers and regulators alike, because the Animal Welfare Act does not specifically define ‘psychological well-being’ but rather leaves its definition open for interpretation” (1999, 48; cf. Lutz and Novak 2005). Experts in animal behavior regularly underscore that the most successful enrichment strategies are those that are sensitive to species-specific and individual animals’ needs. As Corrine Lutz and Melinda Novak stress, not all NHPs are alike: “For example, some species are primarily arboreal whereas others are primarily terrestrial. Some species have thumbs that permit fine motor manipulations

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whereas others do not. Species-typical information can then be used to select enrichment strategies that are morphologically feasible and behaviorally relevant for the animal under consideration” (2005, 179). In other words, strategies may vary considerably across species of monkeys (such as baboons, capuchins, macaques, or marmosets) as well as among members of similar subspecies (such as a rhesus, crab-eating, or pig-tailed macaque). As Klüver and Butler each recognized long ago, not all monkeys—neither as a species nor individually—watch or respond to visual media in the same way (see also Harris et al. 1999; Haude and Detwiler 1976; Haude, Kruper, and Patton 1966; Platt and Novak 1997; Plimpton, Swartz, and Rosenblum 1981; Swartz and Rosenblum 1980). These observations are important for my arguments here and below because television is especially potent in facilitating the erasure of speciesspecific differences while simultaneously enabling the translation of observations about individual animals into standardized practices for all. The flawed logic inherent in such practices is illustrated by the following set of hypothetical statements: Hercules, a crab-eating macaque, likes to watch television more than his enclosure mates Xena and Gabrielle; nevertheless, when lab personnel speak of Hercules, he frequently stands in for all monkeys with whom they work, whereby Hercules’s attention to a TV screen offers evidence of a potent source of enrichment for all macaques (for Hercules, Xena, and Gabrielle, and for not merely crab-eating macaques, but an even wider variety of rhesus monkeys, too). Put more simply, Planet of the Apes will intrigue all primates, regardless of individual character or species.16 Lutz and Novak flag such practices as being rooted in anecdotal knowledge rather than carefully designed scientific research on species-specific primate behavior. They explain, “Perhaps the greatest challenge is the development of a rational hypothesis-driven approach to the study of promoting psychological well-being. Much too often the approach has been to try whatever is available at the time and record what happens. However, with this approach, virtually any modification of the captive environment will be associated with some changes in behavior.” They underscore, too, that interaction with other monkeys is paramount because “only social contact satisfies the goal of promoting a wide variety of species-typical activities while at the same time reducing or preventing the development of abnormal behavior” (2005, 178). Lutz and Novak move one step further by distinguishing between “active” and “inanimate forms of enrichment,” involving, for instance, “those that require some physical activity on the part of the animal (active enrichment) and those that provide only passive

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kinds of stimulation. Active forms of enrichment include, but are not limited to, toys, foraging devices, swings, and grooming boards [or manipulanda]. Passive forms of enrichment include exposure to pictures, slides, videotapes, and sounds. This distinction is somewhat arbitrary inasmuch as passive forms of enrichment can be converted to active forms of enrichment. . . . Furthermore, active forms of enrichment may provide only passive stimulation if the animal does not use them” (2005, 179–80). In other words, among behavior specialists, television is currently understood as only one of many in a complex array of enrichment strategies that may be subcategorized as “social, physical, nutritional, occupational, and sensory,” in which visual media (including televisions and computer joy sticks) fall under “visual” and “tactile” stimuli (Lutz and Novak 2005; see also Fajzi, Reinhardt, and Smith 1989; Harris et al. 1999; Lincoln, Andrews, and Rosenblum 1995; Segal 1989). Reflecting widespread practices, Harris et al. explain that television can be relatively easy to employ, and “suggestions from various researchers indicate that the single caged animal’s environment could be enriched by using many modern technologies. These include joystick apparati, computer-controlled video screens, and audiovisual enrichment such as videotapes and television. These studies demonstrate that monkeys can be trained to respond to active, complex visual stimulation in ways that can be defined as enriching. The disadvantage is the programming and equipment necessary (i.e., joysticks, computers, and interfaces)” (1999, 48). This important point is illustrated by a photograph in Lutz and Novak’s article showing a monkey looking out of its cage, where the caption states, “Animals housed in single cages tend to watch more television than those housed in social groups” (Lutz and Novak 2005, 184) (a statement certainly eerily reminiscent of human habits). This statement is supported by the research of Bloomsmith and Young, who tested captive chimpanzees’ responses to a variety of images. They cautioned, though, that it was inconclusive whether the chimps “valued” watching the videotapes (1988, 411). Others have found that when given the choice between an image of a monkey and a blank screen, where each is accompanied by a food reward, monkeys were more likely to choose the blank screen (Lutz and Novak 2005, 184). As Harris et al. explain, “television viewing provides passive interaction and is relatively inexpensive” (1999, 48) (which may well account for its pervasiveness in labs). As employees of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, their wider survey of Department of Defense labs revealed that approximately 75 percent used television for primate “environmental

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enrichment,” yet “currently, TVs in primate colonies are simply turned on, with no regard to the content or whether the animals actually watch it” (1999, 48). These authors describe a more complex approach that characterizes their own facility: “Televisions [are] tuned in to local public broadcasting stations within each room on a weekly rotating basis. For instance, room A would be provided a television for 7 d[ays], then it would be rotated to room B. Television is provided for approximately 8 h[ours] daily, and each room receives approximately 7 d[ays] of television per month. In our facility, television (TV) is viewed as a sensory enrichment for rhesus monkeys.” Clearly, the conundrums associated with evaluating television’s value are vast, as is the potential for quirky innovation: whereas Harris et al. recognize the connection between variation and stimulation, their own complex approach nevertheless assumes that persistent television viewing, for eight hours a day, is healthy for monkeys and, further, that public television seemingly provides better stimulation than, say, Fox News, HBO, Telemundo, or the Golf Channel.17

Monkey See, Monkey Do Regardless of the concerns raised by these and other researchers, television is nevertheless widely espoused as a welfare practice in primate labs in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.18 One cannot help but wonder about the veracity of claims that television provides a significant distraction from stressors for the monkeys, or perhaps more so for the humans who care for them, especially in understaffed or large facilities. Clearly, television runs the risk of being employed more as a distraction than as a form of enrichment for captive primates in ways eerily reminiscent of national concerns about human children’s passive engagement with television and other electronic devices (see, for instance, Turkle 2012, 2015). One possible interpretation, of course, would be that lab personnel engage in some form of collective projection of their own desires onto the monkeys; that is, this may involve some sort of inverted “monkey see, monkey do” relationship, where human staff need to believe that animals see the world as they themselves do. To stop here, though, would be to disregard the widespread defense of television as a valuable technology of enrichment, alongside its ubiquitous presence in both monkey and human domestic space. Indeed, over the course of the last few decades, televisions have become a virtually inescapable aspect of quotidian life in the States, beginning with its onset as an affordable prestige appliance in American homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Television’s presence in private homes and public space

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escalated with cable programming, alongside the emergence of such devices as the VCR, DVD player, flat-screen monitors, PDAs, and the like. Once a public feature primarily in sports bars, televisions are now ubiquitous in hotel lobbies, restaurants, airports, and doctors’ offices. Whereas sports bars provide opportunities to watch competitive events in the company of others and airport waiting rooms broadcast news and weather ostensibly with a traveler’s need-to-know in mind, other venues’ channel selection can be random, or seemingly set at the whim of on-duty staff, the sound muted so that one must infer the goings-on on screen. Indeed, a range of service industries assume that Americans expect TV, and businesses respond accordingly, a statement confirmed by Erik D., an editor of a magazine that specializes in hotel infrastructure and décor: [Yes,] TVs or some sort of digital screen are more ubiquitous in hotels—both in public spaces and guest rooms—than ever before. This is partly due to the continued rapid evolution in technology and guest expectations to be engaged throughout their stay. My own opinion is that people, guests, are now conditioned or expect to be bombarded with media wherever they step in a hotel (save for the spa, so far, thankfully). I think there is a level of comfort and connectedness that these TVs/ screens bring, and that’s probably something you know a lot more about than I do as an anthropologist. Part of it also could do with hotel brand standards, in that hotel companies oftentimes dictate to their owners/franchises what amenities are required in certain spaces. Obviously, a majority of bars and restaurants, even outside of the hotel industry, have televisions humming all day and night.19

The presumption here is that we human primates desire television. Whereas today in-room viewing is organized around personal and private choices (exemplified by cable television programming, high-speed wireless access, and gaming consoles), “public” television viewing is altogether different, responding to a presumed need “to be engaged” and the security we find in being “bombarded with media.” This says a lot (or perhaps very little) about marketing assumptions regarding our species’ needs. What, then, do such practices say about decisions in other quarters to give animals the opportunity to watch TV? This is the focus of the following section.

macaque care in practice: welfare as domestication In this final section, I wish to loop back to the neuroscientist’s statement that “our monkeys watch TV” as an assertion of animal welfare. Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols underscore the complexity of

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identifying, describing, and understanding “care in practice,” be it “in clinics, homes [or] farms”: The most difficult aspect of writing about care is not finding which words to use, but dealing with the limits of using words at all. Care, after all, is not necessarily verbal. It may involve putting a hand on an arm at just the right moment. . . . A noisy machine in the corner of the room may give care, and a computer can be good at it, too. And while your cows may respond to the tone of your voice when you talk, they don’t much mind what it is that you are saying. . . . Stressing the verbal too much misses out on the large non-verbal component of what is specific to care practices. (2010, 10)

In response, I propose employing the rhesus monkey as a case example. Rhesus macaques are widely regarded as the quintessential research monkey. Blum describes their allure as follows: Rhesus macaques are tough monkeys. . . . There are monkeys—fluffy, dark titi monkeys from South America who sit close together, tails entwined like lovers—who make you want to cuddle them. Rhesus macaques aren’t like that. They look like the street toughs of the monkey world. . . . Males reach a muscular 30-plus pounds. But it’s their teeth that stand out. The canine teeth of a rhesus macaque are daggerlike. . . . In American research labs, they’ve gained a reputation for playing rough, fighting rougher. If they can’t bite, they’ll scratch. They are as fierce with human handlers as with other monkeys. . . .There are scientists who like them very much, but there’s a certain respectful distance in their descriptions. They speak of fierce independence and pride. Rhesus macaques can be born and die in captivity and never seem domesticated, only stubbornly wild. Yet, they share one critical quality with humans. They are intensely social, frustrated by boredom, desperate in loneliness. (1994, 35–36)

With Blum’s description in mind, I often ask experienced lab personnel to describe macaques for me.20 Interestingly, descriptions are patterned according to one’s relationship to the monkey. Researchers—such as lab directors and postdoctoral students—express respect paired with wariness when speaking of these animals, whom they variously describe as “highly intelligent” yet “nasty buggers” who are “dangerous,” “mean,” and “sly.” Researchers are prone to speak, too, of general species characteristics, underscoring their propensity for violence, most often referring to how they will “bite one another” or “bite off” such body parts as digits and penises, understandings that can inform a reticence to house them socially. Whereas animal technicians in the same labs likewise express respect for and are cautious around these monkeys, they more typically describe

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macaques with admiration, as “smart,” “tough,” “rambunctious,” “cheeky,” “clever,” and, notably, “playful” and “intensely social,” descriptors often qualified by accounts of the habits of specific monkeys. These differences reflect conflicts in a lab-based ethos regarding the proper care of monkeys valued, on the one hand, as productive research subjects and, on the other, as unique individuals, contrasts rooted in training, the quotidian nature of human-animal lab encounters, and a lab’s inevitable division of labor. Productive research is highly dependent on a successful partnership between researcher and monkey, who must work well together for hours at a time, day after day, and sometimes for several years at a stretch. Unquestionably, researchers become attached to “their monkeys,” yet the relationship also necessitates emotional distance, whereby the monkey is best viewed as a work object and generator of data. In the cautionary words of a former researcher, Ari Handel, “Don’t fall in love with your monkey.”21 In contrast, animal technicians shoulder significant emotional labor (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; see also Hochschild 1983). Most notably for my analysis here, it is these animal caretakers who are invariably put in charge of monkey enrichment and who, in turn, make determinations about television’s use, as illustrated by my own ethnographic observations.

The Naturalized, Captive Macaque Neuroscientists often employ macaques in research; here, I draw on experiences within an urban university’s lab that at any one time houses five to ten such monkeys. Ten years ago this lab’s macaques were kept in solitary cages. Its animal care technicians, who had learned of other approaches while attending conferences in their field, encouraged the lab’s academic director and his handful of postdoctoral students—bolstered by support from university veterinarians—to shift their monkeys to social housing. The director was won over by the argument that monkeys, as research subjects, generate better data if they can inhabit an “enriched environment,” where “enrichment” specifically entailed opportunities to interact socially with others of their own kind. The lab’s animal technicians devoted significant time to expanding their knowledge of primate enrichment strategies, and then they convinced the lab director to fund their design of a social enclosure that altogether replaced the cages where, previously, macaques were housed individually for the full span of their laboratory lives. Whereas in many labs “social housing” entails housing pairs of macaques together in rows of cages, the staff in this lab made the bold decision to house all of their monkeys together within the same enclosure.

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Today, the social housing unit occupies half of a former storage room that is about 15 × 20 × 9 feet, the other half reserved for human occupancy. Although small, this social enclosure displays a rich array of stimuli. Among the most obvious components is a matrix of climbing structures consisting of artificial trees, small platforms, and thick ropes. Also, an assortment of other manipulanda—primarily toys reminiscent of those given to toddlers or dogs—is rotated in and out on a regular basis. The animal caretakers spend a significant amount of time in the macaque room, albeit outside the animal enclosure, caring for and interacting with the macaques as yet another form of daily stimulation for the monkeys (and as a source of delight for the humans). A few years ago one caretaker decided the monkeys deserved an outdoor view, so she arranged for a carpenter to cut a small hole in the wall and insert a tiny window (perhaps 12 × 12 inches) at the height of the cage’s top perch.22 These actions expose efforts to “make” (Lowe 2004) the lab monkey through specialized efforts of domestication. The enclosure itself resembles the artificially “natural” environments of zoo enclosures, where one similarly sees toys that signal efforts to domesticate monkeys in ways reminiscent of toddlers and house pets. Yet a lab macaque is a very different creature than its zoo counterpart because he or she must move back and forth between a man-made monkey enclosure and the larger domain of the lab itself. And whereas many contemporary zoos purport to offer humans the fantasy of viewing animals in their natural habitats (cf. Berger 1990), lab monkeys are triply “naturalized”—or perhaps better phrased, “domesticated”—in radically different ways. Whereas researchers require macaques to be cooperative research subjects, animal technicians’ efforts counteract this by working methodically and deliberately to preserve their “monkeyness” once they are back in the social enclosure. The window cut in the wall signals yet another means of “making” the monkey, expanding the boundaries of their monkeyness beyond their enclosure and, further, beyond the lab itself, potentially to encompass a much larger world outside. All of these forms of human action reveal various efforts at monkey domestication. Some of the more striking—and, frankly, peculiar—aspects of this lab’s monkey “habitat” can be spotted on the walls of the monkey room. A few years ago the animal caretakers decided to further enrich the monkeys’ environment by decorating the room’s interior. They painted the walls a pale “baby” blue, and then they lined the portion near the ceiling with a matching wallpaper border that sports a repeating band of frolicking dolphins. As a result, the room is reminiscent of a human child’s nursery. Lower down, stationed at approximately the waist height of an adult

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human, they mounted a small, boxy TV set that, for several years now, has played an incessantly looping video clip derived from an Animal Planet episode in which a cheetah pursues and tackles a gazelle.23 What we are witnessing here, within a framework of enrichment, is the (re)making of a monkey of an altogether different order. Discussions with the lab’s animal technicians about the window, dolphin décor, and television revealed polysemic understandings of what “makes a monkey.” The window allowed these macaques to glimpse the outside, an act that exposed them to the possibility that there is a larger world out there. As one caretaker explained, she had hoped initially that perhaps the macaques would be able to watch birds and squirrels, but she soon realized this was probably impossible because there were no trees nearby. According to another, they soon learned they had to cloud over the glass pane—as one would a bathroom window—in order to protect the monkeys from being seen from outside, because regulations require that monkeys, and the lab, be protected from view, primarily out of fear of being captured on camera by animal activists. Once these caretakers realized that nature could no longer be viewed by the monkeys by gazing outside the lab, the wallpaper border then offered an alternative means for bringing nature into the lab. When asked, “But why dolphins, when they are not part of a macaque’s natural habitat?” they responded that this was what was readily available at a nearby box store, and they agreed it sufficed as a proxy for the natural world. In this sense, then, nature itself is “denatured,” and ostensibly anything reminiscent of the wild can stand in as an appropriate prop for stimulating a macaque’s imagining of the wild. This is just one example I have encountered of patterned efforts by animal technicians to bring nature into monkey labs; in other instances, wall posters of wild animals do the same work as the dolphin wallpaper. These sorts of practices exemplify what I reference as the serendipity of lab enrichment. Of this range of innovations, none is more common—nor peculiar—than the employment of TV. The rationale that informed this lab’s television use was a bit more complicated than that of the wall décor. Animal technicians explained that they had tried a range of programs, from sitcoms to the news to public television (at one point they considered using a clip from Planet of the Apes), but as one young caretaker explained, “we soon discovered that they loved Animal Planet,” and “[some of them] will watch this over and over. . . . What they especially enjoy is a scene where a leopard [sic] stalks and kills [sic] an antelope.” These animal caretakers explained that their macaques watched this video intently (a behavior I myself did not witness—to me, they seemed to

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ignore it). This observation translated the anecdotal into standard practice, and they read attention as desire. As described above, though, research findings elsewhere challenge the assumption that intense focus signals an appropriate enrichment strategy. As Harris et al. explain, for example, Conceptually, the notion that the proportion of time spent watching something relates to its impact as a positively stimulating event is itself questionable. Animals watch both conspecifics and predators intently, but most researchers would agree that both are not positive stimuli. Predators are watched because they represent a threat, not simply because they represent novelty and escape from boredom. As such, it is not simply the case that “watching” is a measure of positive interest. Rather, positive interest would involve subjects actively behaving to produce such stimuli. Although animals in the wild intently watch predators, they do not seek them out, and they avoid moving into areas associated with predators. Similarly, TV “watching” may be intensely maintained because it is a pleasant stimulus or because it is aversive, but only the former should maintain responses that result in the presentation of video images.24 (1999, 49)

My intent here is not to judge the caretakers’ video viewing choice for the macaques, but instead to think through what this video and, more generally, the television’s presence, says about the making of labs as moral space above and beyond scientifically informed efforts to enrich captive animals’ lives. More importantly, macaque interest and perceived desires are understood by these animal caretakers as natural to their species, regardless of the facts that they were bred and born in supply laboratories and that they have never stepped outdoors. The scientific imaginary at work here presumes that these monkeys retain an innate, evolutionary sense of a generic wildness, whereby an African cheetah and gazelle can instill interest (or fear?) in lab-bred macaques of Asian origin. The animal technicians’ caring efforts may well be poorly informed in terms of their choice in TV shows, but such decisions should not necessarily be read as evidence of neglect. Animal technicians spent a significant amount of time in the “monkey room,” swapping old toys for new, preparing special treats for individual animals, inventing new tactile challenges, and interacting with the macaques throughout the day, while also maintaining logs and reporting back each day to researchers, other caretakers, and veterinarians about amusing or surprising behaviors from each animal. As one put it, “these monkeys are my life.” As I discuss in other chapters, monkeys here likewise had personal and pet names that were sometimes used exclusively by these caretakers. (In contrast, lab researchers more typically used the coded names assigned to each monkey by their original

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breeding facilities.25) Whereas television appears to reduce individual animals to the category of generic monkey, other specialized practices employed by animal technicians foreground their individuality. But whereas efforts to incorporate innovative manipulanda are in direct response to monkeys’ behaviors, the relevance of television is obscured by our incapacity to know what monkeys are thinking when they gaze at an image that we ourselves can read as a cheetah chasing down its prey.

The Paired Domestication of Laboratory Worlds Such efforts serve to naturalize these laboratory monkeys in very specific ways, evidencing serendipitous readings of standardized enrichment strategies encountered in the research literature. This lab’s monkey enclosure is certainly reminiscent of artificial environments that characterize zoos and animal sanctuaries, where, likewise, one might see toys strewn about enclosures full of climbing apparati. As already noted, though, lab monkeys are a very different sort of creature than their counterparts living in zoos and sanctuaries. Unlike animals elsewhere who inhabit artificial quarters, lab monkeys might be removed from their group enclosure numerous times each week for experimental purposes when they are handled by and must willingly cooperate with both animal technicians and researchers (where the latter, for the most part, are postdoctoral students). In a neuroscience lab, the demands placed on a monkey are arduous, involving, for instance, sitting still for hours at a time in a small room that has been darkened to keep distractions to a minimum, and boxed into a specially designed Plexiglas chair so they cannot move—much less scratch an itch—while staring at a computer screen that may only display a moving dot. Also, they are generally hungry and thirsty, so that they will accept pellets or juice, the latter administered in droplets, as meager rewards for their labors. A monkey’s brain activity might be tracked via surgically implanted electrodes or by tracing eye movements while he or she watches the screen next to a postdoctoral student who sits immobile in his or her own chair staring at a computer. In settings like this, the monkey’s video monitor is regarded as an essential research technology that will soon exhaust a restrained animal. Lab monkeys, then, simultaneously inhabit radically different worlds from those in zoos, sanctuaries, or the wild. In one domain within a given lab, postdoctoral students work methodically and deliberately to transform lab monkeys into work objects, whereas elsewhere down the hall animal technicians counter this reality through efforts to maintain these same creatures as more than mere data points. Downtime in social enclosures

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enables animals to forage, groom one another, explore, climb, and play with other monkeys of their own kind. Social life entails learning quickly, too, how to avoid harm—be it through play or by moving carefully around other monkeys so as not to jostle their respective head implants. Laboratory life demands heightened skills of adaptability because the monkeys must also live in sympatry with humans, existing as an “in-between” sort of creature who is neither solely “wild” nor “captive” (Fuentes 2007). Research monkeys must cooperate with requirements that they successfully inhabit several different habitats over the course of their laboratory lives. Lab space proper, intended for research experiments, has its own aesthetic that lies under postdoctoral control: reminiscent of a poorly lit den or study space, it is crammed with computers and other hardware, tangles of wire, and dirty tea and coffee cups. Here, monkey and student might share space, each lodged in his or her respective chair staring for hours at a computer terminal, where, to paraphrase former lab researcher Ari Handel, a passing observer might begin to wonder, “Who is the monkey of whom?”26 The enclosure room, on the other hand, is the animal caretaker’s domain, where one encounters an altogether different domestic aesthetic. Whereas the social cage interior is rich in manipulanda, the space lying outside this enclosure is visually enhanced following human sensibilities, as evident in the wallpaper border sporting frolicking dolphins, the small window— now covered—and the television screen. Most certainly, the television’s location is partially pragmatic: if placed inside the enclosure, the monkeys might injure themselves or damage the device. More importantly, however, are the images projected on the screen itself, of a wild predator hunting and, presumably, devouring its prey. What meanings are embedded in the decision to show a film involving wild African animals to captive monkeys originally of Asian origin who were bred, born, and raised in enclosed laboratory space? Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch, in their joint research on the use of premature piglets in a Danish neonate lab, demonstrate how scientists engage in the making, remaking, and undoing of piglets as baby animals, surrogate models for human neonates, research objects, and as corpses for dissection (Svendsen and Koch 2014). Macaques who inhabit the neuroscience lab are similarly flexible creatures who romp with other monkeys, remain calm when handled by animal technicians, and cooperate with research scientists as they move from within the social enclosure, outside the cage, and then down the hall to work alongside postdoctoral students as research subjects. As Svendsen and Koch remind us, too, many animal research subjects will be euthanized once their involvement in a study ends, their bodies destined for

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necropsy. In neuroscience, this final stage is especially grisly because the most valued portion of a monkey’s body is its brain and head.27 In Nicole Shukin’s words, the domestication of lab animals necessitates “rendering” (2009) them for science. During the postmortem phase, an individual monkey is transformed irreversibly by science into valuable data.

Enrichment’s Burden My analysis might well end here, save for the fact that labs, as domesticated space, are occupied by humans, too. Animal care technicians shoulder the brunt of difficult emotional work, or what Birke, Arluke, and Michael identify as “the technicians’ burden” (2007, 99–109). Animal technicians must prep animals for experiments run by postdoctoral students; care for them following surgeries; and recognize and respond to signs of psychological instability, illness, and injury. They, too, may be called upon to euthanize an animal at a study’s conclusion. This is all the more poignant in light of my findings regarding the personal lives of animal technicians. Here I draw on ethnographic data generated from comparative interviews with veterinarians and animal technicians associated with university-based labs in the United States and United Kingdom. Veterinarians who assist in research settings are frequently itinerate, moving over the course of a work week among an assortment of labs within the same institution, where they inspect facilities, treat injured or ill animals, and assist in “putting down” or euthanizing animals in ways deemed humane. Of those I interviewed, all described leading fulfilling lives beyond laboratory space, characterized by their lively engagement with nuclear and extended family members, the joys of parenthood, home ownership, farm-based life, opportunities to teach courses to aspiring veterinarians, and ongoing research of their own. Nearly all had grown up on farms, and all had aspired to be veterinarians from an early age and were proud of their accomplishments and credentials. They had chosen to work in laboratories for the sake of animal welfare, determined to become involved in oversight activities that would help protect research animals from undue harm. Animal technicians, however, had radically different employment and personal trajectories: the picture that emerged from interviews with eight caretakers in the United Kingdom revealed an especially stark history. The majority had stumbled on lab work by accident, answering an advertisement in a local paper, for instance, not realizing beforehand that the job involved research animals. Early burnout in this profession is common, and those who stayed typically stuck with it as a lifetime profession (when I encountered them, six of the eight had been working with laboratory

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animals for nearly a decade, the seventh for four years, and the eighth, who had risen to the rank of supervisor, for over twenty years). None were married nor ever had been. None had children. Seven of the eight did not own their own homes but rented studio apartments or rooms in boarding houses. A solitary existence typified cartakers’ lives outside the lab.28 As one explained, “I don’t spend much time at home—I sometimes stay here through the night if [one of the monkeys] needs care. I go home to shower, change, and sleep.” All underscored the importance of privacy—or secrecy— in reference to their work. They cited the need to protect their labs from animal activists, but equally significant was their discomfort in having others judge them, in the words of one interviewee, as “immoral” for their association with an animal facility. All made it clear that even their closest friends and family members—including siblings or parents—did not know the details of their duties at work, and all but one were careful never to speak to others of working specifically with animals. One interviewee explained that, if asked, she told others that she sometimes worked with mice, but never monkeys. (Labs in the same complex housed zebrafish, rats, rabbits, ferrets, sheep, and marmosets, but no mice.) During a group discussion I asked members of one team how they managed friendships, and one replied jovially, “We are one another’s family—we are each other’s best friends.” In response, the others laughed and agreed. Another then added, “You wouldn’t be able to stand it here for very long if you didn’t have great coworkers. I was surprised how much I liked working with [the monkeys]. But the work is hard sometimes. We take care of each other here.” Although it is never articulated as such, the animal “technicians’ burden” (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007) is the tacit agreement that they assist researchers in rendering harm to animals while also being employed as the mediators of enrichment and welfare. As I demonstrate in chapter 5, lab monkeys unquestionably define a prized form of biocapital (Rose 2001; Sunder Rajan 2006): as I am often told by researchers, they are extraordinarily expensive to acquire and maintain. Typically, a macaque is employed for several years, day after day, in a lab, in the near constant company of animal technicians who come to know well the personalities, preferences, and quirks of individual monkeys. Given the intensity of sustained interaction, and the emotional burdens placed on caretakers in particular, the furnishing of the monkeys’ quarters emerges as a moral project in yet another sense beyond enrichment practices. The quirky creature comforts of the tiny window, dancing dolphins, and Animal Planet video reanimate an old storeroom where monkeys romp in a place now reminiscent of a human nursery. As such, the monkeys’ social enclosure emerges as a moral project

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in a double sense. First, its aesthetic domesticates monkeys whose days are numbered by experimental neuroscience; second, it evidences the domestication of animal technicians, too, who, in shouldering the brunt of a laboratory’s emotional work, likewise cohabit an “in between” space. The monkey room, then, is home.

coda In concluding this chapter, I wish to return once again to the neuroscientist’s assertion that a monkey’s access to television exemplifies care in practice. As I have demonstrated, monkey TV has a complicated history, playing a significant role in the ontological project of making monkeys for science. Given television’s ubiquity today as a technology of research and welfare, in this paired sense it is doubly moral: employed, first, in the conditioning of an animal as a valuable and productive research subject and second, as a standardized method of care that keeps a monkey content, and docile, during downtime, a practice built on the premise that television bolsters psychological well-being. The uncritical use of TV gives one pause: as the literature on primate viewing reveals, a focused gaze, read as interest, may signal fear for instance, not necessarily pleasure or desire. Furthermore, how monkeys perceive and think about televised images remains a black box of science, what Gregory Bateson once described as “mysterious and opaque” (1972, 308). Given the reality that lab-based television may be here to stay, what might comprise alternative approaches to understanding how and why monkeys watch TV? How might we begin to think outside the box—be it a Plexiglas chair, research viewing apparatus, or social enclosure? Among the most innovative—or, depending on one’s point of view, quirky—responses to the use of TV as primate enrichment I have encountered to date are the projects of video artist Rachel Mayeri of Harvey Mudd College. As a graduate student, Mayeri worked with primate behaviorists in San Diego engaged in filming monkeys for their observational research, paired with subsequent on-site work in primate labs and interviews with lab personnel based in Scotland and France.29 Her provocative works, assembled under the collective title Primate Cinema, challenge human viewers to embrace primate subjectivity (see figure 5).30 An early work entitled “Baboons as Friends” is staged as a film noir rendering of a bar scene that reenacts the premise of the sitcom Friends, but where the main characters are baboons played by actors in costume. The work provokes her audience to consider what it might mean to think and act like a monkey in a social context normally seen as purely human. For a subsequent work

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figure 5. Chimpanzees responding to “Apes as Family,” an 11-minute singlechannel film and two-channel video installation that was produced for chimpanzee viewers at the Edinburgh Zoo as part of Primate Cinema by Rachel Mayeri. This still captures zoo-based chimps’ responses during the film’s test phase. Reprinted with the artist’s permission.

entitled “Apes as Family,” Mayeri went two steps further, by working with actors—again in costume—who first received training in primatology on chimp social behavior, and by shifting the position of observer to apes themselves. She describes the film as an original movie I made expressly for chimpanzees at the Edinburgh Zoo. A primate drama, like many made for human audiences, the film follows a young female as she befriends a wild group of foreigners. The drama is intercut with the chimps’ responses to the film when it premiered at the zoo. The project creates a prism for human beings to learn about the inner world of chimpanzees. By watching a movie through chimps’ eyes, we can imagine what they think and feel. Chimps are, after all, our closest relatives. Known for their complex social, cognitive and emotional lives, they also share with us a fascination with cinema.31

In yet another project, “Movies for Monkeys,” Mayeri responds to the intense curiosity of squirrel monkeys. As she imagined this work, she asked, “How could I entertain a squirrel monkey with an inert video—they are so kinesthetic, interactive, and sensual? One scientist measures their attention with a maximum span of two seconds.” Images in “Movies for

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Monkeys” include the dark shadow of a mouse moving across a screen and a field of shifting red dots she describes as “flying anuses,” intended to be reminiscent of how these monkeys view one another. The project involved three levels of filming: images intended for monkey viewing, their responses, and the process as a whole.32 This collective work, perhaps best understood initially as an experimental exploration of primate social life, blossomed into a much deeper critique of the possibilities of interspecies understanding. Mayeri puzzles over how various primate species might respond in specialized ways to films for which they themselves are the intended viewers, and in so doing she encourages us, too, to watch with a critical eye her films of apes and monkeys watching TV. Interestingly, Mayeri explains, “People ask me, So, what do monkeys want to watch?” Indeed, subsequently, her films have assumed an initially unintended and newly serendipitous path because they occasionally cycle back into labs where researchers test them on their own in-house primate subjects, reporting back to her on their reactions to her art (Mayeri, personal communication, 2015). In closing, Mayeri’s creative works urge us to rethink the boundaries of NHP care in practice. Today primates of all sorts are presumed to need, enjoy, or even desire television entertainment as a means to quell the potentially inevitable pathological consequences of laboratory life. As I have shown, television’s use as an enrichment strategy undergirds the framework of animal welfare. But what if lab science were to reorient itself and follow Mayeri’s lead by inverting simian subjectivity? This would require a radical shift in stance; it is a call of sorts to lab personnel to shift away from practices that entail, essentially, watching monkeys watch TV as a means to assert that they are “just like us.” This newly conceived morality of care entails learning how to think like a monkey.

part ii

Sacrifice An Interlude

3. The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals We deploy words magically to echo events, create semblances of order in a sea of chaos, and give the impression that we actually grasp the hidden meaning of the world in which we move . . . michael jackson, The Other Shore

I never fail to be surprised by the regularity with which laboratory scientists speak to me of the deaths of research animals. Oddly, when I describe my project in the simplest terms as a study of scientific morality, this inevitably prompts those with laboratory experience to address methods of killing. I have lost count of the number of times someone has pantomimed effective cervical dislocation on a mouse; gestured, with a rapid slice of the hand, the efficient movement of an imaginary, miniature guillotine as it decapitates, in plodding succession, individual members of a colony of rats; or recounted for me a first experience of administering a barbiturate injection or inhalable anesthetic as a humane method for ending an animal’s life.1 Although generally described matter-of-factly to me, I have learned over time that the seemingly unemotional, rational tone accompanying such demonstrations and descriptions may belie deeper, private ambivalence, questioning, or conflict. Those who do not ponder the profundity of death are outliers, and for every scientist I encounter whose lab work is punctuated with killing, I meet another who, early in his or her career, turned away from research that required the deliberate and systematic ending of life. There are still others, as the offspring of scientists, who speak of animal death as figuring prominently in their childhoods and their subsequent decisions to steer clear of lab research as a profession, gravitating instead to the humanities, arts, social sciences, or law. Some integrate animals’ lives into their work as artists, ecologists, or activists, driven by efforts to study, protect, or advocate for other living creatures, or to challenge us to consider and question the work animals do for science. Although these assorted encounters of mine involve parties from a wide array of backgrounds, they share one thing in common: when informed of my research, they nearly always speak of death. 107

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In response, I frequently ask myself: Why this pronounced focus on the art of killing? Why employ death as a means to anchor discussions of morality in laboratory science? What accounts for these routine responses, in which death emerges as a default, anchor, or key referent for talking about the merging of “science” and “morality”? And how do involved researchers understand, undertake, and process animals’ deaths as they build and maintain a moral sense of self? The sheer number of animals killed each year for scientific purposes alone gives pause: in 1986, philosopher and ethicist Sidney Gendin reported “conventional estimates” for the United States as ranging somewhere between 70 to 120 million (1986, 54n1),2 a trend that reveals an entrenched practice of using, and killing, animals for scientific purposes. This chapter is an effort to decipher how lab researchers reconcile the inherent contradiction that experimental life science is so often dependent on the deaths of various creatures.3 Under what conditions is killing justified? Considered necessary? Deemed immoral? What private sentiments does death invoke? What etiquette of language and rules of conduct surround animals’ deaths, and what might this teach us about the morality of killing in science? Who kills, and when, where, and under what conditions?

The Ethnographer’s Dilemma Ethnographic engagement trains one to be alert to patterned speech, behavior, and belief and, further, as one delves deep into a realm of specialized practices, to suspend one’s judgment so as to remain open to alternative worldviews. Herein lies the ethnographer’s dilemma: how best to remain focused and to balance one’s treatment of others’ attitudes and actions if and when they challenge one’s own moral code. In the course of my engagement with this project, this has proved to be an especially difficult challenge where animal death is concerned. Animal death is no stranger to my world: although I am not a farmer’s daughter, throughout my childhood I spent a fair amount of time in barns and on farms, where I have cared for sickly animals who died and have witnessed the slaughter for food of still others whose flesh was later served to me at mealtime. I know hunters and have eaten their kills; have borne witness to the sacrificial slaying of fowl, goats, and oxen during religious rites; and have killed rodents to nourish and sustain a now aged reptile. Yet I continue to circle back to the conclusion that these contexts share little in common with those framed by scientific research, an unstable reading that nags at me throughout this chapter. Across the arc of my own career thus far, much of my work as a medical anthropologist has entailed deciphering the transformative power of human suffering and death, paired orientations that inform aspects of my analysis

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throughout this chapter on lab animal life and death. In Madagascar, where I worked throughout the 1980s and 1990s, spirit mediums described physical pain, chronic illness, and madness, and revolutionary school youth recounted their nation’s violent histories of enslavement, conquest, and colonialism (Sharp 1993, 2002b). Within transplant medicine—a research concern of mine for over twenty years—the surviving kin of deceased organ donors punctuated interviews with ghost stories of dead lovers and children, and, in turn, scientists engaged in highly experimental research spoke passionately of the drive to succeed in a world where many patients die while waiting for replacement organs (2006b, 2013). In other words, I am accustomed to studying themes of death and suffering; nevertheless, I am struck by the paucity of non-polemical material on how best to analyze their relevance to animals’ lives. This chapter marks an effort to enrich current discussions by proposing a somewhat radical turn: How might theory relevant to human suffering and death help reform our talk of animals? Much of this chapter centers on the politics of care, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years from both medical anthropologists and moral philosophers writing of human experience (Banner 2014; Farmer 1997; Kaufman 2015; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Lock 1997; Mattingly 2010, 2014; Mol 2008; Pols 2012; Taylor 2008). As Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman remind us, “A focus on care involves us in attending to relationships of vulnerability. . . . Care settings engage people in social relationships that are saturated with moral meaning as well as material practices and symbolic acts central to lived moral experience” (2016, 161). Whereas Wilkinson and Kleinman (and, indeed, the majority of other authors cited above) are concerned exclusively with human suffering, alongside Mol, Moser, and Pols (2010) I assert such analyses translate well to contexts involving animals. As we shall see, a morality of care often emerges not only by attending to words, sentiments, and actions, but also to the “material practices” of laboratory life and death. As I discovered during earlier ethnographic projects, suffering and death are often entwined and nearly always framed by hope, desire, and visions of promissory futures (Guyer 2007). For instance, a medium devotes herself to ancestral spirits, seeking respite from the physical and psychological exhaustion that accompanied her early resistance to possession by the dead; disenfranchised school youth abandon their studies and thrust themselves into street protests in hopes of bettering the lives of those younger than they, even though such actions ensure their own scholarly ruin; organ donor kin, numb from mourning their dead, find solace in imaginative memory projects; and transplant researchers thrive on incremental successes that bear

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figure 6. “Who would you RAT/HER see live?”, an advertisement featured on billboards across the United States in 2011–2012 to promote public awareness of and support for animal research. Produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research. Reproduced with permission.

the promise of ending human suffering by generating (re)usable organs of animal or mechanical origins. In all of these contexts, suffering and hope are ever entangled with each other (cf. Mattingly 2010). Similar themes pervade contexts involving animal experimentation. A mantra of laboratory science is that animal subjects are an important and necessary alternative to human ones, playing key roles in the development of groundbreaking treatments and cures. An iconic image employed within animal research involves contrasting the needs of a child to that of an animal. Among the most prominent producers of such representations is the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), a public relations and lobbyist firm that generates glossy posters for display on laboratory bulletin boards and at research conferences, alongside a prominent national billboard campaign mounted in several U.S. cities known for animal activist activities. FBR’s media campaigns typify the polemics of science versus activism that I seek to avoid. For example, an especially popular poster features a white, blond-haired little girl in a hospital bed serving as a potent reminder that “It’s the animals you don’t see that really helped her recover.” Yet another image shows a white rat to the left and, to the right, a smiling little girl (who, again, is white and has light-colored hair) cradling her chin in her hands, with the caption “Who would you RAT/HER see live?” where the text itself (with “RAT” in purple and “HER” in white) highlights the life-and-death choice we must make between non-human subjects and children in need.4 As the billboard implies, the rat saves the child (see figure 6).5

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Within lab-related domains where I have conducted ethnographic research, animal experimentation is driven by the premise that dangerous, life-threatening ideas and procedures are best tested first on animals, facilitating a cautious movement from bench to clinic. The deaths of non-human species are justified because it is far better to let an animal die than it is to risk the life of a human being when trying out dangerous and poorly understood ideas. Put plainly, it is legal, permissible, and, by regulatory standards, ethical to conduct a range of procedures on animals in ways considered reprehensible with humans. Medical experts who first attempt innovative yet unproved, high-risk methods on human patients—thereby bypassing animal studies—may face strong sanctions, intensified surveillance, or expulsion from their institutions or professional communities.6 This theme of a (lesser animal) life given for another (more highly valued, human one) surfaces frequently during interviews and conversations with lab scientists when they speak of research goals, design, and species choice. Yet the moral reasoning that informs their logic is complex and goes far beyond the notion of the rat versus the child. This chapter is an effort to parse how associated personnel make sense of animals’ deaths in laboratory science. Phrased another way, it probes how research scientists themselves understand the virtues of their work and the moral values they associate with animal experimentation and when death frequently marks the endpoint of an animal’s participation as a research subject. A theme that surfaces repeatedly is the framing of animal death as a “sacrifice,” a turn of phrase that has attracted significant attention in social scientists’ analyses of laboratory work (see especially Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Lynch 1988; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Regan 1986). Indeed, during preliminary presentations of my research findings, I was regularly encouraged by listeners to make sacrifice a central theoretical concern of this book. In response, I offer part II as an interlude designed to encourage readers to pause and think carefully about the relevance—and limitations—of focusing on sacrifice as a dominant trope of laboratory science. As I seek to demonstrate throughout this chapter, a more fruitful approach involves probing how scientists themselves think beyond sacrifice as a presumed frame of reference, where other possibilities lie embedded in how they talk about the animals who participate in their research, and how they themselves understand proper, humane killing as offering evidence of moral thought and action.

Death and Innovation Annemarie Mol, in her analyses of the “logic of care,” demonstrates the necessity of being attentive to both life and death. This analytical stance is

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particularly enlightening in her efforts to probe the entanglement of human and animal worlds, where innovation—or what she terms “tinkering”— provides a compelling entry point for exploring the sociomoral complexities of suffering, caregiving, and end-of-life events (Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010). An especially effective methodological strategy entails attending to “care in practice,” an assertion echoed by Wilkinson and Kleinman. As the latter underscore, “the practice of care” is an “enactment of substantive human values and thus . . . it is inextricably moral and political” (Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016, 162; see also Kaufman 2005, 2015 on endof-life care). Within laboratories, researchers’ and animals’ lives most certainly are entwined in a host of unexpected ways that, nevertheless, can be difficult to recognize, much less parse. Yet close attention to quotidian practices as an ethnographic way of seeing uncovers important patterns. This proves significant in contexts framed by death as a frequently unmarked outcome of laboratory life. Understanding the worth of animals within science first necessitates unpacking the values placed on experimental efforts, where the end point often rests on a distant horizon, or what Guyer describes as a “promissory future” (2007). In the scientific realms where I have immersed myself, researchers foreground the end point as involving a search for new ways to improve human lives: perhaps they will discover how the brain compensates for injury, how subtle physiological responses to experimental medications in animals could translate to human use, or how new reparative techniques hold up post-surgery. An overwhelming mantra in these domains is that scientific research will “help other people” or “save lives,” and, without fail, staving off the suffering of innocent children (and, secondarily, mothers with children) is regarded as especially virtuous.7 A core premise at work here is that animals’ deaths have purpose. Many experimental procedures rely on the specialized techniques of surgery, visual scans, or necropsy (that is, post-mortem dissection), all of which are employed to determine the effect—and effectiveness—of research.8 The logic that informs these approaches is that experimental outcomes may only be perceptible through invasive procedures conducted with anesthesia or by way of methods that require the dismemberment of a euthanized animal’s corpse. If we branch out beyond the confines of the laboratory, dead animals proliferate in still other quarters of science. Biology students of all ages, for example, regularly dissect animals of a range of species—from frogs to fetal pigs—as a means to learn about vertebrate anatomy,9 and veterinary schools often employ living and dead animals for teaching purposes. These practices are not unique to animal science: they correspond to activities in medicine

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that may involve human subjects or bodies, rooted in deeply historicized understandings of the potency of pathology as an important medical domain (Foucault 1975; Richardson 1987; Timmermans 2006). In other words, the broader logic of pathological investigation legitimates animals’ deaths in, and for, laboratory science. Yet this sort of framing only scratches the surface of a scientific ethos of animal use, because research also necessitates training, restraining, impairing, cutting, and culling animals, acts that are likewise understood as part-and-parcel of this larger moral project to save human (and, as veterinarians regularly remind me, animal) patients’ lives or, at the very least, reduce their suffering. Such actions, when conducted carefully and ethically, are understood as humane, not cruel. Here, “humane” is used in a double sense. First, animals should be killed with “care” so that they experience little or no pain and, as some explain to me, with as little fear as possible. Second, in the case of many species and research procedures, killing animals is regarded as more compassionate than cycling them back into other research experiments. Those who adamantly oppose this moral logic, such as animal activists, are themselves regarded as immoral among many research scientists. This sentiment is exemplified by various posters produced by the FBR. One sports a photo of a group of animal rights protesters standing behind a police barricade and holding a sign written in neat cursive script that reads “Stop Animal Research.” The poster’s (intentionally droll) headline reads: “Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer” (see figure 7). (It is most certainly an intriguing thought to ponder that rodents or other animals have given their lives to save a group of protesters.) Yet another offers an even more provocative critique, depicting a group of activists in ski masks occupying a small lab, an image that equates their actions with political terrorism.10 Contrary to the imagery of several of FBR’s posters, rarely is lab research limited to a single animal11 nor, for that matter, is a medical breakthrough solely about saving the life of an individual patient. Instead, as described in chapter 1, animal science necessitates broader involvement through a models approach. Within such a framework, a lab employs numerous animals—or what one premedical student called “multiple copies”—of the same species or genetic strain, all of whom are housed and understood as generic creatures who together stand in as surrogates for all potential, future human patients. Species substitution (a rat for a human) and animal generics (all rats in a given research colony are the same and, thus, interchangeable as human models) together effectively erase an animal’s uniqueness or individuality. This (re)framing of animals for science facilitates the moral logic of killing.

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figure 7. “Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer” poster. The text beneath the image reads, “According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, animal research has helped extend our life expectancy by 20.8 years. Of course, how you choose to spend those extra years is up to you.” Date unknown. Produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research. Reproduced with permission. Source: National Library of Medicine.

In contrast, rescue work by activists inverts the paradigm of the generic animal. For many activists, for example, the act of saving the life of an individual animal figures within a step-by-step progression toward the salvation of all lab-based creatures.12 Among the first things rescuers do—be they from the ASPCA, the Anti-Vivisection League, or PETA—is to give a name to the animal taken under their care.13 As this contrast reveals, a significant tension underlying activists’ responses to laboratory conventions is that lab practices are assumed to obscure what Igor Kopytoff described for precious things as their “singularity” (1986). Whereas the FBR celebrates the rat’s ability to save the child, for the activist this sort of animal generics negates the worthiness of each individual creature. However, the presumed erasure of uniqueness is only part of much larger, often contra-

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dictory, processes. As I will show, erasure is an unstable practice, and one that tends to proliferate at those moments when lab personnel grapple with the precariousness of the boundary that marks the human-animal divide.

animal erasures Of special interest to me are the consequences of invisibility, or, in the words of the poster referenced earlier, “the animals you don’t see.” Unlike “us,” research scientists and other associated lab personnel “see” as well as interact with and manage (or in lab parlance, “train,” “condition,” and “work with”) lab animals, often on a daily basis, realities that inform specialized forms of interspecies intimacy. This work, nevertheless, is shielded from public view so that, typically, the veil is lifted only in instances involving whistle-blowers who alert outsiders to substandard care, neglect, or criminal abuse, or as a result of activist rescue work. Some scientists I have encountered express unease over the invisibility of their research, underscoring that institutional policies designed to protect labs and animals from outside scrutiny tend to foster misunderstanding or, in the words of one IACUC officer, “misinformation” about the importance of animal experimentation.14 For instance, Esteban—a postdoctoral student originally from Spain with five years’ research experience in neuroscience monkey labs in the United States—fretted over public misunderstandings of the nature of his work. Over the course of an interview, he repeatedly turned the questions back on me, asking “How well do you think the public understands us?” and “Will your research help explain the difficult work we do?” With Esteban’s questions in mind, I explore this theme of invisibility and track how lab personnel embrace and, in other instances, push back against processes of animal erasure. More specifically, this chapter focuses nearly exclusively on the quotidian practices of lab researchers, because it is standardized research protocols that involve them directly in animals’ deaths.15 I begin by thinking comparatively by considering instances where nonlab-based animals’ contributions to human life are celebrated publicly and posthumously. I then return to the sheltered enclaves of lab space to consider eclectic, unscripted practices that offer evidence of how scientists themselves struggle with animal generics and mandated killing.

The Public Lives of Animal Heroes Lab animals’ invisibility stands in stark contrast to the public lives of other working animals, many of whom are commemorated posthumously for their heroics. Consider, for instance, the poster that circulated widely during

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World War I entitled “Good-Bye, Old Man—An Incident on the Road to a Battery Position in Southern Flanders,” rendered by Fortunino Matania for the Blue Cross, an animal welfare agency founded in Britain in 1897. The illustration depicts a soldier with a harness slung over his left arm kneeling before a fallen warhorse. The man is cradling the animal’s head in his arms while kissing the mortally injured creature. This intensely intimate scene is set against a backdrop of a modest farmhouse under shellfire while a comrade beckons him from up the road to abandon the animal and catch up with his brigade before he himself is injured (Gosling 2014, 72). Unlike posters and billboards celebrating lab research, here, at the brink of death, the human/animal roles are reversed, whereby the soldier risks his own life to comfort a fallen beast (see figure 8). Indeed, numerous monuments around the world commemorate the labors of warhorses. These include the Civil War Horse Memorial at the U.S. Cavalry Museum on the grounds of Fort Riley in Kansas; the Horse Memorial in Cape Town, South Africa, erected in memory of fallen animals during second Boer War (1899–1902); the 58th London Division Memorial in Chipilly, France, which commemorates men and animals who died in 1918 during the Battle of Amiens (the associated sculpture highly reminiscent of Matania’s poster); De Oppresso Liber near the 9/11 memorial in New York City, featuring a Green Beret astride a hardy pony of Afghanistan;16 and the Animals in War Memorial near Hyde Park, London, a monument that honors a variety of animals, including horses, mules, dogs, elephants, camels, buffalos, rams, and glowworms (see figure 9).17 Hundreds of other monuments have been erected in the United States and elsewhere to honor military, police, and fire dogs who have died in the line of duty.18 Whereas one may easily uncover a plethora of monuments erected to scientists and their accomplishments, very few celebrate lab animals’ achievements, and they tend to be confined to the era of the Space Race. The first consists of a modest gravestone in Alamogordo, New Mexico, placed in memory of Ham the Space Chimp, who was launched into orbit by NASA in January 1961 and whose partial remains are buried there. (Ham died at the Washington National Zoo in 1983, where he had lived for seventeen years.)19 Outside Moscow, Russia, two separate memorials honor the Soviet space dog named Laika, the first erected for her alone, the second a far more ambitious project that features Laika as a mascot of sorts nestled within a larger tableau celebrating Soviet advancements in science and technology (see figure 10). (Laika died during her historic flight in November, 1957; unlike Ham, she was never intended to survive her historic launch into lower earth orbit.)20 Unlike myriad generic lab rats and

figure 8. “Help the Horse to Save the Soldier,” World War I poster for the Blue Cross, a London-based animal welfare and veterinary care organization founded in 1897 concerned with working urban horses and, subsequently, those employed in war. This image, captioned “Good-Bye, Old Man—An Incident on the Road to a Battery Position in Southern Flanders,” circulated widely during WWI. Fortunino Matania, artist. Courtesy of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, Chicago.

figure 9. Animals in War Memorial, Hyde Park, London, unveiled in 2004 and inspired by Jilly Cooper’s Animals in War. The front face reads, “For all the animals that served and died under British military command throughout history. They had no choice”; the rear face reads, “Many and various animals were employed to support British and Allied Forces in wars and campaigns over the centuries, and as a result millions died. From the pigeon to the elephant, they all played a vital role in every region of the world in the cause of human freedom. Their contribution must never be forgotten.” David Backhouse, artist. Source: WestportWiki, Wikimedia Commons, August 14, 2013.

figure 10. Close-up of Laika, the Soviet space dog. Part of a larger mural commemorating Soviet space science that occupies the base of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space (1964), Moscow, Russia. A. P. Faidysh-Krandievsky, sculptor, and A. N. Kolchin and M. O. Barshch, monument architects. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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figure 11. Monument to Laboratory Rats and Mice, Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia. Andrew Kharkevich, artist, 2013. Photograph by Irina Gelbukh, 2013. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org /w/index.php?curid=27166481.

other creatures hidden from view, Ham and Laika are regarded internationally as memorable public figures whose likenesses appeared on magazine covers, in newspapers, and, for Laika at least, for many years to come on an international outpouring of commemorative postage stamps. Although relatively rare, a few memorials have been erected to laboratory animals. Typically, these are mounted on, or within, the grounds of research institutes abroad. Among the most widely known—and whose image appears regularly in conference PowerPoint presentations—is a

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memorial on the grounds of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, that celebrates rodents’ contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge (see figure 11). Created by sculptor Andrew Kharevich, it depicts a seemingly elderly mouse (wearing a shawl and pair of spectacles) knitting a strand of DNA. (The institute intends in the future to erect additional statues in honor of other animals.) Yet another even more obscure memorial, erected in honor of guinea pigs, stands on the grounds of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut on the Isle of Reims in Germany.21 As Susan Iliff (2002) details, counterparts in the United States typically grace the grounds of privately held pharmaceutical firms (and not university campuses, where my own research has been based). As I detail in the next chapter, impromptu memorials do surface within the confines of U.S.-based laboratories, most often created by animal technicians. But these are a far cry from statues erected to heroic animals credited publicly for their valorous or patriotic deeds and depicted as part of a quasisymbiotic pairing of an animal with an equally heroic human handler and partner. Whereas we celebrate on museum grounds, in public parks, on the stage, and in film the sacrifices of warhorses and pack animals, and the bravery and steadfastness of K-9 heroes, lab animals remain nameless creatures who may be born, live, and die within the confines of laboratories as members of larger research colonies, packs, or herds. The invisibility of these generic creatures also facilitates processes that transform them in still other ways, sometimes even involving their erasure as animals at all.

The Invisible Animal I am sitting in a café with a colleague who is busy describing his experiences with online IRB and IACUC training at his university. Today, federal, state, and university regulations require scientists of a range of stripes—from anthropologists to neuroscientists to nurses—to demonstrate competency in the ethics of working with human and animal subjects through automated, online certification.22 The required readings that constitute these “tutorials” or “modules” are followed by multiple choice tests, where passing scores generate certificates in a range of topics and specialties that must then be updated or renewed periodically, and whose timing must correspond to the full period of data gathering, analysis, and even, sometimes, writing and publishing.23 My colleague flips open his laptop and fishes around on the web until he finds the page for which he is searching: it consists of a red, bisected circle—like that which typifies a regulatory traffic sign—superimposed on a picture of a lab rat. The caption accompanying the image reads “THIS IS NOT AN ANIMAL.”24

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Although seemingly absurd, within certain contexts of laboratory science this statement makes perfect sense, evidenced specifically by federal regulatory language pertaining to animals. As stated in Section 1.1, “Definitions—Animal” of the USDA’s “Quick Reference Guide” to the Animal Welfare Act, [“]Animal[”] means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warm-blooded animal, which is being used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research; horses not used for research purposes; and other farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock or poultry used or intended for use as food or fiber, or livestock or poultry used or intended for use for improving animal nutrition, breeding, management, or production efficiency, or for improving the quality of food or fiber. With respect to a dog, the term means all dogs, including those used for hunting, security, or breeding purposes.25

A key point that surfaces in this passage is that strains of rats and mice bred specifically for lab purposes “are not animals” because their management and care (as is true, too, for creatures raised for food or the racetrack) are regulated separately from, say, practices involving a lab-based macaque, ferret, or beagle. Lab mice and rats have specialized histories (Haraway 1997; Raines 1991) that exclude them from forms of oversight imposed on other species. Put another way, researchers working with lab-based rodent colonies must manage them in other specialized ways. Thus, the seemingly comical or absurdist statement that “this is not an animal” flags one possible origin of the ability to objectify lab-based creatures. If a rat “is not an animal,” then what, precisely, is it? And if one can begin to think of a rat as “not an animal,” what is to prevent researchers from eliding how they think about rats with other species as they progress through vertebrate branches of the evolutionary tree and through undergraduate, to dissertation, to postdoctoral research and beyond?

Lab Generics Science is replete with taxonomic systems. Within laboratories, some common forms of labeling include designating animals by species or sub-species (e.g., Macaca mulata versus Macaca fascicularis); by non-scientific nomenclature (a rhesus macaque versus a cynomolgus monkey); and by research foci, as with, say, onco- or non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice (Haraway 1997; Van Belle, Taylor and von Herrath 2009). These very basic approaches inform generic thinking that then facilitates emotional distance between

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researcher and animal. Animals are categorized in still other ways that likewise erase their individuality, most evident in the contrast between sanctioned versus creative and eclectic naming practices. Personalized labeling systems—what I reference as animal naming practices—may be temporal and context-specific phenomena. Often, animals are acquired from off-site breeding facilities, and when they arrive at a lab they bear names that may reference, for instance, their research purpose, their birth date or batch number, or the breeding facility from which they originate. As Michael Lynch explains, an “ ‘animal’ index” might mean that individual creatures are designated by their “day” or “time point” within an experimental protocol (for example, “the rats from Day 3”) (1988, 271). These are deeply bureaucratized practices that assist lab personnel in distinguishing one animal, or group of animals, from others while working in the lab or recording and reporting data. Animals may collect additional names over time, bearing, for instance, the name of the lab in which they now reside (e.g., the Diabetes Project); at other times their names might reference the lab’s director (e.g., the ferrets in the Hart Lab, or the marmosets of the Dreiser Lab). The sheer number of animals in any one colony may well render the naming of individual animals cumbersome if not impossible, so that a single creature most likely bears a designation—akin to an address—that specifies cage location in a grid of stacked shelves. Thus, E-15-24JAN is code for a rat born on January 24 who resides in the fifth tier (E) and fifteen cages over, as one reads left to right on a grid of rat enclosures.26 Each time a rat is removed from this enclosure, this location “name” is noted so that the animal may be returned properly afterward. But this name is not merely about the logistics of retrieval from and return to a housing unit; it also serves as a key designation in lab notes and logs. The identity of an individual animal from such an address may be designated in even more specialized ways with ear punches or tags, or by way of tail or toe clippings or tattoos that are part of a standardized numbering system for designating colony, litter, and sex.27 In addition, I regularly encounter researchers of all ranks who provide animals with what might be referenced elsewhere as “pet” names, even when this goes against sanctioned protocols. Naming is officially discouraged precisely because it facilitates (or perhaps alerts others to) personal attachment. Naming, however, does not necessarily foster intimacy across the human-animal divide. Even when names may seem personal, they may flag, yet again, bureaucratized practices. In one marmoset lab, for example, individual monkeys were named alphabetically according to their order of arrival; thus, everyone knew immediately that Festus had entered the lab

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earlier than Moses, a fact that indicated, too, that Festus was a more experienced lab monkey (as was his respective doctoral student). Everyone knew, too, from a row of binders on a top shelf that two earlier cohorts of marmosets named from A to Z, now deceased, had once inhabited this same laboratory and had worked with other students who had participated in similar research and had since moved on professionally. How, then, do naming practices figure against the backdrop of the mandated deaths of animals once they are no longer of use within a laboratory? Consider this account from Stephanie, a thirty-two-year-old Anglo medical resident involved in diabetes research at an elite Midwestern medical school. Stephanie works in a lab that houses roughly fifty to a hundred rats at any given time, and when asked during an interview what she thought about naming animals she responded as follows: stephanie: I give all my rats the same names: I call them all Harry— H-a-r-r-y, but it’s a play on H-a-i-r-y, of course [chuckles]. I mostly call the females “Harry,” too, although sometimes I resort to Harriette [her spelling, original emphasis]. ls: Can you explain why? stephanie: Well, that way I never mix them up, or forget their names [again, chuckles]. No matter what, I’ll always have it right— what their names are. I figure I don’t even have to worry about the sex with that name. It [“Harry”] suits them all— it’s a good description of a rat. ls: Do you ever find yourself growing attached to specific rats? stephanie: [pause] I do, actually. My first rat ever, in fact, was Harriet [she clarifies this spelling], so I guess I name them all for her, in a way. Sometimes it’s hard not to [grow attached to them]—rats are really smart, and I work fairly intensively with some of them. When they get sick and I have to sacrifice them early on, with those rats it’s hard. But then I tell myself that there will always be another Harry, or Harriette, and this helps. Stephanie’s seemingly quirky practice is not all that unusual within the confines of lab science.28 As I have documented elsewhere, researchers frequently develop elaborate naming systems for animals whose days are numbered, and designated names may be inspired by personal experiences (Sharp 2013). I have known animal breeders and pet owners, too, who follow practices similar to Stephanie’s: indeed, over the years a close relative of mine has given a succession of purebred dogs the same name in honor of

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the very first and most beloved one and, over time, as a means to avoid the mishap of calling her current dog by the wrong name. Not unlike what occurs with Stephanie’s rats, each dog embodies in its name the lingering memory of its predecessor, the name itself serving as an innovative form of memory work and even, perhaps, animal immortality. As Stephanie herself reveals, when all rats bear the same name, the sense of loss at the moment of death is appeased by the understanding that another rat just like the previous one will be there to take his or her place. In essence, it’s Harrys and Harriettes all the way down. As Stephanie’s account reveals, naming practices are a complex affair. For one, they offer evidence of the intimacy of human-animal encounters in laboratories, alongside eclectic memory projects. A poignant element at work here, though, is the frequency with which unconventional naming practices surface within the larger framework of death. As such, they work against established and standardized practices that assert colony over individual, and coded generic systems over animal uniqueness and singularity. Note here that coded naming practices do not necessarily imply that a lab researcher does not know an animal as an individual: body markings, behaviors, and predilections can facilitate intimacy and preference. And as Stephanie’s twist on animal generics reveals, prevailing, normative practices may well inspire personalized, serendipitous responses to interspecies encounters. When taken together, these eclectic responses reveal the workings of a moral imaginary that might destabilize or reinscribe the logic of standardization. Still other standardized practices facilitate the transformation of animals into something else entirely. As Svendsen and Koch demonstrate in their analysis of the lives and deaths of lab-based neonate piglets in Denmark, context affects how research animals are managed, handled, described, and imagined. As they explain, an individual animal moves at birth from being a vulnerable, preterm piglet delivered by caesarian section, to a model of and thus surrogate for a human neonate, to a euthanized corpse in a pathology lab, where it is reduced to tissue cultures that embody quantifiable data (2014). In contexts such as this, the laboratory piglet emerges as a shapeshifter of sorts. Spatial and temporal frames of reference matter: across the rhythm of a twenty-four hour day, a piglet may move in and out of being viewed by lab personnel as a living, vulnerable creature, to a work object or a research partner, to a data point. These shifts vary according to the human parties involved, the specifics of context, and the piglet’s (and researcher’s) station in a lab. They also flag scales of care. At any point in time, a piglet’s uniqueness and individuality may be valued, especially if it demonstrates an ability to generate important data or if it appears vulnerable, weak, or ill.

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At other moments, the same piglet is a generic creature and thus merely one of many; or it may serve as a surrogate of a human neonate, and thus not be an animal at all. What precisely, then, is a laboratory animal in such contexts? Lynch— drawing on observations in a neuroscience rat lab—describes how animals regularly shift in and out of view. The neuroscientists he observed developed specialized understandings about animals, some of which were published in esoteric brain science journals. “Animals” in these articles were represented, for instance in terms of electron micrographs and statistically based arguments about the regeneration of axons in the cell layers of the hippocampus. Such “animals” were relevant only as cases which demonstrated an abstract regenerative process in a generalized brain. Other understandings about animals, rarely communicated in accounts of laboratory methods, pertained to rats as holistic living creatures. These understandings were communicated informally, and were not validated through rigorous testing. They were part of the everyday life of the laboratory, consisting of various sorts of tacit “know-how,” recipe knowledge, and experimental craft that enabled practitioners to deal with the contingencies of “handling” laboratory rats. (1988, 266–67)

According to Lynch, these trends offer evidence of a transformative process that “renders” the “naturalistic animal” an artifact of science, and here death is pivotal. As he explains, “ ‘Animal’ is thus a quantitative index—a coherent grouping of documents ultimately referring to an animal that once lived, but more immediately signifying a graphic rendering of the animal’s remains” (1988, 270). These processes involved in managing lab-based piglets and rats resonate with those involved in the “making of the monkey” for lab science, as described in chapters 1 and 2, negating, altering, and transforming an animal’s “nature” into something else of value in science. These are, nevertheless, unstable processes both spatially and temporally. The nature of human involvement matters, too, because a researcher may view, manage, and value an animal very differently than an animal care technician does. The same monkey, when roughhousing with other monkeys in a social enclosure and taking toys and biscuits from a caretaker, is a very different creature from the one he or she is expected to be when sitting in front of a lab computer and working under the supervision of a postdoctoral student. Ontologically speaking, a single monkey is many monkeys at once or, as Mol might say, a “monkey multiple” (Mol 2002). Similarly, the piglet is multiple and is perhaps even the preterm human baby it models. Here, the piglet does not merely save the child: the piglet is the child is the pig.

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To summarize, a compendium of sanctioned, standardized codes of conduct surrounding animal management facilitates animal erasure. The most blatant example of this involves the supposition that certain creatures, at least, “are not animals” but instead are specialized life forms crafted specifically for scientific use (see also Haraway 1997). In turn, the framework of animal modeling blends individual animals as interchangeable members of larger colonies. In such contexts, sentimental naming practices are discouraged in large part to assist researchers in shielding themselves from the emotional responses that death’s inevitability can generate. The step-bystep processes involved in engaging animals in research facilitate their movement in and out of categories that may well erase their animalness, as demonstrated by the vulnerable piglet who shapeshifts into a human baby, reemerging posthumously as a “quantitative index” of data points (again, see Lynch 1988, 270). These processes of erasure in life also inform how lab personnel are trained to think and talk about death and acts of killing.

beyond the trope of sacrifice “I came in early today because I had to sac a batch of rats.” Ursula, a twentynine-year-old Ukranian-American medical student who has paused her clinical training at an East Coast medical school to earn a PhD in neurobiology, has been working in animal labs since she was a teenager. She explains to me that she knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a doctor, an interest that later blossomed into an insatiable drive after her younger sister was diagnosed at age four with a brain tumor when Ursula was in eighth grade. Her sister endured multiple surgeries; still alive today, she has limited mobility on her left side and blindness in one eye. Ursula’s intended profession is clinical research in pediatric neurosurgery. Her graduate work addresses the effects of tumors and surgically imposed lesions on rat brains, with a special focus on impaired mobility. Ursula hopes in the future for a multiyear postdoctoral fellowship that would enable her to work in a vertebrate lab that employs animals with, as she puts it, “smarter brains where they can tell you what they’re experiencing,” namely, pigs or monkeys. Where rats are concerned, she currently tracks their abilities pre- and post-surgery to perform various tasks she has trained them to do, paired with data on brain function transmitted via implanted electrodes. She later euthanizes and performs necropsies on these same rats. Whereas much of a rat’s body is disposed of as medical waste and incinerated, Ursula retrieves and preserves brain tissue samples with great care for ongoing study.

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A Laboratory Lexicon of Life and Death Although Ursula’s word choice—“to sac a batch of rats”—may strike the novice reader as insensitive and callous, Ursula draws upon an established lexicon for describing laboratory animals’ deaths. Ursula references a wellworn concept, namely, that lab-based animals are not “slaughtered” (as are creatures intended for consumption) or “terminated” (a term employed more readily for non-mammalian species), nor are they “murdered” or “executed” (terms lab personnel consider appropriate only for describing humans’ deaths). Instead, the researchers I have encountered most often speak of “sacrificing” animals, an expression that flags the underlying complexity of human-animal relations in science. “Sacrifice” is part of a broader lexicon of death whose use varies according to one’s training, duties, and station within a laboratory’s labor hierarchy. The majority of lab researchers I have encountered speak exclusively of animal “sacrifice,” employed in either the active or passive voice (i.e., “we sacrificed the animal” or “the animal was sacrificed”) and not of “death” or “killing.” Another term of secondary importance that might be used interchangeably with “sacrifice” is “euthanize.” Lab personnel more generally—be they researchers, animal technicians, or veterinarians—only occasionally speak of “terminating” an animal (I have only heard this used in reference to zebrafish). In contrast, the laboratory veterinarians I have interviewed rarely employ “sacrifice” unless speaking directly to a researcher, because they considered it an inappropriate euphemism that grants agency to animals in ways they find distasteful. Instead, veterinarians typically prefer to speak of “euthanizing” or “putting down” an animal. Some veterinarians speak of these acts as “killing” (with a flattened, matter-of-fact affect, and not by any means as an accusation directed at researchers). In this sense, they employ an expression used more broadly by colleagues elsewhere: for example, James Herriot, the celebrated author of rural veterinary life in England, refers on various occasions to the “humane killer” he carries in his car to end the suffering of untreatably ill or injured farm animals (1972, e.g., 34). Veterinarians are also more likely to describe a deceased animal as “dead,” as a “corpse,” or as a previously living creature’s “remains,” terms that, again, lab researchers typically do not use. Instead, among researchers, animals’ remains are generally described as “samples” or “data,” akin to Lynch’s notion of the “quantitative index” (1988, 270). Of note here, too, is that animal technicians’ phrasing generally echoes that of veterinarians and not researchers, although they, unlike all other

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personnel, might speak of the necessity of “killing” an animal for humane reasons (once again, reminiscent of Herriot). My overall sense is that animal technicians are not as easily persuaded to speak euphemistically of death as are others who work in the same lab space. Nevertheless, when they do speak of killing, they tend to use the term in the past tense: that is, “we had to kill [the pig] Arnie,” followed by a qualification such as “because he did not recover well from surgery and he was suffering.” Although “kill” may slip off the tongue of an occasional lab researcher, its use, though not taboo, is discouraged.29 My point here is that whereas “sacrifice” and “euthanize” are certainly euphemisms for “kill,” they do more work than this as part of an elaborate lexicon of death. “Sacrifice” might best be thought of as a “Key Word” (Williams 1983) whose complex history enables us to track shifting ideas about the medical, social, economic, and moral worth of using animals in scientific research. The term’s use is widespread in scientific laboratories, favored by scientists from a host of disciplines—within the United States and abroad—to describe the deliberate termination of laboratory animals’ lives. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, the first published use of the term in a scientific journal dates to 1903, appearing in an article that describes the deliberate killing of a research animal in anticipation of necropsy. In subsequent illustrative entries (dating from 1926, 1944, 1971), animal sacrifice is clearly regarded as a key component of this two-step process.30 The emergence of “sacrifice” as part of a scientific lexicon marks a reworking of still other contemporary meanings of the period, where the term’s earlier use signaled the reluctant economic loss associated with, say, selling an animal below value, where the owner—and not the animal— bears the burden of sacrifice.31 These meanings, of course, build upon an even older one associated with religious rites. As both a noun and verb, “sacrifice” inevitably frames understandings of lab-based practices as, at the very least, quasi-religious or ritualistic. In its most basic sense, “sacrifice” is a powerful term that shifts the animal, at the time of death, away from its position as a subject (or object) of study to one that gives its life to science. At the moment of death, it redefines the relationship between researcher and animal as that of the sacrificer and sacrificed, an association that has not escaped the notice of social scientists writing on lab-based human-animal relations (see, for example, Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Friese and Clarke 2012; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Regan 1986). As Hubert and Mauss argued long ago, the sacrificial act involves a moral contract between human and animal, whereby the ritual slaying of the animal binds the sacrificed creature to the

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human sacrificer. Together they form a sacred, interdependent dyad (Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]).32 In laboratory contexts, then, “sacrifice” is understood to flag ritualized behaviors (Lynch 1988) that evidence complex, albeit unspoken, sacred bonds between humans and other living creatures (Regan 1986). The term also underscores the intimacy of human-animal encounters, especially in reference to the quotidian rhythm of care (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007). Lynch, in his now-classic essay on ritual practices in laboratory science, argued that the metaphorical power of “sacrifice” as a technical term of “scientific cosmology” lay in its power to “transform” “the animal body into scientific object” (1988, 225–26). Lynch’s work involved ethnographic observation in a neuroscience lab that primarily employed rats as experimental subjects. He argued that a lab animal is two sorts of creature at once, the “analytic animal” and the “naturalistic animal.” The making of the first is dependent on the existence of the second: as he explained, scientists understand rats as both “analytic products of research” and as “naturalistic creatures to be ‘handled’ in the laboratory. While the ‘analytic animal’ is a creature in a generalized mathematical space, the ‘naturalistic animal’ is a phenomenon in the commonsense life world. The ‘analytic animal’ therefore becomes the real animal in a scientific system of knowledge, while tacitly depending upon the ‘naturalistic animal’ for its practical foundation” (1988, 266–67). Lynch also regarded “sacrifice” as a “rendering process” (see also Shukin 2009). The sacrifice of an animal for the specific purpose of acquiring data marks a “pivotal moment” in the “career” of a lab animal when it is killed or “‘consecrated’ for experimental purposes” and transformed into “an artifact” of scientific engagement (1988, 268–69, 274). According to Lynch, “scientists are not oblivious” to the religious significance of sacrifice as metaphor (274– 75); he underscored, however, that “it would be mistaken to equate the analytic data produced through the sacrifice of the animal with a ‘sacred’ order.” Nevertheless, sacrifice does ultimately “convert” the “naturalistic” animal into an “analytic” one and, as such, “sacrifice is a mediating act” whereby “the transcendent significance of the animal” is “achieved” only in those instances where killing and sampling are done properly and, ultimately, when the animal generates data judged to be of analytical value, and standing in as a fair representation of a larger cohort of similar creatures (279). As such, for Lynch, “sacrifice” marks the boundaries of specialized technical processes that, like rituals, have the power to transform. This insightful framework nonetheless neglects the term’s broader polyvalent range. Reminiscent of Lynch’s findings, research scientists with

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whom I have worked are cognizant of, yet uneasy with, the religious overtone of “sacrifice.” Whereas when speaking of animal sacrifice they might reference themes of salvation (where the rat saves the child), they wrestle with efforts to generate alternative turns of phrase to describe animal death. Their troubled efforts to do so, though muted in public venues, occasionally instigate lively discussions with peers in laboratories, on journal editorial boards, and the like on how best to talk about death. As some lab researchers have explained to me, the term “sacrifice” provides a means for demonstrating respect for the animals with whom they have worked; others, however, balk at its euphemistic power and prefer alternative expressions devoid of religious connotations. For instance, I occasionally hear researchers speak of “ending” an animal’s life or, on rare occasions, using more colorful language that asserts the irony of sacrifice’s quasi-religious overtones, such as “sending” an animal to “Monkey Heaven” or to “that Big Pig Pen in the sky.” Some theorists assert that use of “sacrifice” exposes unease among lab personnel over killing (Regan 1986), yet as these examples demonstrate, there is widespread discomfort on the framing of standardized practices of killing in religious and ritual terms. An overarching problem with the trope of sacrifice is that it excludes other lexical and analytical possibilities. In response, I ask, How might we escape the unidimensional qualities of this concept and delve into deeper layers of meaning? Human organ transfer (involving donation, procurement, and transplantation) provides a helpful comparative example. Within this specialized domain of medicine, language is carefully policed by a range of invested transplant professionals such that only certain turns of phrase are permitted. Associated acts of rhetorical policing (Richardson 1996) are designed, in very deliberate fashion, to shape sociomoral thought and action. These processes are evident in scripted turns of phrase that dominate organ donation campaigns, policy papers, public talks, and transplant celebratory events. No written or oral presentation is considered complete without underscoring the “shortage” or “scarcity” of human organs. In turn, acts of “altruism” and “heroism” frame discussions of why individuals or their kin consent to organ donation. Finally, organs themselves are described as “gifts of life” that are offered without an expectation of anything in return, actions that enable transplant patients to be “reborn” or gain “a new lease on life.” Theorists respond in turn, where analyses focus overwhelmingly on polarized positions of organ transfer as open-ended reciprocity, set against those who assert that the altruistic model disguises the reality that organs are sheltered commodities. In short, both those who work within and those

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who analyze organ transfer are trapped by the limited imaginary of dominant tropes. In so doing, they overlook other frames of reference: some parties, for example, regard transplanted organs not as “gifts” but as exchangeable parts reminiscent of car repair or as living entities that embody their donors after death (Sharp 2006b). Cross-cultural research based outside the United States provides still other alternatives: as Margaret Lock and Sherine Hamdy demonstrate, for instance, the imaginary of heroic gift-giving proves ill-suited to Japanese and Egyptian contexts (Lock 2002; Hamdy 2012). Whereas far less rhetorical policing occurs in laboratory science, language still matters. Interestingly, during the course of this current project, it has proved risky to neglect or even question sacrifice, not among scientists themselves but among social scientists, who widely regard it as key to deciphering human-animal relations in laboratories. But readings of killing as ritualized behavior takes us only so far; the framing of the bond between researcher and fish, rat, dog, ferret, or monkey as sacred has little bearing on researchers’ moral sentiments (although this does prove helpful at points in understanding those who opt out of animal research). “Sacrifice” as a well-worn term nevertheless bears the possibility of facilitating introspection, such that researchers themselves sometimes pause to ask themselves: Is this indeed a relationship between slayer and sacrificial victim? Does its use evidence a desire for euphemisms, and if so, why? What differentiates “sacrifice” from “killing”? More generally, it is at the moment of death that researchers often find they must pause to reflect on the morality of what they do both at that moment and across the full arc of their research. As demonstrated below, moral introspection may well engender creatively serendipitous thought and action.

The Moral Economy of Animal Labor When Ursula states that she had to “sac a bunch of rats,” her turn of phrase exposes otherwise obscured layers of meaning. Ursula employs the diminutive form of sacrifice, where the expression “to sac” exposes professional jargon at work—through punning—that is reminiscent of the playfully dark euphemisms for death that abound in medicine. As Coombs et al. demonstrate, medical slang proliferates in emergency medicine, peaking during students’ years of internship and residency training and then dropping significantly among established, senior physicians (1993). In this light, we might well view Ursula’s use of slang as signaling her insider status as a fledgling neurobiologist, and as she advances in her career we should expect her use of “sac” to diminish over time. (Indeed, my data confirm those of

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Coombs et al.: the lab directors whom I have interviewed only occasionally employ the term “sac,” whereas it seems popular among undergraduate and graduate students.) When “sac” replaces “sacrifice,” it shifts the term’s meaning because the phrase “to sac an animal” is eerily reminiscent of “sacking,” or firing, a laborer.33 “Sac,” then, indexes a hierarchy of human-animal relations, where in this instance the animal occupies a non-religious subservient role. After all, it is the human who determines and manages the animal’s activities, not the other way around. Lab scientists frequently describe animals’ experimental participation as “work,” and they praise individual animals for “working hard” or for doing “good work,” activities that are inseparable from the production of useful data. (Lynch reports similar findings [1988].) In turn, a successful “working” relationship between human and animal is crucial to the success of any project, and this may be a source of pronounced anxiety among those who have yet to establish their careers. Consider this statement from Esteban, a postdoctoral student who works closely, and often on a daily basis, with a hefty adolescent male macaque named Spartacus: esteban: I’ve been here now for three years; typically a post-doc[toral fellowship] lasts three to five. It’s a protected time to do research. It’s when you establish yourself so you can then go on to a faculty post. I want to have a lab [of my own] like this. . . . I am building on the platform of this species. I am trained to work with this species, this animal. [In the past] I worked with pigs . . . and people [that is, patients]. . . . [I found] I really like the monkey-human connection. I realized I cared the most about how the brain works [in terms of perception]. It’s a very deep feature of us. . . . A monkey can report to you what it sees. ls: What do you mean, “report”? esteban: Well, it can’t speak English, of course [wry smile]. . . . They are trained subjects; they are trained to indicate if they saw something—they do this [for instance] by pushing a button [on a computer keyboard] or through eye tracking [in both instances while the monkey observes a computer monitor]. Of course we don’t really know what the monkey thinks it saw, [but] we reward them. It’s really all about perceptionaction-reward. And it’s what you do [when you’re the scientist]. I have to steer the system. When Esteban speaks of “building on the platform of this species,” how he must “steer the system,” and that monkeys are “trained subjects,” he

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relies on a language that seems at first glance to objectify, in this instance, the rhesus monkey named Spartacus. For instance, Esteban refers to a generic monkey as “it,” but he refers to Spartacus as “he.” My participantobservation in monkey labs has taught me that a well-run experiment hinges on the carefully calibrated and paired abilities of researcher and monkey to labor in close partnership day after day, and for months or years at a time. In its crudest form, an unhappy or unwell animal generates poor data, as bioengineers used to tell me in describing their work with male calves (Sharp 2013). Esteban’s daily interactions with Spartacus reveal that this is not a mere generic monkey; instead, Esteban is exquisitely aware of Spartacus’s personality and temperament alongside his shifts in mood. For example, before Esteban would allow me to be in the same room with him and Spartacus, he instructed me in a low and calm voice not to make eye contact because Spartacus prefers a dominant position vis-à-vis others. Later, when Spartacus yawned, bared his two-inch canines for me, and “charged” me by lightly thumping his body against the interior of his lab “chair,” Esteban, who was standing next to Spartacus, again instructed me very quietly to crouch down to ensure my head was lower than the monkey’s.34 Spartacus became still and then refocused his attention on Esteban, who, also with eyes averted, then slowly and methodically rewarded Spartacus with edible tidbits held out delicately to him at the end of a thin wooden skewer. In other words, when Esteban speaks of how he is “building on the platform” and must “steer the system,” he is doing two things at once. First, he recognizes the experimental process as an apparatus of sorts, where Spartacus is a working part, or a relatively inert actor within the context of the experiment. But Spartacus is also a working animal, exquisitely trained in ways reminiscent of approaches employed with, say, a dressage or carriage horse, a hunting hound, a K-9 bomb squad dog, or a truffle pig. As researchers constantly remind me, a lab monkey is neither “a pet” nor “a wild animal.” Further, the monkey is neither a purely utilitarian creature (as animals are described, say, in the food industry) nor a companion (as with a house pet). As my father used to explain to me, when he was growing up his family always had two dogs: one was a house pet who was coddled, fed table scraps, and slept indoors, and the other was a working animal, a well-trained hunting dog who lived and slept in an outdoor kennel and who trained exclusively with my grandfather in anticipation of excursions to field and stream. Successful lab work with macaques like Spartacus requires a similar quasi-symbiotic working relationship between human and animal that is increasingly refined over time. The success of this sort of relationship

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defines the very core of the moral economy of laboratory labor and associated human-animal hierarchies.

Research Death as Moral Contract Allow me to pause here to state clearly what I am not arguing: my purpose here is not to demonstrate how research scientists objectify animals as a means to facilitate killing, nor that killing comes easily or naturally to anyone. Most certainly, some find the act of “sacrifice” or “euthanizing” an animal easier than others do. This does not signal, however, that one is ever fully immune to the moral quandaries associated with taking the life of a living creature.35 Contrary to what the FBR posters assert, animal sacrifice in science goes well beyond notions of, say, the principle of the greater good—that is, the moral assertion that animal research is justified because it presents suffering among sickly children. This reductionist trope is employed most often in the public arena to sway opinion among lay audiences. Although this principle most certainly figures into the calculus of lab animal life and death, these sorts of arguments merely scratch the surface of much deeper moral thinking among research scientists about the values they assign to animals. Fully understanding the morality of animal death requires tacking in several directions, and in my effort to clarify its complexity, I begin from the outside and then work my way in. Whereas much social science research involves identifying dominant patterns, I assert that an equally fruitful approach requires paying attention to what are widely referenced as “outliers.” Throughout the course of this research project, I regularly encountered those who had opted out of laboratory research precisely because it would require killing other creatures. Consider this statement from Katie, a sixtyyear-old Anglo researcher who holds a PhD in evolutionary biology: katie: I’ve never forgotten the words of my high school biology teacher. When we started the week on vertebrate anatomy, we were scheduled to dissect some rabbits. But before we started the class, he spoke to us about what was about to happen—he said, “You need to be respectful and think about what we are about to do. This is an animal that is giving its life so that you can learn from it. It’s important not to forget this.” ls: Did you then dissect the rabbit? katie: Yes. He first went to the back room and killed the rabbits, and then he brought them out to our class in a very respectful way. I’ll never forget that. And I’ve never forgotten what he said. Later I became a

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vegetarian and even, for a while, a Buddhist [chuckles] because I just can’t do it; I can’t kill an animal for my own sake. I love biology [laughing]—and look at me, I’ve built my entire career working with yeast! Katie is representative of a larger cohort of lab scientists who remain invisible because they have opted out of terminal experiments focused on vertebrates (or other living creatures). Although invisible, they flag an important theme in lab research: that those who do choose such professions, or do remain in relevant fields, must on some level think through— and struggle with—the significance and consequences of killing. For example, every lab researcher I have interviewed has spoken of species with whom they will not work. Samantha, a fifty-eight-year-old Anglo researcher who, like Katie, specializes in evolutionary biology, exemplifies this. She has long directed her own monkey lab and as she explained, “I’ve never been able to work with dogs. I love them as much as my own children.” Cosmo, a forty-eight-year-old Italo-American sculptor and son of a renowned cardiac specialist who worked for decades with beagles, recounted how his father always made sure they had a pet beagle at home who stood in as “an atonement” of sorts for all the other dogs that he “kept and killed” at work. And as Patrick, a twenty-nine-year-old French Canadian doctoral student based in a macaque lab of a Midwestern university, told me, “I draw the line” at chimps, because “that would be overkill—you don’t need a chimp for this kind of research. Besides, they’re endangered, and I think it’s wrong to use them.” James, a fifty-nine-year-old Anglo director of another monkey lab, voiced similar sentiments when we discussed the range of primates used in research. He, too, used the same idiomatic expression as Patrick: “A chimp would be overkill. And there are many more ethical issues there. Great apes—there’s no reason to go that far. Baboons are bigger and harder to work with. It’s interesting you suggested marmosets— they’re very tiny. Some are trying to do this. But [for my research] there’s no better [human] model than a macaque.” Still others prefer to work with tissue samples as a means to shield them from the act of killing.36 Some argue, too, that tissue work enables a single animal to generate data for many experiments, thus sheltering other animals from research use.37 Sarah, a thirty-two-year-old African American geneticist, described for me her notion of “the elegance of genes,” where samples taken by others based elsewhere “may be superimposed” on understandings of the animal, enabling her to avoid having to “sacrifice the animal myself.” Not unlike Katie, Sarah shields herself from having to harm

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other living creatures. Those who opt out of working with—and killing— animals (especially vertebrates) enable us to access otherwise invisible practices and sentiments. When Patrick and James speak of “overkill,” they reference core notions of lab animal welfare embedded a set of principles known as The Three Rs. Initially proposed over half a century ago in the United Kingdom by Russell and Burch, the Three Rs—standing for replacement, reduction, and refinement—today guide lab activities in European, North American, and other countries (Russell and Burch 1959; see also Fraser 2008). Fenwick, Griffin, and Gauthier offer this succinct description of this code of conduct: “The tenet is grounded in the premise that animals should be used only if a scientist’s best efforts to find a nonanimal alternative have failed, and that when animals are needed, only the most humane methods should be used on the smallest number of animals required to obtain valid information.” More specifically, researchers should be alert to alternative research strategies that could “replace” the necessity of animal use (e.g., computer modeling), and they should strive to “reduce” or use as few animals as possible. They describe “refinement”—a key concern for my current discussion—as follows: “ ‘Refinement alternatives’ refers to the modification of husbandry or experimental procedures to minimize pain and distress, and to enhance the welfare of an animal used in science from the time it is born until its death” (2009, 523–24). Thus, when Patrick and James speak of “overkill,” they employ a doubleentendre that equates the humane killing of one species (in this case, macaques) with salvational practices that spare another more prized species (that is, chimpanzees) from laboratory use. In this sense, the expression “overkill” reveals the outer boundary of a shared moral framework. Their decisions demonstrate the Three Rs at work: they simultaneously “replace,” “reduce,” and “refine” the use of chimps by relying on small numbers of another primate species. Within such a context, the chimp defines a spectral presence: absent from the lab (and thus from view), yet always standing in when needed as evidence of a species-specific protectionist stance that asserts a shared recognition of the need to guard endangered species at the sacrifice of prolific others.

Remembering the Dead Among those who do choose to work with lab animals, a moral economy of labor defines yet another important analytical framework for understanding animal death. I often ask lab researchers if they can recall a favorite animal. Early on, I expected to hear descriptions of animals’ temperaments

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as a dominant theme of remembrance. Instead, lab researchers nearly always offer sentimental narratives of creatures whom they regard as exceptional “workers” who “produce reliable” or “strong” data. Douglas, an Anglo researcher now in his late fifties and a senior neuroscientist who holds both MD and PhD degrees, has directed his own lab for nearly three decades. He has worked with several primate species, but he has always preferred macaques. He responded as follows when I asked if he could recall any favorite animals: “There was Buster in [the lab where I was trained— he was] my first monkey. And Annie—she was a female macaque, a really hard worker, so she was an exception to the preference for males—she worked harder than any monkey I’ve ever known. We nicknamed her Acura [he then explained the pun to me: she was fast like a car in terms of her learning abilities, and she demonstrated high “accuracy” in her answers]. There’s a lot of animal-to-animal variation [i.e., not all monkeys are alike].” Later in our interview he returned to my question, speaking again of monkeys he encountered in the lab where he did his graduate training. Note that he revisits the importance of Annie as a favorite animal: [I liked] Lucille and Little Richard. Lucille was named for Lucille Ball because of her red pelt and Little Richard because he liked to wiggle his fingers like he was playing a piano. . . . But, no, my favorite monkey was Darwin—he was a really sweet monkey. He could go for eight hours straight on apple juice. And I had a real soft spot for Annie—I trained her and she trained me. Annie, we had to kill her because she had a false positive [on a required medical test]. She was a great monkey. I was away when it happened. The vet staff said, “We just can’t take a chance [of her infecting the other monkeys].”

As Douglas’s responses reveal, individual monkeys are remembered, and prized, as skilled workers who produce sound, reliable data and who, like Darwin or Annie, exhibit exceptional stamina and drive.38 Researchers sometimes speak of how an animal seems to “enjoy” the work: indeed, in one instance, a lab director went so far as to describe the “games” his monkeys “played” during experiments as a form of “enrichment” (thus eliding “work” with animal welfare).39 Esteban’s earlier remark that a lab researcher can never know what a monkey is thinking allows us to probe more carefully into Douglas’s comment, one that expresses the joy a researcher experiences when engaged in experimental partnership with a seasoned and skillful animal. As Douglas explains, Annie was among his favorite monkeys spanning an arc of three decades of research because “I trained her and she trained me.”40 Douglas also employs the inclusive phrase “we had to kill her” (emphasis added), even though he was in fact out of town when

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the vet euthanized her. In doing so—and in using the term “kill”—he expresses the sentiment that he was culpable in her untimely death. Experimental engagement with animals may inspire actions that fall outside scripted protocols. As Douglas’s account reveals, it is not unusual for those who work most closely with specific animals to be exempt from the ultimate “sacrifice,” that is, shouldering the responsibility for killing an animal one has known well. Instead, others might step in out of compassion for a fellow researcher, a serendipitous form of humane care that shields a fellow lab worker from emotional harm. Evidence from my research indicates that this occurs most frequently with vertebrates understood as “highly sentient” creatures who have worked closely, day-to-day, with particular researchers.41 Aaron, an Anglo neuroscientist in his late fifties who attended medical school with Douglas, has developed an especially elaborate way to manage the sense of loss within his own lab: aaron: When we sac someone’s monkey, those who have [worked with that monkey], it’s a loss—you feel bad when you kill them. ls: Students in your lab don’t sacrifice their animals? aaron: No, I do this myself—with the help of the vet, of course. And when it’s time to sacrifice an animal, [afterwards] we have a wake. ls: [Puzzled:] A wake? aaron: Yeah. I go out and get some beers and we sit around and tell stories about the monkey. It helps the students. ls: Does anyone else attend, like the animal technicians? Do you have a sense of their reactions? aaron: [After a moment’s pause:] Hmm. I’ve never thought about that— I’ve never asked them. They’re generally pretty quiet about it. They might say, “I never liked that monkey” or “I’m really going to miss that monkey,” but that’s about it. They don’t talk about it. At the onset of my research, I could not have imagined encountering lab personnel who held wakes for monkeys. Nevertheless, Aaron brackets out a portion of the workday as a period of mourning, a practice that serves as a counterpoint to my earlier arguments about the invisibility of lab animal memorials. For whereas in this instance no permanent memorial is erected in an animal’s honor, the wake nevertheless exposes the sometimes raw emotional labor borne by researchers who work closely, one-on-one, with a well-trained animal, often nearly every day for several years, such that the monkey may soon become known within the lab not just by name (“Merlin” or “Skyler”) but as, say, “Nancy’s monkey” or “Ronnie’s rhesus.” Indeed, the more sentient the species, the more likely such animals are

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considered “partners” in research and thus their loss felt more acutely once they are dead. Within labs, I occasionally stumble across a playful bulletin board photo of lab staff that incorporates a photoshopped image of, say, a macaque. Within these photos, the macaque might be one of several passengers in a van or boat, or perhaps the monkey sits on a blanket sharing a picnic lunch with human staff. Within laboratory worlds such as these, when “Nancy’s monkey” is euthanized, Nancy, alongside her colleagues, may well experience a monkey’s death as a significant emotional loss of a highly valued coworker. As I have learned from Douglas and through interviews with other researchers, their “firsts” are etched into their memories. Most often, these involve the first animals with whom they worked and the first animals they sacrificed, a moment Lynch found to mark a “rite of passage” among the neuroscientists in a rat lab because it was “among the first tasks assigned to new members” who were expected to master associated techniques (1988, 279; see also Friese and Clarke 2012). These patterns are reminiscent of how physicians recall their first patient encounters, and the first time one under their care died (Rhodes-Kropf et al. 2005). When researchers labor with monkeys in labs, they always know they face the possibility of loss, perhaps because an animal becomes too ill to be saved or because the research protocol necessitates necropsy. Perhaps, too, the monkey lingers and is recalled in posthumous form for many years within a researcher’s body of data. Indeed, I suggest that each time a researcher draws on this data and reports findings derived from his or her monkey, the researcher not only remembers the monkey but, in a queerly bureaucratized way, memorializes the animal too. The wakes held periodically within Aaron’s lab also expose the boundaries of compassion because the emotional labor associated with being an animal technician remains invisible. Both researchers and caretakers circulate freely within laboratory environments—bumping elbows in the hallway and the rooms where animals are caged, and periodically exchanging information on the health status, behavior, or needs of individual animals— yet the labor practices and hierarchies that characterize lab life often ensure social distance between these two groups. Whereas researchers have or are working toward advanced degrees (the endpoint is typically a PhD or MD), animal technicians are presumed by researchers to lack the same levels of expertise, knowledge, and training. They are, however, experts on animal care, and they often work closely with veterinarians who pay regular visits to their respective laboratories. And whereas a postdoctoral student is expected to interact perhaps on a daily basis with “her monkey” during

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downtime—feeding him treats and helping him remain accustomed to her presence and voice—she also spends many other hours elsewhere in an office analyzing her data. Animal technicians, however, spend nearly all of their working day in the company of animals—cleaning their cages, restocking food and water, administering basic medical care, and, depending on the species, providing animals with a various stimuli as enrichment. When animals fall ill, technicians might stay overnight to oversee their care. In describing such practices, Birke, Arluke, and Michael underscore, animal technicians shoulder the brunt of heavy, albeit invisible, emotional labor (2007; see also Hochschild 2003). As I elaborate in chapter 4, when animals are killed animal technicians may well engage in specialized forms of memory work far more elaborate than that of lab researchers, erecting temporary or permanent memorials to favorite creatures.

managed suffering and humane care I am sitting opposite Douglas at his lab office desk, and we are discussing the life expectancy of rhesus macaques. Although staff I encountered in another neuroscience lab in the United Kingdom always sacrificed and collected brain samples on each macaque once an associated postdoctoral student’s research project came to an end, Douglas prefers to reassign the monkey to another project. He explains, “These are very valuable animals—we spend a lot of time teaching them to adapt to lab conditions, and they’re extremely well trained [experimental subjects]. . . . [Also,] macaques are very expensive to acquire—I see no reason why we should kill them at the end of a project. Everything we need to learn we can get at through a range of [brain] scanning techniques. Necropsy isn’t necessary for the work we do here.” As a result, Douglas, more so than the majority of other researchers I have encountered, has a stronger sense of this species’ typical lifespan.42 He also possesses cursory knowledge of their social structure, which he pauses to explain to me—how in the wild they are “matriarchal” and how sexually mature males tend to “go it alone, moving from band to band in search of mates.”43 (Douglas is an avid fan of Jane Goodall, and he sometimes elides her findings on chimps with his understanding of macaques, especially where their social habits are concerned.) Although the majority of the monkeys in Douglas’s lab are adolescents (typically four to six years old), several are twice that age. He encourages his graduate students to “share” monkeys, enabling them to assemble comparative data, and he cooperates with a neighboring lab by lending out his monkeys to a colleague in another department who is attempting to breed macaques and several other primate

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species in-house.44 As he explains at one point, “I’ve heard they might live longer on average in labs, but that’s because in the wild [they are threats to each other]. In the wild they might live twenty years. But you can’t forget that nature’s red in tooth and claw.” Douglas’s assumption that in contrast to a lab animal’s existence, life in nature is brutish and short, is shared by many other lab researchers. For instance, at the tail end of a public forum on lab animal care when a debate over the outer boundaries of “welfare” became especially heated, a biologist sitting next to me said in an exasperated stage whisper, “Animals in laboratories lead much better lives than they do in nature. Nature is brutal; most animals do not live very long in the wild.”45 In turn, some researchers— especially young or relatively inexperienced ones—cite examples of presumed innate intraspecies cruelty when reasoning through why they prefer to work with certain species over others. As Susan, a twenty-three-year-old Korean-American and first-year doctoral student in genetics, explained, “I detest mice. They are cannibalistic and will quickly resort to eating their own young. This is why I work with rabbits.” Still others speak of the need to keep animals known to be “highly social” in the wild isolated from one another in the lab because of their, yet again, innate tendencies to harm one another when they inhabit enclosed spaces. As one IACUC director and veterinarian stated during a conference presentation on primate care, “I see far too many bitten off lips, fingers, toes, and penises among animals who are socially housed [to advocate for this as standardized practice]. At [my institution] we typically cage animals individually but in rooms where there are other monkeys. At most, we pair them, but we do not employ group housing; it imposes serious risks for individual animals.” From the point of view of the IACUC officer, Susan, and the biologist sitting next to me, intraspecies cruelty is inherently “natural” to many animals, a stance that enables laboratories to emerge as domains of humane care. Within a regulatory framework, this sensibility falls under the aegis of mandated animal welfare practices: a well-run laboratory follows strict protocols of animal management that affect housing, nutrition, lighting, temperature, and an array of enrichment strategies designed to protect animals from physical harm and psychological decline. These sentiments offer evidence of quotidian sensibility driven by widespread and deeply entrenched moral assumptions. Most importantly, the ethical codes of conduct that steer laboratory life—and, by association, death—are superior and preferable to the laws of nature. As a bioengineer once said to me in a very different context, nature is messy and full of flaws, and science bears the promise of offering much better solutions (Sharp 2013).

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In contrast, the practice of solitary housing, for instance, deeply troubles activists based outside of labs, alongside many animal technicians, too, who regard sentiments of “tooth and claw” as myopic perceptions of the “natural” propensities and needs of individual animals and their species regardless of where they live. Activists assert that no animal should live out his or her life under lab conditions. Lab veterinarians and technicians work hard to offer animals quality, compassionate care both within and beyond regulated welfare protocols. Among researchers, certain species are viewed as highly adaptive to lab conditions; among animal technicians and veterinarians, lab conditions are inherently unnatural environments that can induce psychological distress or illness in any animal who is denied appropriate enrichment. Indeed, animal technicians often read the Three Rs as granting license to “get creative,” as one caretaker put it. Although researchers often speak of regulatory compliance when describing welfare practices, they credit animal care technicians and vets for introducing innovative solutions when the creatures upon whom they rely display pathological symptoms.

Humane Treatment and the Good Life Throughout my adolescence I spent a significant amount of time on horse farms, tending to animals of a range of sizes and temperaments. Horses in the wild, on the farm, in the pasture, and in the barn are highly social, and they can develop clear—and chronic—signs of stress and boredom if left locked up alone in a stall for too many hours with no stimulation. Like many species, a distressed or bored horse will pace, sometimes for hours at a time. They also demonstrate species-specific forms of distress that a trained observer can spot in an instant. Among the most frustratingly chronic habits includes “cribbing,” where a horse repetitively bites down on (and damages) feed buckets, barn posts, and stall planks while simultaneously arching his or her neck and inhaling air while making a sucking or belching sound, a habit that can cause significant damage to teeth and lungs if the animal inhales small bits of debris.46 Yet another is “weaving,” where a horse stands in place and then sways his or her head and forebody back and forth in an endless, monotonous rhythm, often while attempting to glimpse activities occurring outside the stall. These habits are notoriously difficult to break, requiring concerted efforts on the part of human caretakers to identify alternative activities that will distract and stimulate an affected horse in hopes that these behaviors will cease. My point here is that spending time around animals can teach one to be alert to signs of boredom, loneliness, and other forms of stress. As the narratives of celebrated veterinarian and animal behaviorist Vent Virga

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demonstrate (2013), not all parties equally recognize, or know how to respond to, such states of being in other species. For one, context matters. Pleasure horses fall into a different domain of human-animal intimacy than do, say, racetrack greyhounds or colonies of lab mice. Whereas distressed horses can be turned out to pasture with others of their kind to help relieve the effects of solitary hours in a stall, the requirements imposed on lab animal housing practices considered to be compassionate (or in science parlance, simultaneously regulated, practical, safe, and humane) can impede or prohibit freedom of movement. As noted above, lab animals are often thought of as distinct from their wild counterparts. Indeed, I am sometimes told they are of an altogether different “species” because they were born and bred specifically for scientific use. As one premed undergraduate working in a lab once told me, “a patented lab mouse really isn’t a mouse at all,” a response he offered when I asked what he knew of species-specific enrichment (and reminiscent, too, of the earlier online image proclaiming, “This is not an animal”). As his remark reveals, what constitutes proper care may well hinge on whether a creature is understood to be an animal at all. How, then, might varied perceptions of animalness affect efforts to enable a labbased creature to thrive? This quandary requires a peculiar double-turn, where one must be sympathetic simultaneously to animal and human ways of inhabiting laboratory worlds. Not unlike the IACUC director cited above, some lab personnel argue against the practice of social enclosure, underscoring that interactions with other animals might facilitate undue harm. As a result, I assert, among the most complicated issues of a lab animal’s quotidian existence concerns definitions of a “good life,” in which animal welfare and care are passionate pursuits (see figure 12). It is well known among animal behaviorists, zoo keepers, veterinarians, and animal trainers that captivity makes many animals ill (Virga 2013). Many lab researchers are exquisitely sensitive to the preferences and personalities of animals in specific reference to their level of experimental productivity. Nevertheless, they may well rely on other staff—most notably lab-based veterinarians and animal care technicians—to tend to animal welfare through creative enrichment strategies that counteract the potentially detrimental effects of stress-inducing research protocols. Lab animals’ lives are sometimes described to me as if they occupy two distinct temporal zones: “active research” time and “downtime,” where the former involves “working” with researchers and the latter encompasses “enrichment” opportunities overseen by animal caretakers. Whereas theories of enrichment define the core of veterinary training, caretakers generally report that they accrue such knowledge over time by following examples set by others,

figure 12. “We Take Care of Our Animals . . . So They Are Protected to Explore the World Together,” advertisement produced for USA Today and other news venues in June 2014 by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) Foundation, which sponsors certification programs in lab animal care and welfare. Reproduced with permission from AALAS.

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working alongside vets, encountering behavior specialists, or consulting with mentors who surface at regional and national professional organizations. Seasoned caretakers also speak frequently of the need to “train” newly recruited undergraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral students on proper animal management and care (a language that bears much in common with how that student may in turn begin to train, say, a monkey). This requires a delicate approach because it inevitably inverts the labor hierarchy of most labs. Consider these remarks from Sondra, a forty-six-year-old Latina with thirty years of experience working with animals. Sondra is an elected officer in her regional professional organization for animal technicians, serving as a go-to person among peers based elsewhere in the area. She runs a research vivarium—namely, a rodent breeding facility—based within a large teaching hospital complex, and her center houses thousands of animals at any one time. As she explained to me, I’ve been working with animals in various ways since I was in high school: I volunteered in a vet’s office, and then I decided what I really wanted to do career-wise was to be a vet technician. I got my degree and then did this for a couple of years, and then an opportunity came up for me to work in [a university] lab. To this day other vet techs I know get mad at me, saying I’ve crossed to the Dark Side because I’m neglecting my training to take care of and protect animals. But I love my job—I know a lot about animal care, and better me in charge than someone without my training. . . . Ten years ago my boss and I argued [to administrators] that animal care should be centralized somehow, and we put together a proposal to start breeding animals in-house so that we could ensure animal quality while safeguarding their well-being [across the institution]. We’ve now been at it for ten years. And we let people know we’re here to help them if they want to try to do it themselves. Something I insisted we build into the system is that we get to train the new recruits [new graduate and medical researchers] on how to manage and handle animals in their experiments. Someone will come in and say “something’s wrong with my mice—they keep dying” and I ask them, “Well, what are you doing when a dam has new pups? Do you keep opening the drawer and checking up on her? Because that will stress her out to no end, and her natural response is to protect herself when she thinks she’s in danger, and the first thing she’ll do is eat her pups. If you don’t need them, why do you keep looking in on them? Leave them alone and she’ll take good care of them.” And they always say, “Wow, I didn’t know that!” That’s when I know my work here matters. I like to think I save a lot of animals that way, and I try to teach new recruits how to treat animals in ways that I hope will stick with them for a lifetime.47

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My initial interest in animal technicians arose during the course of an earlier project when I encountered several who expressed views that echo Sondra’s. Unlike Sondra, many animal technicians lack prior animal-related professional experience, and they do not hold technical or college degrees. As Sondra likes to say, those who become animal technicians typically “apply off the street” because, initially, “it’s just a job.”48 Those who stay with the work do so because they find they enjoy, and may have an affinity for, animals. A few go on to pursue specialized training as veterinary technicians, animal trainers, or veterinarians, and then they might cycle back into lab work as a lifetime profession. I regularly encounter others like Sondra who have worked slowly and methodically to persuade their supervisors to try innovative techniques that might enrich the lives of captive lab animals. A common refrain is how important it is to gain the trust and support of a lab director if one hopes to introduce new practices that facilitate what one animal tech supervisor called “the good life” in a lab. In three separate examples worth mentioning here, animal caretakers working in monkey labs described how they conducted extensive research on social housing and then convinced their respective lab directors to switch their monkeys from solitary or paired caging to social housing with great success. In one instance, the university campus was a relatively rural one, and the head animal technician, with the lab director’s support, garnered funds that enabled her to build a fairly large enclosure with indoor and outdoor caging. Among many primate researchers, such housing is widely regarded as the gold standard of welfare practices. As Sondra and other technicians explain, postdoctoral students receive sound training in the ethics of research design and the legal parameters of animal welfare. However, as the example of Susan, who detests mice, implies, researchers may not have spent much time in the company of animals, and this then shapes the quality of human-animal interaction in the lab and the values the same researchers place on animals’ lives. Especially where primates are concerned, Sondra and others like her encourage “new recruits” to interact as much as possible with animals during downtime— that is, during those hours when animals are not actively engaged in experiments. With smaller animals, caretakers might insist that researchers learn how to hold an animal properly so that the creature feels safe and secure in their hands. Such techniques always have pragmatic value, transforming into experimental procedures. Here, I return to Dr. Rose, who offered an example: animal technicians in her lab had taught her how “mice and rats need to be ‘hand-trained’ so that they lie still when you need to draw blood; this even translates to when you must euthanize them, because they won’t

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be frightened when they die.”49 Dr. Rose now believes that “no animal should die in fear,” and she is adamant that her graduate students understand this too. This theme of killing properly may well stem from the impact of Temple Grandin, well known for her efforts to reform slaughterhouse practices by introducing humane forms of killing (Grandin 2008). The difference here, though, is that in laboratories encounters between researchers and animal subjects are marked by an intimacy not found on the killing floor of a rendering plant (see Blanchette 2015). Indeed, researchers may work for days, weeks, or even years with individual creatures. The art of humane killing (Fraser 2008; Russell and Burch 1959) is legally mandated by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), and as ethnographic observations reveal, the pragmatics of sanctioned forms of killing expose moral projects at work. Friese and Clarke, for instance, describe a lab director who grows increasingly frustrated during her efforts to train a new student, whose repeated failures to kill mice properly lead to a string of unnecessary deaths (2012). Lynch, too provides a step-by-step overview of the meticulous process involved in the proper of killing of rats in a neuroscience lab (1988). And just as rodents learn to lie quietly in a researcher’s firm grasp, monkeys—from macaques to baboons—are often trained to extend their hands willingly for blood draws, injections, and the like. In other words, animal technicians work hard to ensure that animals are trusting of all personnel, most importantly their associated researchers. A caretaker technician, then, masters the art of fostering reciprocal human-animal trust that proves relevant to both life and death encounters. Although a researcher might devote time each day to interacting with an animal—as does Esteban, for instance, with “his macaque” Spartacus— caretakers underscore that this level of engagement is designed to facilitate experimental work, such that the researcher’s needs are inevitably of primary concern. I must stress that in such instances researchers are not callous or heartless; rather, they simply may have had little opportunity in their lives to learn how to observe animals in ways that typify the training of, say, a veterinarian. Indeed, when animal technicians describe the differences between their knowledge and the presumed lack thereof of new lab researchers, it often strikes me as highly reminiscent of seasoned nurses’ descriptions of medical students’ interactions with hospitalized patients. As one senior teaching physician once explained, she always stressed to medical students how they must trust and befriend nurses if they wanted to master important skills during their hospital rotations (see also Khullar 2015). As Douglas and Aaron demonstrate above, long-term involvement

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in lab research can eventually generate deep knowledge of the complexities of human-animal laboratory life. In some of the best-run labs, lab directors might lead informal discussions, in Aaron’s words, on “how to think like a monkey.”50

The Good Death The deaths of animals in laboratories are widely understood as a humane endpoint of much research. Animal sacrifice is a frequent requirement imposed on laboratories by bioethical principles that shape federal, state, and other regulatory guidelines and that in turn inform, for instance, the activities of university IACUCs. But the concept of death as “humane” has even deeper roots in animal husbandry and stock breeding, evident in quotidian expressions employed in the United States and elsewhere: one “puts down” a badly injured pony or “puts to sleep” a decrepit house pet as a means to “put them out of their misery.” Although seemingly euphemistic, these turns of phrase—that “put” or “(dis)place” animals elsewhere— expose a presumed moral contract between human and animal: the working animal gives of itself to human enterprise and the human in return strives to alleviate suffering at the time of death. Although described as “humane” treatment of the animal, it is perhaps even more importantly understood as evidence of the justness and sympathetic character of the human actor. Animals’ deaths expose the workings of a complex moral economy in myriad contexts involving human-animal encounters. Be it a prized thoroughbred with a broken leg, a beloved house cat with leukemia, or a potentially lucrative, farm-bred runt piglet that fails to thrive, decisions on how not to respond to animal injury, sickness, and suffering are shaped simultaneously by the complicated intertwining of both affective responses and the realities of financial reserves necessary to cover the cost of cures, treatments, and palliative care. As a senior colleague recounted a few years ago, his grandfather was widely regarded by his neighbors as a poor example of a farmer because he retired his plough horses to pasture instead of selling them to a local renderer when they grew too old to work. The act of refusing to put down his horses was viewed by his peers as an irrational practice that broke the pragmatic rules of human-animal labor, altering a working animal into a beloved creature who has earned his or her keep, and the farmer into a man inappropriately wasteful, excessively indulgent, and overly sentimental. As demonstrated in chapter 1, the making of the moral self in science is often inescapably “sentimental,” in that it is frequently difficult to detach oneself from lay understandings and associated practices encountered in

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everyday life. I assert that all (or nearly all) researchers grapple with these sorts of issues throughout the course of their careers, asking themselves whether experimental practices cause undue harm; whether the quest for knowledge is worth the extermination of other creatures; and under what circumstances, and with what species or specific animals, they should call a halt to their research. Whereas laboratory spaces are certainly specialized worlds where open sentimentality is actively discouraged, human actions toward and feelings for lab animals do indeed surface—and regularly so— and they are informed by deeply ingrained practices found in broader sociomoral contexts. This becomes most evident to researchers themselves when an animal must die for the sake of their own work’s progress.

reimagining moral frameworks of care Just as I was in the midst of completing this chapter, I encountered a Latina first-year medical student named Sasha who had spent a gap year after college working for an addiction research project at a major research university on the West Coast. As she explained, research participants were recruited primarily from a local, inner city community. To qualify, they had to be non–treatment seeking, long-term users of heroin, crack cocaine, or methamphetamine. The study required that all participants rest at a preset baseline of drug use, so, under careful medical supervision, all subjects went through detoxification followed by the reintroduction of daily drug doses that, for some, were lower than their original use levels and higher for others. Researchers administered “pharmaceutical” or “pure grade” regimens of highly addictive, controlled substances acquired from the NIH (which was funding the study), paired with various experimental drugs thought to affect craving. The project involved six to eight weeks of voluntary, locked-ward housing on a psychiatric ward of an urban teaching hospital. Once the study phase ended, they were paid several thousand dollars and released, as Sasha put it, “back out onto the street.” As a result of this experience, Sasha was drawn to bioethics and was contemplating applying to a master’s degree program in this field coterminous with her intended medical school training because she was searching for ways to assess the “morality” of this project’s research design. She worried, however, that bioethics might not provide answers to the questions that troubled her. As she explained, throughout the course of her year on the project, staff members were meticulous in following federal regulations and were respectful of oversight from their in-house IRB committee. Everyone on staff underscored that a subject’s participation was impossible

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without undergoing elaborate informed consent procedures, a drawn-out process that included medical screening and a battery of psychological tests. Yet Sasha wondered what happened with participants following their release day with money in hand. Did they have a place to sleep that night? Would they engage in increasingly dangerous behaviors in what would most likely be a futile search for the street equivalent of “pure grade” NIH heroin and the like? Would they die of exposure, assault, or drug overdose, and if so, were she and her fellow researchers culpable in their deaths? Carolyn Rouse (2009), writing of racism in American healthcare, has argued that quandaries like Sasha’s offer provocative “thought experiments” that can facilitate an imaginative reordering of moral thought and action. As a Platonic method of inquiry, Roy Sorensen explains, the thought experiment “rouse[s] us out of intellectual lethargy,” bearing “the possibility” of proposing some “alternative rationality” that “profoundly contradicts common sense” (1992, 108).51 In Sasha’s case, the ethical codes of conduct sanctioned by federal and in-house regulatory apparati demonstrate the entrenchment of IRB conventions as comprising “common sense” rationality. According to Sasha, staff on this addiction study adhered meticulously to the letter of the law. Yet Rouse (2009) prods us in contexts such as this to consider more carefully and critically whose lives matter most, set against the “bare life” of those who are most vulnerable, least secure, and regarded as expendable (Agamben 1995). Sasha’s example shares unsettling similarities with animal experimentation in that, in her instance, drug addicts are drawn into studies designed to assist patients in need in the near or distant future. Again, then, we encounter the complex workings of a laboratory calculus of life and death. Just as the “sacrifice” of the rat saves the child, the sacrifices made by impoverished and untreated street addicts might save others of greater social value: perhaps substance-dependent mothers with children, army veterans addicted to heroin, or those who self-medicate for chronic pain with oxycodone or other potent narcotics. Unlike laboratory animals, human subjects are understood as capable of granting informed consent; nevertheless, they are similarly vulnerable in that their social worth and medical value are bracketed by researchers’ needs, and once their participation as an experimental subject ends, so too might official concern for their demise (see also Petryna 2005 on international drug trials; Abadie 2010 on professional human “guinea pigs”). In other words, the “laboratory lives” of the addict and animal each come to an abrupt end upon dismissal, so to speak, from the experiment: the addict is rendered invisible when released to the street with no promise of follow-up care,52 and the animal’s life is terminated as an

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understood component of experimental procedure. Like the shape-shifting piglet (Svendsen and Koch 2014), each is transformed into blood and tissue samples, their worth reemerging in spectral form, elevated in status as highly valued data points that propel the progression of scientific research. With this unsettling comparison in mind—serving, thus, as a thought experiment of my own—I return once more to the contradictions inherent in lab-based understandings of “humane care.” After all, the etymology of “humane” is human. As its origin implies, the moral weight of the term depends on the capacity of an actor’s thoughts and actions toward others to reflect back on and elevate the actor as an ethical (and fully human) being. Not unlike a sacrifice, which relies on the dyad of the sacrificer (as actor) and the sacrificed (as object), “humane” behavior requires the pairing of the one who cares with one who is cared for by another. Within the laboratory, then, the “humane” treatment of a lab animal does not simply mark the boundaries of “welfare”: it simultaneously bolsters one’s own humanity as a moral being in anticipation of the animal’s suffering. In other words, as one shelters animals from harm or takes action to alleviate pain or fear of death, one guards one’s “humanness.” If laboratory life entails the (re)making of the animal for science, then, yet again, it involves the (re)making of the human too.

Beyond the Three Rs: Rethinking Labor Hierarchies and Animal Erasure This unsettling realization exposes the conundrum of moral action in laboratory contexts. By way of conclusion, I circle back to the Three Rs of lab animal welfare (Russell and Burch 1959). As discussed earlier in this chapter, the Three Rs define a long-standing code of conduct that directs scientists to remain cognizant of the limits of acceptable animal experimentation. Or, as Patrick and James might say, the Three Rs foster awareness of what counts as “overkill.” According to Nicole Fenwick, Gilly Griffin, and Clément Gauthier, however, replacement, reduction, and refinement are not static but mutable concepts designed to engender professional vigilance to ensure the ongoing “humane” treatment of animals. Replacement, reduction, and refinement define a logic of care that should inspire “ethical evaluation” and ongoing “improvements to the welfare of animals” (2009, 523–24). But hierarchies of knowledge matter too. The first is regulatory. Researchers in the United States must adhere to federal and state statutes alongside requirements imposed by their home institutions and sometimes even their local communities. Some underscore that regulatory apparati are also geopolitical, whereby international codes of conduct may likewise

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shape—or restrict—behaviors involving, say, particular species. In various locales, the local might even supersede the national or global. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have been based while writing this book, laboratories at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) must adhere to additional restrictions set by the city itself. A second hierarchy—and of greater interest to me for the sake of this chapter’s focus—involves the politics of a professional hierarchy that pervades animal laboratories. As described previously, a senior lab director may have little daily contact with animals, as he or she focuses instead on supervising postdoctoral, doctoral, and undergraduate students’ research, whereas animal technicians are often exquisitely sensitive to the personalities and moods of individual creatures. A newly initiated undergraduate, too, might be more attentive to an animal’s needs and behavior than, say, a seasoned postdoctoral student well socialized in an lab’s ethos of animal welfare.53 Members of each of these categories of human engage in different responsibilities where animals are concerned, and such factors then shape how they understand—or learn to understand—the logics of humane animal care. All labs must have veterinary personnel, who may be full-time or itinerant and visit labs each day, week, or month. Equally important— although sadly all too often relegated to the category of a sometimes invisible workforce—are animal technicians who shoulder the responsibilities associated with the twenty-four hour care and upkeep of animals. Animal technicians breed and feed animals, clean their enclosures, prepare them for research procedures, tend to them afterward, and work overtime—and sometimes even overnight—when an animal is sick or injured. They provide stimulation during downtime, and they are often the first to detect illness, injury, or stress in an animal under their care. As demonstrated above, these caretakers have taught me that humane practices frequently have what one called a “trickle up” effect. A seasoned and respected animal technician who can win the support of a lab director can often transform the logistics of animal care alongside more stringent training of newly recruited students, sensitizing them at the very start to think carefully and critically of the welfare of animals rather than regarding them merely as work objects, sources of data, and creatures that can be killed and discarded after use.

conclusion: the limitations of humane death I opened this chapter by questioning why discussions of morality in laboratory science inevitably seem to gravitate to the subject of killing animals and what, in turn, sets animal death in science apart from other contexts

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involving house pets, farm animals, and those destined for the slaughterhouse. In answer, I have focused on the politics of care, in which, as Wilkinson and Kleinman underscore, vulnerability serves as a touchstone for investigating “lived moral experience” as evidenced by “material practices and symbolic acts” (2016, 161). Viewpoints on the significance of animal death in science remain entrenched in polarized debates over animal worth; in an effort to redirect discussion, I draw in part on theory concerned with human suffering and death. Of special interest to me are frameworks of compassion and care, terms that translate in laboratory contexts as “animal welfare.” I follow the lead of Mol, Moser, and Pols (2010) by focusing squarely on “care in practice,” a stance that summons the researcher to pay close attention to word, action, and innovation in human and animal worlds. How do laboratory researchers make sense of animal death? Laboratories are intimate worlds where human and animal lives are profoundly entwined, a reality that reveals the complexity of vulnerability as a category of analytical concern. Whereas entrenched practices favor animal generics over uniqueness and standardization over eccentricity, lab personnel often push back, as evidenced in serendipitous naming and other practices. These eclectic responses reveal the workings of a moral imaginary that destabilizes the logic of standardization. In turn, they expose the tension between sanctioned forms of animal erasure and the intimacy of human partnering with well-trained working animals. As the evidence put forth in this chapter reveals, killing is understood simultaneously as inevitable, necessary, compassionate, and humane. Yet such logic is not simply about hierarchies of human and animal worth in which, say, the rat must stand in for the suffering child. Associated imagery directed at lay audiences nevertheless draws heavily on this theme, reemerging within laboratories where killing is frequently described as animal “sacrifice” and, by association, as sacred act. Sadly, this dominant trope impedes detection of the deeper complexities of human-animal relations and a logic that, on the one hand, facilitates the use of animal subjects and, on the other, drives sanctioned forms of killing. Within the lab, death emerges as a moral contract between human and animal, framed by the “good life” and the “good death,” both of which fall beneath the aegis of “welfare.” Laboratory work and death each transform both human and animals (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Lynch 1988; Svendsen and Koch 2014), as evidenced in the decisions made by outliers who opt out of animal experimentation, the actions of lab personnel that push back against animal erasure, and the efforts by all to master “humane” forms of killing that might well expose the vulnerability of the animal and the human.

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These practices also reveal the boundaries of compassion. Evidence of this may surface in statements that expose a dislike or disdain for particular species, the limited power of naming practices to foster sentimentality, efforts to handle or think like an animal in order to foster strong experimental outcomes, or the premises that shape sanctioned mourning practices that nevertheless exclude animal technicians as an invisible, caring workforce. The complexity of researchers’ lived moral experiences has necessitated their defining the primary focus of this book’s interlude on sacrifice. In the following chapter I explore how animal care technicians in turn push back against processes of animal erasure and the presumed inevitability of animal death.

part iii

Exceptionalism

4. Science and Salvation

Experimental animal science is predicated on an inescapable contradiction: that in efforts to advance knowledge—ostensibly for the health and greater good of others in the near or distant future—lab animals will suffer and die. This vexing premise is rife with taboos, and writing of it presents significant challenges. I tread carefully here because, as I maintain in earlier chapters, in lab science one does not speak of “harm,” “suffering,” or “death.”1 The same sorts of contradictions and associated taboos characterize many realms of medicine: if an oncologist is to treat a patient for a cancerous growth, for instance, the patient may well undergo dangerous procedures, including radiation, anesthesia, surgery, and chemotherapy, but such efforts are intended to alleviate suffering, not be the iatrogenic cause of it. Yet, as documented by DelVecchio Good, oncology patients are fully cognizant of such contradictions, where their dark humor plays on the irony that to save one’s life, one must endure treatments that can kill (2001).2 Within lab settings, no personnel are more acutely aware of these challenges than animal technicians. As caretakers, they shoulder much of the burden associated with animal “care in practice” (Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010), where their quotidian duties encompass the broad expanse of cage cleaning and feeding; body tagging, tattooing, and microchipping; creating and supplying proper manipulanda; providing pre- and post-surgical nursing care; and euthanizing creatures under their charge. Such responsibilities necessitate sophisticated knowledge of welfare mandates, ever-evolving “best practices,” and species-specific expertise. For animal technicians, laboratory labor is a moral project. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to the works and lives of animal care technicians. Among the more common challenges associated with working with animals is their ability to inspire emotional responses in their human 157

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cohabitants, a topic that is controversial in experimental science because of the deeply entrenched assumption that emotions compromise scientific objectivity. This stance is increasingly regarded in various quarters as archaic, misguided, and outdated, especially among those who riposte that the human-animal bond is not only inevitable in laboratory work, but a mark of excellence in science. A common dictum widely asserted by animal caretakers is that a healthy animal produces quality, robust data, and many now evoke this rule as a means to persuade researchers to approve and adopt new and creative welfare strategies. In this sense, a dedicated animal technician is a skilled innovator, habitually tinkering with ways to improve the lives of animals who cycle in and out of the lab. The responsibilities inherent in animal caretaking expose yet another contradictory, moral layer in domains where research protocols, conflicting technician-researcher ideologies, staff hierarchies, species type, and institution-based IACUCs can affect how welfare mandates are interpreted and implemented. One need only consider species-specific housing requirements to realize the flexibility that welfare entails. For example, in a lab of research macaques, caretakers might push for a group enclosure while the lab director prefers housing monkeys in pairs, yet the veterinarian who chairs their university’s IACUC is reticent to abandon even solitary caging because macaques can cause serious harm to one another with their long, sharp canine teeth. Regardless of these stark differences in enclosure design and preference, all three parties demonstrate sanctioned welfare practices, and all three might even regard their respective approaches as forms of “social” housing, because in all instances an individual macaque inhabits space (be it a cage or the room itself) that is populated by other monkeys with whom they might frolic, groom, and cohabit or, at the very least, hear, smell, and see. Job burnout, or “compassion fatigue,” flags yet another dimension of moral lab work. Compassion fatigue is increasingly recognized as a potential hazard especially among animal care technicians,3 and in recent years this concept has received special attention in publications and symposia that target this audience (Ayl 2013; Figley and Roop 2006; Kelly 2015; Rank, Zaparanick, and Gentry 2009). Compassion fatigue is most closely associated with enduring the emotional trauma entailed in regularly euthanizing animals (and not necessarily those one has come to know well), working in an environment where one is undervalued, and assisting those who regard animals merely as “resources” or “data points.” Of special concern to me is the significance of compassion to the art of animal care. Here, another contradiction surfaces: whereas all animals deserve the same level

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and quality of attention, staff who are involved in administering care inevitably become emotionally attached to individual creatures. The consequences of this reality are evidenced in what I regard as eclectic forms of animal exceptionalism. I pause to underscore that exceptionalism is not the same as favoritism, the latter term implying that some animals profit from attention while others are neglected. Nor is it equivalent to species preference (as discussed in chapters 1 and 2). All lab personnel, regardless of station, openly express fondness, dislike, or repulsion for particular species or specific animals (recall in chapter 3, Susan who detests mice and Douglas’s reminiscences of favorite monkeys named Darwin and Annie, a.k.a. Acura). Among my most memorable conversations on this topic involved a twenty-five-year-old Anglo-Egyptian animal technician named David who proclaimed repeatedly during our interview, “I love working with monkeys,” and by this he meant macaques. David consistently resisted his supervisor’s urgings to shift to another primate species, namely marmosets, “because, like she says, ‘what’s there not to like about them?’ . . . but I hate the marmosets! . . . With marmosets it’s more evident that they’re animals, but with the macaques—they have individual personalities . . . and [laughing] if they ever made me work with mice only, I swear, I’d quit!”4 Animal technicians, by virtue of job responsibilities that necessitate shouldering the mantle of care, must face each day the unspoken ways that scientific research engenders suffering in animals and takes its toll on the humans who care for them too. Animal exceptionalism assumes various forms, sometimes involving standardized procedures typical in many labs, whereas in other instances evidencing deeply personal and serendipitous responses to the day-to-day realities of human-animal lab encounters. Careful ethnographic attention to quotidian lab life unearths an intriguing assortment of efforts that redirect the lives, deaths, and histories of individual creatures. A common theme embodied in many acts of exceptionalism is that of salvation. As I demonstrate throughout this chapter, eclectic forms of exceptionalism exemplify what Cheryl Mattingly describes metaphorically as the “moral laboratory” (2014), where the ethical dilemmas inherent in the daily “care of the intimate other” inspire “complex reasoning . . . that engenders ongoing moral deliberations, evaluations, and experiments in how to live” (4–5; see also Beidelman 1993; Livingston 2005; Livingston 2012, 4–5). Animal exceptionalism evidences efforts to reconfigure the moral self in contexts where one confronts the suffering of another—what Mattingly references as “first person virtue ethics” (2014, xvi–xvii). As caretakers,

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animal technicians might face such dilemmas at every turn, given that they are entrusted not only with enriching animals’ lives but with breeding, training, culling, and killing for the sake of the advancement of science. As such, salvation work not only targets the animals under one’s care, but bears the possibility for one’s own transformation too. Throughout this chapter I superimpose themes of welfare, care, exceptionalism, and salvation. Salvation proves especially helpful in my efforts to disentangle the often creative and sometimes odd or quirky actions of animal caretakers precisely because the term is so richly polyvalent. Two meanings are especially relevant here. The first bears heavy overtones of ritualized or sacred forms of redemption, a meaning that resonates with the propensity in laboratories to refer to euthanasia as “sacking” or “the sacrifice” of an animal. As I discuss earlier in this work, various eclectic responses—from the aesthetics of a monkey enclosure to the staging of a wake for a deceased animal—evidence acts of redemption in science. But whereas redemption bears the hope of one’s deliverance via repentance, throughout this chapter I privilege salvation because it allows for broader readings of daily lab practices. More specifically, salvation is a form of rescue, a theme that figures prominently in caretakers’ efforts to redirect animals away from euthanasia via “rehoming” or “adoption.” Such actions in turn transform the self. Whereas redemption implies remorse, acts of salvation entail a strong moral core that enables one to take risks and push back against practices one finds emotionally trying, distasteful, or abhorrent. The beauty of salvation is that associated actions may be informed by an unspoken moral drive, literally or symbolically, to deliver animals from dangerous or trying circumstances. Through such actions, yet another meaning associated with salvation surfaces: by adopting, rehoming, or rescuing an animal, one is also salvaging a life. In an effort to navigate this complex terrain, this chapter is composed of three parts. A theme that surfaced repeatedly in interviews with animal technicians concerned the belligerent presence of animal activists, with whom I likewise conducted interviews. As I tacked back and forth between these two groups, I slowly came to realize that they are unknowingly locked together in their conflicting, yet oddly overlapping, ideologies of care. I thus begin this chapter by examining how activist politics define a prominent facet of salvation work, informing (albeit in circuitous ways) animal technicians’ understandings of lab animal welfare. In the second section I consider more carefully the quotidian dimensions of lab-based care in practice and how forces such as lab labor hierarchies might impede or enhance innovative animal care. Again, yet another dimension of animal salvation

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emerges, framed here by mandated welfare requirements that nevertheless necessitate animal technicians’ vigilance to ensure they are put into practice. It is in quotidian contexts that animal exceptionalism arises, most noticeably in standardized approaches that single out certain animals. This is most evident among those creatures known as “sentinels,” whose very presence affects perceptions of the well-being of the colony as a whole. In the chapter’s third and final section, I turn to other eclectic forms of animal exceptionalism initiated by caretakers. The more serendipitous, personal, and peculiar approaches that surface help expose creative efforts at salvation that often have long-term consequences for the animal and human cohabitants of laboratory space.

the politics of animal suffering Proper animal care is always performed with full cognizance of animal welfare requirements, as demonstrated by one’s skills in preventing, alleviating, or ending animal suffering. With this premise in mind, I begin by exploring the broader politics of suffering with special focus on the ideological expanse that separates lab research from animal activism and the associated repercussions of such conflicts for caretaker work on the job. Animals inspire deep emotional responses among those who stand on either side of this ideological divide, and I propose that, in this aspect at least, activists and caretakers are entangled in an uneasy synergism shaped by animal sentiment, salvation, and welfare. Among animal technicians, this dialectic is evident not only in the ever-changing nature of animal welfare requirements, but also in how these codes of conduct are understood, interpreted, applied, and further enhanced within the lab against a backdrop of outside agitation from activists.

Coding Suffering A well-run research laboratory is staffed by a range of personnel who have comprehensive training in animal welfare and are alert to signs of animal discomfort, injury, ill health, anxiety, and boredom. Although elsewhere such categories of experience might evidence “suffering,” this term does not figure within the laboratory lexicon. The corrective once offered to me in an altogether different domain by a cardiac transplant surgeon is instructive: patients under his care never “suffered” because his team always responded immediately to any signs of pain (where “pain” was understood as physiological, not psychological or existential) (Sharp 2009a). In his profession, “suffering” implied one had violated the Hippocratic oath to do no

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harm, that is, suffering entails neglectful or willful acts that cause injury. Similarly, within research labs staff react viscerally to “suffering,” regarding this term as one employed by activists who vehemently oppose the experimental use of any and all animals. The specter of animal activism looms large across an oppositional divide described by Cindy Buckmaster, a leader in lab animal care, as one peopled by “us and them,” in which publicly staged activist activities indiscriminately condemn and stigmatize those who engage in animal research (2015b). Cognizant of how lab work is perceived by a wider lay audience, all lab personnel, regardless of station or rank, are cautious when speaking publicly of what they do. Whereas researchers are accustomed to giving professional talks and publishing their findings, animal technicians as a rule are reticent to describe for any outsiders what they are involved in day-today, and many can tell stories of accusatory responses when friends, family, acquaintances, or strangers learn that they participate in animal research. When the subject does arise in conversation, animal technicians offer few details, especially when sentient or charismatic species are involved. By way of example, I once committed a serious faux pas at a professional luncheon when, at the onset of the meal, I casually asked the group at my table—all of whom worked together in the same lab at a local university—what species they employed in their research. The dead silence and subtle sideglances that followed were clear signals that they worked with non-human primates, and it took some time for me to reestablish trust and engage once again with them in sustained conversation. Arnold Arluke, in writing of the occupational stigmatization of animal research, identifies silence as a common response to the “dilemmas of information control,” where lab-based personnel (including researchers and animal technicians) face—or anticipate—“reproachful,” “confrontive,” “dangerous,” or “distortive” “others” who disapprove of, judge, and condemn their work (1991). When animal technicians do speak to outsiders, they are vigilant in policing their language, a process Richardson has described elsewhere as “semantic massage” (1996). Buckmaster encourages animal care technicians to reject pariah status by speaking openly and publicly of what they do. She underscores that pride rather than shame should characterize the public face of lab animal work, where both human and non-human lab inhabitants deserve to be celebrated as “heroes” of science. She also provides a primer on how to “make your words count,” advocating that one avoid such expressions as “experiments,” “research on,” and “the animal” or “it” in favor of “studies,” “research with,” and “our animals” (2016, italics added). Indeed, Buckmaster prefers the term “caregiver” to

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“caretaker” as a means to foreground the technician’s benevolence.5 Words serve as powerful tools for asserting legitimacy and underscoring the significance of interspecies intimacy such labor ensues. Most importantly, one should never be ashamed to speak of one’s commitment to caring for lab animals. The rejection of pariah status, paired with the precision of word choice, counteracts stigma by looping back into a work ethos of compassionate and empathetic care.

The Caretaker-Activist Battleground This notion of “us and them” characterizes the ways that each side imagines the other, and respective accounts may border on the apocryphal, hyperbolic, or simply be outdated. During interviews, lab staff of all stripes described activists as “madmen” and “criminals” who “break into labs” and “set fire to vans,” and who “lie on job applications” so they can “go under cover” and then “steal animals” or “put illegally obtained photos [or videos] on the web.” These descriptions are reminiscent of the activities of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the United Kingdom and elsewhere and of PETA in the United States, especially from the 1970s to the 1990s. They often struck me as outmoded or isolated events, given that public support of animal activism in the United States, for example, has become more supportive and “mainstream” (in the words of one lab veterinarian), corresponding to a shift to the center by several formerly “fringe” groups.6 I do not wish to imply that more violent forms of activism no longer occur. As recently as 2009 the FBI investigated the firebombing of the car of a UCLA neuroscientist who employed monkeys in her research on psychiatric disorders (Cart 2009), and, as documented by the Anti-Defamation League, within the last decade researchers based throughout the University of California system especially have been systematically targeted. These events have occurred alongside sporadic attacks at still other universities around the country.7 Nevertheless, those I interviewed who had direct experience with activists tended to be fairly senior, and their encounters typically happened a decade or more before and often amounted to protesters carrying placards outside where they worked. Although these events harken to an older era of protest, their tales were sometimes told as if they occurred in recent times and could happen again at any moment. Notably, no one I interviewed had experienced the infiltration of a lab, break-in, personal attack (to one’s self or property), or death threat.8 Generally, too, most activist efforts today are a far cry from setting fire to vans, assaulting scientists, and smashing up labs (though undercover camera work certainly

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persists as a well-worn tactic). As I have learned over the course of my research, several high-profile activist groups have shifted from an anarchist to bureaucratized structure. One activist-turned-academic described this emergent corporate style as the “PETA-ization of the movement” where PETA, in his mind, exemplifies efforts among like-minded groups to reinvent themselves as lobbyists who are also family friendly.9 Activists certainly play their part in feeding the ongoing proliferation of apocryphal tales of scorched earth tactics. Often for the activist there is no middle ground or room for compromise. Those interviewed regard any and all research involving captive animals as illegitimate and cruel, and in official rhetoric where lab animals are concerned, little if any distinction is made across species, procedures, medical value, and research outcome. At times during my interviews, activists seemed especially prone to speak in rehearsed sound bites, a trait shared with other proselytizing groups. (Lab personnel likewise rely on their own rhetorical and visual tropes; I return to this below.) My intent here is not to demonize activists: I must stress that all whom I interviewed were helpful and insightful. More than any group interviewed, they often offered detailed, historicized (though selective) narratives and thoughtful, personal critiques of where they believe the fault lines of research science lie. Their assistance enhanced, not diminished, this project. Nevertheless, as typifies apocryphal tales, my efforts to locate concrete evidence in support of one side’s claims over the other’s have proved elusive throughout the course of this project. In many instances these stories assume the form of a they said/we said style of bickering across an ideological divide. Yet as typifies such genres of storytelling, some partial truths are embedded within. For instance, activists sometimes do infiltrate labs, take photos and videos of caged animals and lab procedures, and destroy lab property, and lab personnel do on occasion engage in whistle-blowing in consort with them because they are disturbed by breaches in welfare protocols. Important to my discussion here, though, is not the veracity of these tales and one group’s rights to name-calling and accusation over another. More to the point, activists and lab technicians are ensnared in an ongoing struggle over rights to define proper animal welfare and care, through which, ironically, each group might well, although inadvertently, advance the goals of the other. That is, activists help keep animal technicians—and lab research as a whole—on the alert where animal well-being is concerned, and, as we shall see, animal technicians, far more often than activists, I wager, rescue animals from future experimentation, euthanasia, and more generally, laboratory life.

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figure 13. “This Won’t Hurt a Bit . . . Stop Animal Testing,” billboard produced by Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania (AACT) to raise public awareness of animal testing in the cosmetics industry. The original image, produced by Choose Cruelty Free (CCF) in 2010 by the artist June Ball, did not include the dog’s paw and mascara brush on the left. This billboard appeared throughout 2011–2012 until public complaints led the Advertising Standards Bureau of Australia to prohibit its display. Reproduced with permission from CCF.

The Public Face of Lab Research The activists’ dictum is that all animals’ lives matter and that humans bear no rights to exploit other species. Nevertheless, activist groups seeking public support (or notoriety) often focus, sometimes exclusively, on charismatic species, as exemplified by long-standing efforts to rescue dogs (as discussed in chapter 1) and attacks on researchers engaged specifically in NHP research. In counterpoint, pro-research lobbyist groups tend to feature less charismatic yet essential animals, such as rats and mice, in their own efforts to garner public support.10 Consider, for instance, the aesthetics and message of a billboard produced by animal activists (in this instance, mounted in Tasmania) (figure 13) against those of the RAT/HER billboard described in the previous chapter (figure 6) that was created by a U.S.-based lobbyist firm supported primarily by industry (ranging from pharmaceutical corporations to animal vendors).11 Together they represent polar extremes of ethical lab science, the one depicting the gore of animal experimentation and the other offering a white-washing of lab research. In the first (figure 13, above), one encounters the bloodied and pus-oozing face of a woman who serves as a proxy for animals who suffer in her stead so that she may don the mascara of her choice. Reaching into the frame from the far left is the animal victim who

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assumes the role of the scientist, its presence evidenced merely by an outstretched dog paw (most likely a beagle’s) in the act of applying make-up to the woman’s eye. This billboard is intended to induce shock and empathy for the many animals who remain hidden away in labs. Again, the question emblazoned on the other billboard (figure 6), “Who would you RAT/HER see live?” presumes that a moral human being would choose a smiling and adorable little girl over an animal. Yet this image provokes still other questions: Whom would you spare? Whom would you rather kill or let die? But lab science is not merely about cosmetics testing conducted by Big Pharma, and the little girl is hardly the only one who benefits from successful lab research if, indeed, breakthroughs make their way to clinical practice. The propaganda of each billboard relies on potent visual tropes of suffering on the one hand and heroics on the other, whereby animals and humans switch positions according to the politicized intent. Man’s best friend should not be forced to endure such pain for the sake of human vanity. And an innocent and carefree child should not be forced to suffer or die for the sake of saving the life of a generic rat. But what of other species, such as farm animals? And given that the child in pro-industry materials is almost always female, white, and, often, blond—sometimes bedridden and holding a teddy bear, or wearing a headscarf to indicate she is undergoing chemotherapy— what, then, of little boys? Or people of color? Or other nationalities? Or adults young and old? Such animal and human subjects are deemed less photogenic or deserving of care, yet they too participate in research or might benefit from scientific breakthroughs. And why not feature a monkey—or a dog—as a hero of science instead of the celebrated rat? Or a mouse or a pig as a victim of research? Both activists and research lobbyists are keenly aware of what imagery inspires sympathy and empathy in viewers, and each lays claim to certain iconic animal species and human allies or foes. When taken together, their competing visual messages evidence a black-boxing of the quotidian realities of sound laboratory practices.

Competing Tales of Salvation In the midst of this battleground, animal technicians generally are not considered prime targets by activists (whereas individual research scientists and sometimes even their families are). Instead, in the activist’s mind animal technicians are guilty by association because they work within or with a particular lab or researcher, and because their work facilitates animal experimentation. Instead, activists tend to regard caretakers as potential members of a fifth column. In the words of one longtime activist, after

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bearing witness to “too much suffering and death,” animal technicians might eventually “cross to the other side.” This “crossing,” as imagined by activists, involves the caretaker as emergent whistle blower, a collaborator willing to rescue animals from further harm. Such imaginings generate elaborate (and, again, seemingly apocryphal) tales of lab staff saving animals from slaughter by leading them out the back door of a lab in the dead of night so that innocent, rescued creatures can be stolen away in an unmarked car (or van), nursed back to health, and adopted in full public view by compassionate citizens who are supportive of the cause. Animal technicians resent how such, as one put it, “preposterous and condescending” characterizations demean their work and exploit false images of animals who receive quality care. As they and other lab staff often emphasized in interviews, the origins of accusatory images that appear on the web and elsewhere are unknown, and they frequently argue that they are “out of date,” “tampered with,” or “photoshopped,” or acquired from somewhere overseas with substandard welfare statutes, such as China or India. Recall, too, the lab-based dictum that a lab animal’s life is better than it would be in the wild—an inversion of the stance of an activist who advocates setting free all captive creatures (be they in labs, zoos, circuses, or people’s homes).12 In turn, caretakers are well aware that activists regard them through the lens of the exploited worker who lacks political consciousness. That is, they are misguided, uninformed, and underpaid employees who are nevertheless culpable, as one put it sardonically, for their involvement in the “animal slave trade.” (Indeed, activists may describe their efforts to free lab animals as akin to an underground railroad.) Animal technicians most certainly bear witness to a wide range of procedures and experimental approaches that can threaten the well-being—and lives—of animals and, as made clear in the previous chapter, they participate regularly in protocols that culminate in animals’ deaths. Yet they underscore the importance of their work, and in interviews they nearly always remind me that they are often the primary gatekeepers of animal welfare. Nowhere is this role clearer than in the alternative moniker of “animal caretaker” (or even more so, “caregiver”). As I demonstrated in chapter 1 in my discussion of beagles, and as I will more fully in this chapter, many lab animals are indeed “rescued” (the activist’s term), or “adopted” or “rehomed” (caretakers’ preferred terms), although the sorts of paths to salvation I trace below rarely involve activist intervention.13 Instead, “rescue” work from within labs is surprisingly common and, in some instances, figures within long-established practices that mark the endpoint of the quotidian arc of compassionate lab animal

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care. Yet not all animals are rescued, nor is rescue experienced in the same way among those who are. Some animals are recycled into other research protocols, and many others are euthanized (which is often described as a form of salvation from further suffering). Legally, only certain species can leave a lab: I know of no instance of adopting a chimpanzee, for example, although increasingly they are making their way to sanctuaries once they are “retired” from research,14 and the only instance I know of a rhesus monkey leaving a lab and becoming a house pet is close to sixty years old. Many creatures—be they NHPs or other species—are regarded as too serious a biohazard to be “rehomed” to the outside world, for fear of contaminating humans and other animals with dangerous pathogens. Those animals who do leave laboratories to lead other lives may make their way to veterinary schools before being adopted by private households, or to school biology classrooms where they become lab “pets” (this can happen with rabbits and ferrets, for example).15 Still others are resettled within the private homes of staff members or their friends or colleagues. Throughout the course of my research, I have encountered lab staff who have, at various points in their careers, brought home mice, rats, rabbits, frogs, zebrafish, dogs, ferrets, and even small monkeys. Perhaps the animal was a runt and destined for culling, as was true of a mouse named Arthur; deemed “surplus” in a litter of lab-bred ferrets, as with Reo and Rolo; or sent home after the experiment in which she was employed came to an end, as with Gypsy the rabbit. Still other animals who never leave the lab are immortalized following euthanasia through eclectic memorial projects.

specialized practices of animal welfare Occluded forms of animal exceptionalism are informed by a wider logic of compassion and care central to the workaday world of animal care technicians. As my own data, albeit anecdotally, suggest, efforts among caretakers and veterinarians to rescue animals from labs might easily outnumber the success stories claimed as single-handed triumphs by activists. (Indeed, “rehoming” may well be institutionalized in some labs; I return to this in chapter 5.) As I discovered in the course of this project, lab animals go home all the time, although neither by way of a (nonexistent) back door in the dead of night nor amid great public fanfare, but via bureaucratized channels that at the very least require a supervisor’s approval. Understanding how and when these events occur necessitates understanding certain aspects of the quotidian, albeit hidden, nature of lab animal care and welfare.

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Compassion and Care The social stigma of working as a lab animal technician is very real. Both activists and lab personnel frequently tell me that the majority of Americans today are opposed to the use of animals as experimental subjects,16 the former employing this as leverage in their lobbying efforts, the latter drawing on it as evidence of how unaware most people are of their dependence on animals for their own happiness and well-being, from drug trials to medical breakthroughs in, say, surgery or brain science. Animal technicians feel heavily under fire, perhaps because they are the first line of defense in caring for animals on a daily basis. More so than any other category of lab employee I have interviewed, they are acutely sensitive to activists’ efforts to demonize work they understand as both emotionally challenging and intensely rewarding. From the perspective of one who works within a lab, animal research is essential to the advancement of scientific knowledge, and, specifically from the caretaker’s stance, research is understood as making significant, and often groundbreaking, medical discoveries that in the future could save or improve the lives of both human and animal patients. But whereas researchers are focused on the acquisition of knowledge in the long term (see Sharp 2011c), whereby a particular species is employed because it provides the best fit for investigating a research question, a common refrain among animal technicians concerns species-specific care, as framed by research requirements. As summed up for me by Cassandra, a forty-five-year-old Latina animal technician supervisor with two decades of lab experience in four different labs, “believe me, you want to have me in this job, because I make sure they [the animals] get the absolute best of care.” Tess, who is Anglo-Irish and thirty-three, and who first worked for eight years as a vet technician in a small animal practice, said she “burned out” because there “is too much sickness and death in pet practices, where owners wait too long to bring in their animals.” She is much happier working with lab animals (which she has done for the past four years) because “these animals deserve the absolute best treatment. . . . and that’s what my job allows me to do.” Indeed, a word that surfaced repeatedly throughout my interviews with animal technicians was “love”: love for their work, love for the animals, and joy found in a job where they can work with like-minded and supportive colleagues of a similar stripe and training. Within a well-run and effectively staffed lab, the paired concepts of “welfare” and “enrichment” are rooted in official, bureaucratized, and codified guidelines and legal requirements designed to prevent, anticipate, respond

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to, and alleviate lab animal pain and distress, be it physical or psychological. Such efforts offer clear evidence of how animal care is regulated and enforced. As I demonstrate throughout this chapter, “care” encompasses an array of practices that go well beyond what the law requires, especially evident in the notion of one’s “love” for the work and for other living creatures. Several interviewees—including both caretakers and veterinarians— cited the popular writings of British author and country veterinarian James Herriot as inspiring them at an early age to enter animal care as a profession. In one instance I had the distinct impression that a senior lab veterinarian, in anticipation of my arrival to his office, had positioned several books on his bookshelf so as to display his ethos of compassion, where several book covers faced outward, including Peter Singer’s Ethics into Action alongside Herriot’s All Creatures Wise and Wonderful and Every Living Thing. In another instance, the office of an animal care supervisor was decorated with a poster and a small, framed needlepoint, both of which listed all of Herriot’s book titles. Regardless of context and organizational structure, animal technicians often bemoan the aloofness of researchers who have little understanding of their duties as caretakers, alongside researchers’ tendency to value animals most keenly—or even exclusively—as sources of valuable data and not necessarily as unique creatures. Although fledgling lab technicians (like Alicia in chapter 1) might mistake animal care technicians for low-level orderlies, caretakers are a font of knowledge and may have sophisticated training and even multiple degrees in the lab sciences and veterinary medicine. They are often the most up to date among all employees on welfare reforms, and I found that, as a group, they are avid readers of all sorts of material, including web postings of the USDA, world news, technical journals, and animal fiction, whereas researchers, be they fledgling or senior, more typically stick to scientific journals. The animal caretaker’s space is often set apart geographically from the researchers’ work environment, most evident if there is a lounge dedicated solely to caretaker use. Rooms where they circulate can be chock full of visual reminders of care, from inspirational posters, calendars and charts with animal photos, and gewgaws (most often plush toy animals), to innumerable photos that mix up lab and home life. For example, a photo of a lab hamster might sit next to another of a pet pug. Animal technicians pride themselves in their expertise, and they persistently speak the language of welfare. During lab visits I was peppered with the jargon of animal care— the USDA and IACUC, specialized methods, contraptions, and procedures

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for “euthanizing” (and not “sacking”) animals—alongside terminology that reflected deep knowledge of species-specific animal behavior. Because they work together so closely, they may speak of themselves as a “tribe” so as to distinguish themselves from the researchers whom they assist.

Hierarchies of Need In academic contexts, animal technicians work alongside, or are supervised by, usually itinerate veterinarians who specialize in lab animal medicine and who rotate among an array of labs within a given institution. Still others who interact regularly with animals also bear welfare responsibilities. These include researchers and their students who employ animals in experiments; entry-level lab assistants, like Alicia, who may engage in activities ranging from breeding to euthanizing animals, and who are often young, aspiring scientists; and other, generally poorly paid staff whose duties might be restricted to feeding and watering animals and cleaning their cages. The distribution of labor varies from one lab to the next. In some, responsibilities are rigidly hierarchical; in others, staff, regardless of station, may overlap significantly in their involvement with animals, especially where enrichment activities are concerned. For example, in two separate mouse vivaria I visited, researchers entered the room solely to retrieve animals for experiments or to make a note on a cage to let caretakers know the animals inside should be euthanized. Whereas the latter knew the names and research interests of the former, the inverse was not so. In turn, significant differences marked the organization of three neuroscience labs in my study, even though researchers were involved in fairly similar experiments with rhesus macaques. In the first two, the animal technicians took full charge of training both the monkeys and the newly recruited postdoctoral students, and they were empowered by their respective lab’s director to determine when the postdocs were adequately prepared before they could begin working alone with an individual animal. In the third, the head researcher, though a leader in her field, was finding it increasingly difficult to obtain funds to cover the full-time salaries of non-research staff. Faced with this challenge, she brought in a veterinarian well versed in animal training who then taught her postdocs how to condition their respective monkeys, an innovation she found produced a new crop of students more sensitive to the needs, tastes, and moods of the monkeys than had been true of any previous generation of recruits. This shift had serious consequences for the animal technicians, however, whose numbers were reduced significantly.17

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Sanctioned Forms of Exceptionalism Officially, lab animal care is about generics: mandated welfare practices and associated protective strategies are not specifically designed with, say, the special needs of a ferret named Hobgoblin in mind, but with all ferrets in all labs in the United States. In other words welfare, when put into practice, is species-specific. Consider, for example, this discussion derived from R. S. Ball’s overview on “preparing ferrets as research subjects”: Regardless of cage design, it is important to provide an area that accommodates a ferret’s instinct for burrowing and hiding, which are examples of species-typical behavior, and its need for resting. . . . To accommodate these needs, it is necessary to provide an enclosure with a solid bottom and sides, with or without an overhead cover. Many options exist, including large dog bowls, 4- to 6-inch diameter polyvinyl chloride pipes, fabric ferret hammocks or sleeping bags, and ferret tunneling toys. Play toys may be provided, but due to the ferret’s inquisitive behavior, it is imperative to scrutinize toys for safety and from potential ingestion. . . . Although aggressive behaviors may sometimes be observed in group housing situations, . . . ferrets in general are social animals and benefit from being in a group. . . . Ferrets should be housed in groups or in pairs, and solitary housing should be avoided. . . . Although males have been observed grasping or biting each other by the nape of the neck, this is actually normal mating behavior and it should be tolerated if it is not excessive. If the animals develop lesions due to excessive biting, it may be necessary to separate them. . . . Social hierarchies exist, but usually not to the detriment of an individual animal. Ferrets sleep together in groups, so the rest area that is provided should be sufficient to accommodate all of the inhabitants of a given enclosure. Properly trained care staff should handle ferrets regularly. This human contact will increase the ability of the animals to remain relaxed and comfortable during subsequent research procedures. Ferrets that are fed and watered daily but not handled regularly tend to become rambunctious and more easily frightened. Such fearful behavior may be evidenced by a vocalization best characterized as a screech. Chuckling or chortling sounds are more indicative of stimulation from play.18 (Ball 2006, 352)

As Ball underscores, ferrets have natural behaviors that translate into needs that should inform a best-practices approach in the lab that will then help sustain and enrich the life of any research ferret. Behaviors that may be considered adverse in one species (neck grasping and biting) are natural to another. Cage design, bedding, and manipulanda should be designed with the social, temperamental, and habitual needs of the species in mind (perhaps

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best illustrated in the provision of fabric hammocks for caged ferrets). Although variation is recognized (as embodied in the “excessive” biter), responses always return to the habits and needs characteristic of a typical member who represents the species as a whole. Indeed, if one were to demonstrate clear favoritism for one animal over all others, this might well call into question whether all, or only some, animals were receiving proper care. It is for this reason that I have intentionally shied away from using the term “favoritism” in favor (so to speak) of “exceptionalism.” The work ethic of species-specific welfare is reflected as well in coding systems that are designed not only to assist in the quantification of animals as data, but as a deliberate strategy to depersonalize human-animal interaction to prevent emotional attachment and favoritism. It is for this reason, for instance, that many labs maintain labor hierarchies that keep contact hours specifically between researchers and animals to a minimum. As noted in chapter 1, all animals bear coded designations borne on or in their bodies in the form of tags, tattoos, embedded microchips, or ear or toe clippings, and such codes are then replicated in lab notes, logging systems, and researchers’ publications. These are animals’ official, bureaucratized, and standardized designations. Yet animal technicians often balk at this, and their subversiveness might well be displayed in unconscious or unspoken acts that manage to defy standardized practices that disrupt efforts to personalize or identify with particular creatures. Among my starkest memories of this involved a fleeting moment during a group interview with four animal technicians who, when explaining the ear clipping system used to number rodents in their lab, they demonstrated in unison the positions of different numbers on their own ears. Eclectic, playful, esoteric, and, ultimately, personalized naming practices also abound. Among the most common demonstrations of exceptionalism involves the naming of animals. This is inevitable where some creatures are concerned, especially among those regarded as members of “higher” or “sentient” species. Names may reflect an individual animal’s habits, appearance or comportment, temperament, skill, or biography. For instance, a rhesus macaque known as Ruby is so named because her coat has an especially lustrous red hue to it; the ferret named Lucifer (also known as Mauser) was given these two playful monikers because he incites the most pronounced fear response among rats involved in an experimental psychology experiment; and the name of the coonhound known as Skinny Minny preserves memories of a phase soon after she arrived when she faltered in gaining weight following a complex surgical procedure. In still another context, within a herd of skittish and playful piglets, each is named for a famous

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dancer: Alvin (Ailey), Freddie (Fred Astaire), Ginger (Rogers), Izzy (Isadora Duncan), Karri (Karole Armitage), Rudi (Rudolf Nureyev), and Twy (Twyla Tharp). A range of staff may well have had a hand in naming these animals—the lab director, a postdoctoral student with a colorful flair for language, or one of a host of animal technicians. Still, animal caretakers, who typically have the most sustained and intimate contact with animals throughout the day, are often the most prolific producers of personalized names for animals that others will also employ in the day-to-day of lab life. Naming practices are nevertheless widely regarded as officially taboo within laboratories because the personalization of animals evokes emotion and signals attachment. A question that is often raised in workshops designed with the needs of animal technicians in mind, however, is “How many of you name your animals?” and the majority present respond in the affirmative. Leaders within the field frequently argue that prohibitions on naming are woefully outdated; in Buckmaster’s words, there “ain’t no shame in namin’.” Here I quote Buckmaster at length because she captures a sentiment expressed in many of my interviews with animal caretakers, giving voice to their predicament: While most of us in research have been naming animals for years, there are still a few hold-outs, from what I call the “Dark Age of Detachment,” who insist that doing so is anthropomorphic and will bias data collection. . . . Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t believe that naming a rat Bill would cause anyone to think of him as anything other than a rat . . . named Bill.19 If Bill’s personality is unique among other rats, it’s because he is a living creature with unique biological qualities and experiences. It’s because he is an individual, not an object. Naming research animals doesn’t make them seem more human. It makes them seem alive. People have been naming domesticated animals for centuries. It’s natural for us to do so. Despite this natural tendency, naming research animals was forbidden by many of our supervisors for decades, and young researchers and caregivers were forced to fight their natural tendency to name and bond with their charges. They were forced to pretend that the animals in their labs were fundamentally different in nature from those that slept in their beds with them at night. They were told that naming research animals would rob them of their objectivity. . . . They argued that an animal named Einstein might be perceived to be smarter or more deliberate than an animal named Dudley, for example, and that this subjective bias would skew the information collected from these animals. As someone with experience in behavioral research with animals, I think this might be likely in studies that are poorly designed for objective data collection in the first place.20 In that case, animal names are hardly the source of the problem. . . .

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Resistance to naming research animals has nothing to [do] with concerns about scientific validity; it stems from an unwillingness to experience the emotions that come naturally when we interact and bond with animals. . . . Connections with research animals are actually required for valid research results. Research animals have a variety of physical, behavioral and social needs, and signs of distress can be subtle. We are expected to learn, respect, address and monitor their needs carefully to minimize variability in our studies. Doing this well requires that we bond with our animals, and naming solidifies our connection. (2015a, 237)

Buckmaster’s views reflect sentiments shared by a wide array of animal technicians (and her role as president of several leading professional organizations has certainly helped disseminate and validate this approach) who nevertheless still confront significant resistance from lab researchers who may cling to practices that maintain an animal’s generic status. I should underscore that in the labs where I have conducted research, naming was at the very least tolerated and more commonly embraced or even encouraged by lab supervisors. Variables that mattered the most were, first, one’s station within the hierarchy: fledgling researchers like Alicia may well appreciate standard protocols that discourage emotional attachment to animals when they are still in the early stages of learning the ropes (especially where techniques are easily perceived as marring or harming an animal, such as toe clipping, blood draws, surgery, and euthanasia). Second is the species in question: mice, whose time on earth is frequently short lived and who may fall within a colony of hundreds or thousands of animals, are perhaps the least likely to be assigned individual names. For rats this is less so, in part because their numbers may be fewer, but also because, as lab personnel of all ranks like to say, they are “smarter,” are “easier to train,” and have “more personality” than mice. There are, nevertheless, some animals who are from the start singled out as specialized creatures who, by virtue of their station in a lab, demonstrate standardized forms of animal exceptionalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the role of lab sentinel.

The Sentinel as Standardized Exception Sentinels are curious creatures. Most often described as “the canary in the coalmine,” sentinels have a long, established history as animals who have been singled out as a biological means to detect impending harm to others around them. The sentinel’s origin in science dates back to the early twentieth century and generally is accredited to the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane (Boycott, Damant, and Haldane 1908).21 The expression “the canary in the coalmine” springs from the practice of keeping caged canaries in underground

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mining operations because of their sensitivity to methane and carbon monoxide. If these noxious gasses were present, the canary would soon show signs of illness, collapse, or die, thus alerting miners to environmental danger. Laboratories have long employed sentinels as warning systems,22 especially in vivaria where the threat of dangerous pathogens could potentially wipe out an entire colony. Lab animals are thought of and described by researchers as valuable “resources,” and the need to euthanize large numbers of exposed animals poses significant financial and procedural threats to a research study. The sentinel, then, is sometimes the first line of defense in protecting the health and well-being of throngs of active research subjects (Anderson et al. 2015, 493–94; Pritchett-Corning et al. 2015; Reif 2011). Under the rubric of the Three Rs, however, the use of sentinels is increasingly falling under scrutiny, whereby lab-associated specialists in various quarters have begun to question their necessity via the logic of animal “reduction.” In large facilities, hundreds or more sentinels are employed and then euthanized each year. In response, some labs have begun to phase out the use of sentinels by investing in sophisticated monitoring apparati that can detect an array of pathogens in the air, in animal bedding, in blood samples, and the like. Others contract with specialized vendors to perform these services (see, for example, Clifford, Henderson, and Chungu 2014). These approaches, however, are prohibitively expensive for many, especially for smaller academic facilities. As a result, sentinel use remains popular, and these animals may be such a part of daily laboratory life that they can remain invisible while in plain sight. Alicia, for example, recounted for me how she “discovered” on her own the sentinel residing within “my block” of cages. As she explained: “They are all white mice. I didn’t even notice these for the first three weeks I was there. My mice are all black and I wondered, what are these white mice doing here? . . . I had to ask one of the [animal] tech[nician]s why they were there. . . . I’ve since noticed that they always seem to be in the lower right corner of the racks.”23 In mouse labs especially, where animals may number in the thousands and only live there for a few days or weeks before being euthanized, a sentinel’s name is often generic. That is, it inhabits a cage that bears the label “Sentinel.” Nevertheless, in this way alone it stands out as being different from all other mice known only by their numbers. Animal caretakers often explain that if any animal in so large a colony has a name, this most likely will be the sentinel, and they themselves might lavish special attention on this creature. This is because the sentinel is not part of any research protocol, but is there simply to signal that all is well in the colony or vivarium. Because of their exceptional nature, sometimes

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sentinels are fed varied diets that amount to treats. Although today many sentinels are bred and supplied for this specific purpose by vendors, they might also be home-grown, so to speak—chosen from within a lab’s breeding colony when deemed unfit for research use because of their size, coloring, or physical injury (sentinels signal the presence of pathogens and so a physical injury may not necessarily matter). Some may also have been rescued from euthanasia at the end of another previous experiment and recycled back into the sentinel cage as a means to extend their lives a bit longer. Sentinels are regarded simultaneously as hardy, helpful, and vulnerable creatures because they are there specifically to alert staff to problems that could affect the well-being of an entire colony. As a result, an irony of their existence is that they are exposed to more potential sources of illness than other animals (their bedding is frequently derived from the soiled cages of other animals), yet they may live longer than their vivarium mates because they are not used in experiments. As a result, animal caretakers can grow attached to sentinels: they name them, play with them, feed them special snacks, and sometimes take them home as pets after they have outlived their use in the lab. During interviews I always asked lab personnel if they had ever taken an animal home and found frequently that the rats who now live as pets started out as sentinels. When it came time to euthanize them and replace them with new animals, their caretaker-owners acquired permission from their immediate supervisors or lab directors to “adopt” them. These practices involving sentinels help establish routes for other animals who might also escape euthanasia and be “rehomed.”

eclectic forms of animal exceptionalism Throughout the course of one’s career, a caretaker encounters animals who inspire especially strong emotions: it might be a special quirk, a perceived personality trait, a demonstration of affection of sorts across the species divide, or the outcome of stressful efforts to assist an animal in crisis.24 Ferrets and piglets, for example, generate strong affective responses in caretakers because of their inquisitive nature, gamboling forms of play, and social propensities among members of their own species. During several professional events I attended over the course of this project, videos of these animals at play elicited intense delight among caretakers, even more so than, say, another of a very cute baby elephant in a zoo and beagle puppies making mischief in a kennel. In the world of lab animal care, everyone has their own tastes, and thus it is difficult to assert the existence of dominant patterns in terms of which species or type of animal is most likely to garner

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special devotion or love. Indeed, among the most impassioned talks I heard over the course of this project concerned the welfare of zebrafish and the need for more sophisticated enrichment policies. For every caretaker who insists that monkeys lead the pack as the most inquisitive and responsive lab inhabitants, I encounter another who swears by rats. Breakthroughs in research can also transform caretakers’ thinking about particular species: a recent publication on empathy in mice (a project that had led one longtime researcher, for welfare reasons, to halt his research with them) (Panksepp and Lahvis 2011), sent ripples through some quarters of animal care, especially among those who supervised large rodent vivaria.

Rehoming Favored Species During the course of comparative research I conducted in the United Kingdom, I encountered staff from a neuroscience lab who, over the last ten years, have been involved in a slow, steady transition by replacing rhesus macaques with marmosets as experimental subjects. As lab staff from different quarters explained, macaques were becoming increasingly difficult to acquire domestically or from broader EU sources, and they were reticent to resort to what they regarded as “archaic” and “questionable” practices that involved acquiring captured wild animals or relying on overseas vendors based in various Asian countries. In short, they objected largely on the basis of welfare concerns, yet they were sensitive, too, to the scrutiny of animal activists who were keen to track down “large monkeys.” Macaques were proving expensive to obtain and maintain, and staff members’ own deepened sense of animal welfare made them reticent to continue working with large animals whom they felt deserved better housing than the social enclosures their cramped lab suite could accommodate. Marmosets offered a viable alternative: pint-sized and friendly, they proved easy to train, they thrived in group enclosures, and staff had relatively decent outcomes in their efforts to breed them on-site. When the lab’s macaques were euthanized one-by-one at the termination of various projects, the lab “reinvested” in marmosets. And, as I learned, they were a focus of intense delight among a range of staff members, including researchers, veterinarians, caretakers, and other employees. I advise readers unfamiliar with marmosets to look them up on the web. The common marmoset, or Callithrix jacchus, is a New World monkey, a furry little creature with a fluffy layered coat tinged with grey and red, a long, silky tail, and big tufts of white fur that fan out across each ear. The words that quickly come to mind when viewing them are “cute,” “adorable,” “entertaining,” and “funny.” A child once told me they were reminiscent of

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a “tiny monkey in a lemur suit” (yet another said they looked a lot like the little monsters known as mogwais in director Joe Dante’s Gremlins). A common image of a captive marmoset features a fidgety creature perched on a human’s shoulder, as if it were a pet parrot. Marmosets caught the attention of Robin McKie, the science editor for The Guardian (U.K.), when he wrote in 2013 about a transnational project—spanning the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States—known as the “Big Animal Research Debate.”25 His article focused on the emotional impact that marmosets have on humans, based on his visit to a lab facility at King’s College London: “[In spite of the use of many other species] it is the marmoset—furry, curious and humanlike—that triggers the most intense emotional responses, a point acknowledged by Mary (who asked not to be fully identified), the senior research technician in charge of the animals at King’s, who devotes her time to the animals’ welfare, right down to knitting hammocks for them to sleep in. ‘You end up having favourites. You cannot help it. And when, after six years, they have to be put down, it is very hard. You have to block it off’ ” (McKie 2013). Although marmosets proved advantageous as subjects for ongoing research in the neuroscience lab I describe above, staff began to falter when faced with the inevitable requirement that they euthanize the animals under their charge when the research came to an end. Several on staff had worked with macaques in the years before, a task they unquestionably found difficult and emotionally trying. This was especially pronounced among the caretakers, who often preferred to be absent from the lab on the days when the macaques were scheduled to be “put down,” and several made it clear to their supervisor that they preferred not to handle or be near the remains of a monkey they had known. But rhesus macaques were different from marmosets: staff knew that efforts to adopt out macaques, as large, gangly, and potentially dangerous creatures, were out of the question. Marmosets, however, seemed to fall into a different category of emotive care: they were cute, easy to manage and handle, and small. With the support of a national inspector, two staff veterinarians, and an innovative supervisor, the animal care technicians initiated bit by bit a new protocol for the marmosets once the research ended. It was well understood that not all could be saved, but they slowly persuaded one of the staff vets to “adopt” one or two. The program was controversial: it is widely understood in the United Kingdom (as well as the United States and elsewhere) that research monkeys should not leave labs for the outside world, but the veterinarian, because of her training and stature, was able to procure permission to house a few at home. And slowly, over the course of a decade, her

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home grew into a lively menagerie. Today one room of her rural domicile houses a spacious group cage not unlike that in the lab, and, as the caretakers confided, whenever they feared the loss of still other animals they cherished, they knew they might call on her for help. As two lab-mates told me, “she’ll take just about any animal home with her if you ask her.” Yet another example of the “adopting out” or “rehoming” of animals as a standard protocol involves a research team in a southeastern U.S. city that occasionally employs ferrets. Ferrets are favored for a wide range of research projects—including those focused on various infectious diseases, estrus, and menstruation. Within this lab, a team of caretakers appealed to their supervisor (who is a senior veterinarian) to approach the lab director. The caretakers were adamantly opposed to the introduction of ferrets to their vivarium unless researchers agreed from the very start that, first, experiments would not be terminal; second, that the ferrets would always be housed in pairs; and third, that concerted efforts would be made to rehome all of them once the study ended. An ability to satisfy the caretakers’ requests was possible because the lab often contracted with researchers elsewhere in their institution to run small studies for them, and so as a team they settled on a project that involved tracking fear responses in rats. Ferrets give off a strong, musky scent that is easily detected by other mammals (especially among those upon whom ferrets might feed), and the research involved bringing a caged ferret into a room where the brain activity of a rat was read through magnetic imaging. Within this lab, all ferrets are given unique monikers like “Snaky,” “Beady Eyes,” Snotty,” and “Tinkerbell,” and concerted efforts are made to ensure that once their experimental involvement ends, they are adopted—sometimes hundreds of miles away in other towns, cities, and states. As a senior animal technician explained, “all of our ferrets, every last one of them, has been rehomed, and just as we house them in pairs, we always insist that they be adopted out with their cagemates.” These ferrets go on to live other lives elsewhere, most often as classroom pets in high school biology classrooms. Two staff members have also adopted several ferrets, whereas others who “feel sorry for the rats” have taken one or more of these rodents home with them instead. To stop here would obscure yet another important facet of caretakers’ efforts at animal salvation. One’s involvement in animal care frequently extends far beyond the boundaries of one’s workday. It is not unusual for a caretaker to work overtime and even through the night to watch over or nurse a newly arrived animal; one that is ill, injured, or in distress; or one that has just emerged from surgery. One especially devoted animal technician who is now a senior supervisor explained, “If one of my monkeys has

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had surgery, I want to be the first thing she sees when she wakes up, so she knows I’m there to take good care of her. If it means sleeping over in the lab, so be it. She deserves this level of care.” I have heard similar stories from many other caretakers. Yet another facet of care consists of involvement with animals in need of rescue beyond a laboratory’s walls. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, animal technicians frequently have pets of their own at home (who may or may not have been laboratory subjects). Cats and dogs figure prominently, and they are most frequently acquired from animal shelters focused on rescue work. These might be “no kill” shelters or groups that specialize in certain breeds (such as those that save retired greyhounds from racetracks). Animal technicians are prohibited from photographing lab animals, but their phones are full of images of their pets, and at professional gatherings they often share these photos with one another during breaks and over lunch. They are always quick to underscore among their colleagues that the animal was adopted and not acquired from a breeder. In the one instance where the latter was the case, the dog owner in question (who is senior in her field) apologized for being “such a sucker for the breed” and underscored that she volunteers at a local animal shelter on weekends.

Lab Animal Memorials Whereas caretakers’ phones must not contain photos of lab animals under their charge, the interior walls of a laboratory are often smattered with images of lab-based creatures. These consist of industry-produced photos (such as calendars or charts of “model” breeds), professional journal advertisements, posters promoting lab animal research, and photos of favorite animals taken on a lab-owned camera (and with a supervisor’s permission). Sometimes lab animals are videotaped, especially if there is a spot in a lab where they can romp and play with others of their kind; typically this occurs in the alley of a set of kennels or stalls, or in an enclosed hallway when their pens or enclosures are being cleaned. These videos capture piglets, beagles, or ferrets, for instance, making a silly nuisance of themselves, and they are among the few images that make their way out of the lab for use during professional presentations on how play is an important aspect of enrichment strategies for highly social species. Nevertheless, as a rule, photographs taken in the lab stay in the lab. As one moves around a lab with animal technicians, one encounters photos of lab animals at every turn: in individual offices, lounges, housing rooms, and the like. Often these photos coalesce into a montage of sorts and occupy a special bulletin board in a lounge or hallway that is reserved solely for this purpose; in one instance, a team of caretakers and veterinarians showed me

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a thick “family scrapbook” of research animals dating back over a decade. In individual offices there is inevitably a smattering of home-based pets, too, such that their lab animals and pets are blended visually as one big mass of creatures for whom the animal technician cares and loves. Notably, the majority of caretakers I interviewed were fairly young, which may account for the absence of photos of babies or children. Nowhere was this reality more starkly realized than during an interview with a senior supervisor who spent much of our interview telling me his personal, professional history through the lives of his many Australian Sheepdogs—several of whom were now deceased—whose photos took up every nook and cranny of his spacious office. As he explained, he and his wife (who was a veterinary researcher in a neighboring lab) had opted long ago to “make animals our children.” But whereas photos of pets are usually of animals who currently inhabit technicians’ homes, images of lab animals are almost exclusively of those who are now deceased. I have come to understand the specialized photo galleries that blanket lab bulletin boards (alongside the lab scrapbook) as memorial projects devoted to animals of times past. In the words of Tess, the technician quoted above, when you walk past these hallway photos, “you see them and remember them”—that is, the animals under your care. Sometimes within these images one can see a masked lab technician’s eyes peeking over the head of an animal who might appear to be smiling for the camera (this seems to be a common trait among piglets); in other instances the animal rests in a caretaker’s gloved hands. Animals are not photographed in their cages but instead when they have been removed from their enclosures during cage cleaning or for other purposes. Sometimes the bulletin board sports a banner that reads something along the lines of “The Real Heroes of Science,” placed there as a reminder for staff who walk past these memorial walls every day. Although the photos may not be labeled, technicians can often identify many if not all of the animals pictured there, even if the animal’s death predated their own arrival in the lab. In this sense, they are reminiscent of totemic ancestors (a theme I revisit below). These memorial walls offer a way to mourn and mark time, celebrate the hard work of animals of bygone days, and commemorate the efforts of animal technicians to provide a range of creatures with quality care throughout their brief, lab-based lives. Through such practices, these memorial montages offer some level of salvation for both the animal pictured and the caretaker who views the photo on her way down the hall. Recall that Berger (1990) encourages us to contemplate what it is we see when we look at animals; I contend that these

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memorial walls summon passersby to pause and look carefully at individual animals and reflect on their works and lives. Photography provides an especially powerful means for recalling that which is now past, a frozen image that allows each viewer to reminisce or learn about the creatures pictured there. Photography in this context bears properties of salvation alongside the possibility of redemption, themes powerfully expressed in the notion that each animal is a “hero of science,” having served a life well lived. Like a fallen soldier, an animal gave itself, through the act of “sacrifice,” for the sake of furthering knowledge that might one day lead to important treatments or cures. The animal technicians, in turn, may well discover inroads to their own salvation through such memorial projects. Again, each time they pause to look over the wall of photos, they might find an animal who was under their personal care. The image, then, encourages them to reflect back on their past actions with a given animal as a means to think about similar ones who presently populate the same lab. Caretakers’ ability to tell stories about individual creatures to others furthers their sense of self-worth and belonging in the black-boxed domain of laboratory research and associated animal care. Although lying outside public scrutiny, an animal technician can gaze upon the faces of all sorts of creatures and recall that the work one accomplished was possible in large part because one did so with dignity, integrity, and compassion. A theme I encountered in my previous work on organ transplantation in the United States is that grassroots memorial projects begin as subversive acts but can soon be co-opted and transformed into bureaucratized practices. The surviving kin of organ donors employed online tributes, or “cemeteries,” and memorial quilts in response to efforts from within the transplant community to silence them and obscure from public view their sense of loss and need to mourn their dead. In time, however, hospitals, procurement agencies, and public relations firms began to mount memorial projects of their own, among which the most elaborate to date has involved the building of a memorial wall and garden outside the national offices that oversee organ procurement for the United States (Sharp 1994). Unlike the bureaucratization of donor memorials, however, lab-based projects remain in the hands of those intimately involved in animal care. In this sense alone, they stand out as heartfelt, subversive attempts to remind themselves and others of the sacrifices we insist animals make for science.26 Numerous projects I have encountered go far beyond the quasi-temporary mounting of photographs on bulletin boards. The staff of one lab I visited, for example, recently commissioned a plaque to mount outside an elevator door,

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figure 14. Laboratory animal memorial mural at an East Coast medical school, handmade ceramic tiles, 2013. Frank Giorgini, artist. The accompanying plaque reads, “In tribute to the animals whose contributions to research and education benefit both human and animal health worldwide.” Photo by the author. Reproduced with permission.

and I have heard reports of two memorial gardens and a commemorative statue in the making, both of which have been instigated and organized by animal caretakers. Still other efforts involve acquiring funds to hire artists to create permanent installations. An unusual example—because it was instigated by researchers—emerged at a medical school facility where members of the school’s IACUC lobbied the administration to fund a memorial to lab animals, a project that culminated in commissioning a permanent mural by a well-known, local artist. To the chagrin of some lab staff, a stipulation of the administration was that it be mounted within the interior space of the lab, out of public view (see figure 14). In light of this, among the boldest memorials I have encountered to date involves an annual memorial that is staged each year at a medical center that lost a group of research macaques in the floods that accompanied Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Instigated and annually staged by research and animal care staff who knew the animals, a temporary

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June 9, 2001 May we never forget the contributions they made and how much we loved and cared for them. Dedicated to all the animals lost in tropical storm Allison.

figure 15. Commemorative card honoring deceased research macaques, 2014. This memorial is mounted annually at a medical center in Houston, Texas. The text reads, “June 9, 2001. May we never forget the contributions they made and how much we loved and cared for them. Dedicated to all the animals lost in tropical storm Allison.” Reproduced with permission from Tammy Humbird and Cindy Buckmaster.

altar is mounted in the public entryway of the medical school with floral wreaths and, as if in defiance of regulations that prohibit photographing lab animals, individual headshots of these lost animals are always included in the display (see figure 15).

Remains of the Day On occasion, memorial projects take a turn that might strike outsiders as somewhat sinister. This involves taking trophies or manufacturing relics from the bodies of deceased lab animals. However, readers with training in anthropology might not find this trend so unusual: the literature in our discipline is replete with examples where warriors and hunters from a range of societies derive power and strength over human adversaries and animal prey by acquiring parts, or trophies, or power objects taken from the bodies of other once-living creatures (Insoll 2015; Kopytoff 1986, 83; McNaugton 1982; Rosaldo 1980). In lab contexts, various practices are reminiscent of

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such customs; at other times, they more closely approximate the transformation of animals into relics that signify not one’s power over other creatures, but devotional love. I offer an example of each, the first involving researchers’ standardized handling of deceased animals’ bodies in a neuroscience lab, followed by the eclectic practices of animal preservation among the caretakers at work in a similar domain.27 Contemporary neuroscience research often involves the surgical implantation of small neural arrays in animals’ brains. These generally remain in situ for the remainder of an animal’s life. Macaques are especially prevalent subjects in this category of research, and once a research project comes to an end (often after a number of years of working with one, if not a string, of postdoctoral students) the animal is, as researchers commonly say, sacrificed. In one lab where I interviewed and observed both researchers and animal technicians, the days when monkeys were scheduled for euthanasia were emotionally charged. As is common practice in many labs involved in similar research, all staff are notified that the procedure has been scheduled so that those who prefer to do so may stay home or leave early before the monkey is wheeled into surgery. One caretaker explained, “We can opt out. When we take the job, we’re told this. With the monkeys, we tend to keep out of the way—they warn us the day before and then we don’t come in [to work], or we stay away [in the lounge or another room].” In this specific lab the director always took charge so as to spare his staff, from postdocs to animal technicians, from the emotional burden of bearing witness to a well-known animal’s death. In others a senior animal technician or a veterinarian takes charge and, in such instances, they are usually supervisors with decades of experience. This practice of relieving one’s charges of the task of euthanizing a monkey is widely understood as both ethical and compassionate. As a result, postdoctoral students, even after spending several years in a monkey lab, may have no experience euthanizing these animals (though they must learn how to do so before they complete their degree if they intend to establish their own monkey lab in the future). As several caretaker supervisors have explained, they consider this their worst task, and they prefer to go home soon after an animal has been put down because they find it difficult to remain in the lab afterward. It is within such contexts that Aaron, as described in chapter 3, stages wakes for his monkeys to help alleviate the emotional trauma his students might experience. Animal technicians in turn may salve one another’s sense of loss by gathering, for example, at a local bar after work to reminisce about recently deceased animals. The days when well-known animals are euthanized are somber and even sacred moments within labs.

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Within this particular lab, a monkey is perceived as many things at once: an individual and unique animal with special preferences, behaviors, and skills; a generic creature who is one of several or many of its species; a proxy for human subjects; and a “qualitative index” or “data point.” Nowhere is the last category more evident than in what happens following an animal’s death in the surgery room. Many research protocols end not merely with euthanasia but necropsy, and the monkey in the neuroscience lab is no exception. Whereas in other research contexts necropsy approximates a human autopsy in which, say, the abdomen is opened and inspected and cultures are taken (as described, for example, by Svendsen and Koch in their account of a lab in Denmark that employs piglets in preterm neonatal bowel disease [2014]), what interests the neuroscientist most is the brain. In an effort to economize on storage space, or separate that which is valued from that which is superfluous, research monkeys in this lab are decapitated. Yes, decapitated.28 The heads are perfused and then preserved with formalin and stored in a specially designated refrigerator. During an interview with Marta (Anglo, age 35) and Felix (Jamaica-born, age 27), two caretakers from this lab, Marta explained, “We have to warn [other animal technicians] ‘so-and-so’s head is in a jar of formalin.’ Usually they [the researchers] try to cover it with a cloth so you aren’t shocked if you walk in.” A brain necropsy occurs later, at which point brain samples are taken (and then the head is disposed as medical waste). Marta, Felix, and their colleagues, however, are in charge of managing the body. In Felix’s words, “When they finish, we have to take the body. The body is put in the freezer and the head stays in the lab.” That is, the body remains in storage—alongside those of other euthanized animals—until it is retrieved by a vendor. In the past this was a firm that managed biohazardous materials; within the last few years, however, at the caretakers’ insistence the lab now has a contract with an animal crematorium and cemetery that inters remains en masse from a range of labs each month in an undisclosed location. I asked Marta and Felix if they could elaborate on what happened when an animal was scheduled to be euthanized. Their responses revealed the strong attachment that researchers themselves feel for the animals with whom they work. ls: Can I ask who euthanizes a monkey? felix: The researchers. marta: Dr. W [the head of the lab]. He says [to us], “Ok, sorry, see you later” [meaning we should avoid the lab].

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felix: We’re the ones who give them fruit and see them do amazing things. [But] for a couple of them [the researchers] the day before, they do special things [for the monkeys]. There was one who just chopped up all the fruit we had, the entire supply of bananas, and gave [the monkey] a last meal—all the apples and bananas we had. And the [animal] technicians went in together the last night to say goodbye. ls: That’s incredible. It’s like a last meal before an execution. felix and marta: [Shake their heads vigorously in assent] At this moment directly following euthanasia, the monkey can no longer be considered a subject of science: he has, unquestionably, been transformed into an object—and an it—of research. This reframing of the living into objects or things is hardly confined to animal-based neuroscience. It occurs in contexts involving human subjects too. For example, during the course of my research on artificial heart design, when a surgeon at transplant conference spoke during his presentation of the thrill he experienced in watching the “autopsy of the device” that had been retrieved from a deceased, nameless “male patient,” I learned accidentally that a man I had known had passed away. I pieced together from the surgeon’s account that I had known this courageous person, yet I could detect no sorrow or sense of loss during the surgeon’s talk (and, as I describe elsewhere, his presentation made me physically ill) (Sharp 2013). My point here is that the seemingly macabre handling of a monkey’s body is informed by deeply entrenched, historicized, and standardized approaches that characterize both human medical science and animal laboratory research. In the United States we are, after all, a nation that is fascinated with forensic science, as exemplified by the plethora of television shows that inevitably have at least one scene per episode based in a pathology lab. If research is to stay on course, autopsy (or in the case of animals, necropsy) matters. Did the neural implant remain embedded as placed? Was there damage to any brain tissue? How well have neurons fared under these circumstances? What other anatomical, physiological, or cellular indicators might emerge from the necropsy that could inform or affect research findings or design now or in the future? In spite of these standardized practices, a monkey’s death destabilizes all staff in a lab, and efforts to avoid the space where a monkey’s remains are stored typify reactions, regardless of one’s station. I propose here that the

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monkey’s decapitation, although very much an ingrained practice of scientific research, nevertheless approximates the taking of an animal trophy not unlike the action of, say, a fisherman or hunter who has landed a large catch or bagged an impressive kill. The preservation of the monkey’s head, though repulsive, signifies the acquisition of specialized knowledge and professional power. It also stands out as a significant rite of passage for any postdoctoral student hoping to make his way in his profession: at some point he will need to master the proper methods for euthanizing a monkey he has known and then unflinchingly dismember her remains. Furthermore, if the necropsy proves productive, the monkey, though dead, will continue to live on in the researcher’s data, resurfacing each time he gives professional presentations or publishes his research results. As a result, the monkey stays with him for months and years to come, even long after her demise. There are yet other forms of animal trophies that more closely approximate sacred relics. In another neuroscience lab, the research team recently acquired sophisticated imaging technology and a 3-D printer. Together this hardware now enables them to generate brain and cranial scans of individual monkeys, which they then use to build life-size, plastic replicas. They employ these brain molds, or “casts,” to prepare for surgeries on individual monkeys because, as Nimrod—a thirty-two-year-old, Asian American, third-year postdoc—explained, morphologically, “no two monkeys’ brains are the same.” Following surgery, the casts are not discarded but instead further enhanced with markings that designate where a neural implant has been placed, and they are stored together with great care in a discrete grid of compartments located in a drawer dedicated to this purpose in the lab. I learned of these casts when I asked Nimrod if the lab had any mementos of monkeys of bygone days, at which point he brought me to the drawer and opened it for me. With great delicacy he removed three casts, one after the other, and though there were no labels in sight, he was able to identify each monkey by name because he recognized them by their brain size and shape. The third cast he pulled out had been derived from Nemo, the monkey with whom he worked each day. As Nimrod explained, “we never discard these. When Nemo is long gone, this will still be here.”

The Cherished Dead It is a bit past 10:00 a.m. on a weekday morning, and I have just spent the last two hours visiting a suite of labs and an associated vivarium that currently houses mostly rodents. Inside, there are numerous racks of mice and rats, and a handful of female rabbits off to one corner. Another room nearby contains four pairs of female ferrets, and down the hall, around the bend,

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and through several doors yet another room houses pairs of macaques. I am here at the invitation of a team of animal technicians who rotate in their duties to care for all of the animals on this floor, which is occupied by several research groups focused on an array of projects. Although their official hours are either 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. or 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (with a single additional staff member working the night shift as a watchman of sorts), these caretakers often arrive early or stay on for several more hours, and they rotate on a monthly basis over the weekends so that someone on staff is always there to tend to the animals. When those under their watch have undergone, say, surgical procedures, it is not unusual for at least one caretaker to opt to stay late or even overnight to make sure the animal in question fares well. The four animal technicians who have been my guides throughout the morning—Tom (Anglo, age 29), Amar (Anglo-Arab, 25), Mattie (AngloIrish, 35), and Corrine (Anglo, 33)—invite me to join them for a coffee break in a lounge reserved exclusively for their use. I had arrived with pastries in hand, and Tom, Amar, and Corrine dive into the box while Mattie prepares the coffeemaker. The room, a large rectangle, has a table with comfortable chairs in the center, and along one wall is a small couch and a table for coffee, tea, and snacks, alongside a minifridge; another wall consists of two interior windows that look out onto the hallway that eventually leads to the vivarium. The other two walls house small tables with three desktop computers, above which are mounted shelves containing an assortment of books and spiral-bound guides on animal care; an assortment of colored binders; some framed photos of individual animals; a plastic Godzilla; two black, rubber rats (one of which has been signed by the writer Anne Rice); and several palm-sized plush animal toys, including a mandrill, a dog with big eyes, what looks like an otter, and a pair of penguins holding hands and wearing winter caps, knit scarves, and ice skates. High up on the top shelf along one wall are what seem to be the remains of dead animals. When I look more closely, I realize there is what appears to be, perhaps, a very mangy-looking weasel under a glass case (it turns out to be a mink), four animal skulls, and a yet another taxidermy rabbit. The rabbit is a brilliant white and seems flash-frozen, caught in a strange pose upon a short log, its ears thrust forward and alert, one front paw posed as if ready to bolt. Once we are all seated and drinking coffee, we discuss animal care procedures, staff hierarchies, and favorite animals. I then turn to the animal remains on the shelf. ls: Does anyone ever take mementos for instance, as reminders of animals? Such as a lock of hair?

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staff [in unison]: No. corrine: Well, there’s Sam [their supervisor] and his taxidermy [pointing to the mink in the glass case]. ls: Was the mink from an experiment? mattie: No, he had it at home and his wife didn’t like it, so he brought it in here. [Amar then gets up from his chair and takes one of the skulls down from the self. He explains it is the skull of a macaque.] LS: What are those other three? [I guess correctly that one is a macaque and another a rabbit, and Amar explains the third is a baboon.] Were those from this lab? corrine: From the past. ls: Did any of you know these animals? staff [together]: No, but Sam had worked with them. amar: I think they’re Sam’s trophies. [Corrine, Mattie, and Tom, who has been quiet up until now, engage in a friendly dispute over this]: Sam is a little odd / yes / but we like him. mattie: Sam used to work with all of these animals. He worked with baboons, then for a zoo for a while, and then he came back and ever since has been an animal tech. He has managed birds, fish, farm animals. He always has answers to any question. tom: He did the rabbit. The rabbit was here. mattie: That’s Humphrey. amar: And we all know about Humphrey! corrine: He was part of a larger study—there were seventeen rabbits in all, listed A to Q, Arnold, Babar, Cabbage, Dilly-Dally, Eddie, Flopsy, Googly . . . amar: See, Corrine can name them all— corrine: Then there was Humphrey . . . amar: —even though she [Corrine] came into the study near the end. And everyone here can tell you all about the work that Humphrey did. We all know about Humphrey. He was one of the first rabbits to arrive when the lab moved here, and he’s sort of a big part of Sam’s history . . . mattie: And our history too. As Mattie’s response indicates, Humphrey’s remains collapse three histories into one: his own (as an exceptional animal from a nearly full alphabet

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of rabbits), that of the lab (including its move from one site to another, alongside preserving memories of a specific research project), and that of the caretakers, including those who never encountered Humphrey when he was alive. Humphrey, in taxidermy form, looms as a totemic creature whose past history and present state inspire staff caretakers to tell stories of works and lives past, a process that opens a window onto the world of quotidian laboratory life. When assembled together, Humphrey, the skulls of still other animals long deceased, and the brain casts that Nimrod showed to me, stand out as a specialized collection of memento mori that entangles the careers of lab-based animals and humans. Whereas the palm-size brain casts derived from Nemo and other macaques stand out as physical manifestations of data-driven science, the animal remains that occupy the caretakers’ lounge encourage one to reflect on the quotidian aspects of care and the inevitability of lab animal death and loss. When Mattie underscores that “Humphrey . . . [is] our history too,” one realizes that Humphrey has become the caretakers, and the caretakers have become Humphrey.

conclusion: totemic creatures In his classic work, Totemism, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers invaluable insights on human-animal relations by asserting in his widely quoted adage that “natural species” figure prominently in totemic systems “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’ ” (1963, 89). Still other anthropologists and related theorists have long debated the significance of totemism, and, more broadly, have been “thinking animals” for quite some time, as evidenced in writings that extend back to the nineteenth century (Boas 1916; Douglas 1966, 1970; Durkheim 1915; Feeley-Harnik 2001; Freud 1918; Hubert and Mauss 1964 [1898]; Leach 1964; Morgan 1868). Totemic systems are cosmological maps of social worlds in which understandings of self and other are read through mystical associations with fauna, flora, or other things that populate nature and culture, and these associations sanction moral codes of human conduct evident, for instance, in kinship, hunting rights, commensality, and ritual sacrifice. Because totemic systems define who one is throughout the arc of one’s social and cosmological life, totemism is spatiotemporal in orientation, where the self shares origins and histories with other living things. Totemism thus informs rules of association in the past, in the here and now, and well into the future and beyond one’s own death. Given that totemism frequently involves elaborate human-animal pairings, in contemporary parlance, totemism provides a potent idiom for demystifying codified systems of interspecies sociality.

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Laboratory life lends itself well to this logic. As anthropologists have long known from the cross-cultural study of human-animal encounters, the presence of animals in otherwise human worlds blurs interspecies difference, generating intriguing responses to notions of moral responsibility, species affinity, and the imagining of likeness or even kinship across the human-animal divide. Laboratory animals fulfill a staggering array of human needs that encompass not only the utilitarian requirements of experimental science but, as I demonstrate throughout this book, other important economic, emotional, sentimental, and ritualistic needs and pursuits. Like totemic creatures in cosmological systems, lab animals often stand in for, or are the equivalent of, human beings, and their “sacrifice” figures prominently in the moral ordering of experimental science. The juxtaposition of animal trophies and totems provides a helpful comparative framework for distinguishing the moral actions of researchers and caretakers. Trophies, as power objects, bolster one’s ability to overcome one’s human or animal adversaries, thereby helping to assure one’s power over others in the future. In contrast, totemic associations are relational, where one identifies with or, in specialized ritualized contexts, may even become the totem. There are still other differences. Salvation does not figure in the act of taking trophies, whereas it may predominate during encounters with one’s totem. Indeed, to harm one’s totemic animal is tantamount to harming oneself or others whom one holds dear. Instead, the relation to the totem involves protection, admiration, honor, endearment, or in the case of eating, avoidance. Both trophies and totems possess the power to transform the self. With a trophy, one takes power from an animal and through this creature derives elevated status or enhanced skills; with totems, on the other hand, one embodies or is the totem, and by this route is transformed into something morally sacrosanct. Laboratories, of course, demand very different sorts of pairings than do religious systems. The interspecies intimacy inherent in lab work is precisely why there is such sustained resistance to naming and other practices that would enable staff to identify with animals in more personal ways and thereby mark them as exceptional creatures. In this sense alone, totemic systems—which are often rife with taboos—proffer powerful insights for understanding the ritualized processes at work in the lab. As argued earlier in this chapter, animal activists and caretakers (and certainly researchers too) are entangled in an uneasy synergism that informs the ever-evolving nature of animal welfare and care in practice. Lab hierarchies and associated duties also shape the nature of an employee’s contact with animals and the level of intimacy this entails. Nowhere is the significance of these forces

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more starkly realized than in contexts framed by death. Naming practices, photographic images, and relics derived from deceased animals’ bodies all signal animal technicians’ mastery of specialized knowledge and deepseated consciousness of the inevitable emotional challenges that the labors of lab animal care entail. The inevitability of death for most lab animals underscores the complexity of the caretaker’s burden (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007). It also paves the way for pathways of salvation (see also Lynch 1988; Svendsen and Koch 2014). Serendipitous acts—from innovative enrichment strategies to adoption practices to commemorative undertakings—stand apart from the codified, bureaucratized, and experimental actions that research protocols require. Whereas researchers “work with” animals, animal technicians “care for” them; while the postdoc values an animal as a rich source of quantifiable data, the animal technician heeds quirky qualitative differences that inform personalized naming practices and associated responses. Although in professional literature an experimental “lab subject” may be “terminated” via “sacrifice,” within the framework of quotidian laboratory life, the care administered to this same, eventually “euthanized” animal is recalled long after he or she is gone through stories passed from one caretaker to another, the animal’s stark outline evocative at times of a queer sort of ancestor. In conclusion, as Mattingly teaches us, these sorts of contrasts between researcher and caretaker, trophy and totem, and living and dead evidence the “complex reasoning . . . that engenders . . . experiments in how we live” when we are confronted with dilemmas associated with the “care of the intimate other” (2014, 4–5). Here, Mattingly’s metaphor of the “moral laboratory” is made real within the concrete walls, in the drawers, and on the bookshelves of experimental lab space. Animal exceptionalism—alongside exceptional or quirky lab practices—alters scientific values assigned to lab creatures and, in turn, reconfigures the caretaker’s moral self in contexts overrun with unspoken forms of suffering (again, see Mattingly 2014, xvi– xvii). Whereas researchers retrieve tissue, cell cultures, or neural implants as trophies of science that advance and enhance them professionally, animal technicians engage in eclectic memorial projects both large and small that demonstrate their love for their work, their devotion to a range of creatures, and the ultimate sacrifices they have made for the exceptional animals who fall under their care.

5. The Animal Commons

In June 2016 an article entitled “Sharing Animals across Protocols” (Silverman 2016) appeared as a hypothetical ethics case study under the regular column heading “Protocol Review” of Lab Animal, a journal whose readers are typically animal technicians and lab veterinarians. The example focused on two researchers, Drs. Rosen and Chen, each of whom were engaged in similar orthopedic studies of healing in deliberately induced long bone fractures; the former used mice, the latter rabbits. Jerald Silverman, a veterinarian who edits the column and authored the case study, explained that when Rosen (who had been a member of Chen’s lab and who had since established her own) realized that a larger animal model might enhance her research knowledge, she “‘borrowed’ two of Chen’s rabbits,” on whom she performed a surgical procedure used by Chen. According to Silverman, “neither Rosen nor Chen thought they were doing anything wrong until the IACUC found out.” Their institution’s IACUC soon informed the pair that Rosen was approved neither to use Chen’s animals nor to attempt his procedure; Chen, in turn, lacked clearance “to give the rabbits to Rosen” (2016, 209). Silverman elicited three coauthored responses from an assortment of veterinarians and animal technicians. A tension running throughout these critiques involved the conflict between understandings of animals as scientific resources and the ethics of their care and welfare. All three commentaries flagged the presumption that IACUC involvement was unnecessary, focusing on various aspects of oversight that had been overlooked (or perhaps evaded), with special attention to the ethics of “borrowing.” Adrienne Duran and Peggy Tinkey, for example, frequently surrounded the term with apology quotes, asserting “animals cannot be ‘borrowed’ to carry out pilot studies or experiments with research goals that differ from those of the originally approved protocol,” and they were especially attentive to 195

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how welfare concerns figure within the bureaucratic management of lab animals. They underscored, for instance, that when “animal subjects” shift from one environment to another, they must always be accompanied by their identification cards to track their movements and use. They stressed, “It is also inappropriate to ‘borrow’ animals because the IACUC must ensure that the same animals are not being used for multiple invasive or surgical procedures. In this scenario, it is unclear whether the animals that Rosen borrowed were naïve or not” (Duran and Tinkey 2016, 209), that is, had yet to be employed in research. Animal welfare defined an even more pronounced concern among the authors of the second and third critiques. David Lyons et al. emphasized that IACUC approval is not merely about the “surgical component of the protocol” (that is, the research procedures used) but, as codified at the federal level, about animals’ welfare. They explained, “Procedures involving animals should be designed and performed with due consideration of their relevance to human or animal health, the advancement of knowledge, or the good of society,” whereby the researchers “must confirm that the overall use of animals is relevant” (2016, 210). In the third response, Laike Stewart and Jessica Lang placed welfare front and center, again questioning whether the rabbits that were “borrowed” from Chen were naïve, or had previously been used for his research project. . . . the [AWA] and [t]he Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals1 limit the situations under which animals can be subjected to a second major survival surgery or related operative procedure. There is a serious concern that an animal could be reused in a painful or distressing way. . . . Federal guidelines focus on surgery, but common sense suggests that the painful or distressed reuse of an animal . . . requires careful justification by the PI and careful consideration by the IACUC. (2016, 211)

Stewart and Lang also flagged what they considered an obvious ethics breach by Rosen and Chen, in which “piecing together component protocols seems counterintuitive and could easily produce instances of noncompliance” that “can be reported” to the NIH and elsewhere, and that “the argument put forth by the PIs would allow anyone who has been approved to carry out a particular procedure on a particular species to use their skills in another study and on another species, if required” (Stewart and Lang 2016b, 211). As this case study and its associated responses reveal, the borrowing of live animals is regarded (by caretakers and veterinarians, at the very least) as ethically suspect and requiring careful oversight and even intervention.

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Within such a scenario, bureaucratic management and the welfare of animal subjects expose the entangled complexities of animal “naiveté,” the medical value of experimental procedures, and flagrant instances of poor judgment. The case study presumes that animal borrowing is an unusual and inappropriate action; as such, associated practices uncover an ethical grey area that rests somewhere between notions of impropriety and the possibilities inherent in sharing. In this light, the Rosen-Chen scenario foregrounds simultaneously unconventional, questionable, and creative aspects of these scientists’ actions. In contrast to the scolding tone of the Rosen-Chen critiques (all of whose authors regard this pair as renegade scientists engaged in this unusual practice), throughout my research I have encountered all sorts of examples of animal sharing. This opaque realm defines this chapter’s focus. I stress that my purpose is to expose neither clandestine practices nor glaring acts of noncompliance (as voiced by Stewart and Lang 2016b); I defer to welfare experts to make such determinations. Instead, the Rosen-Chen scenario uncovers the need to consider the moral significance of animal sharing, and how engaged parties—be they researchers, veterinarians, or animal care technicians—grapple with associated contradictions and consequences when research needs and animal welfare collide, when the objectification of animals is set against the emotional responses these same creatures engender, and when the economic values assigned to animals as research subjects conflict with efforts to protect them from further harm. The examples within this chapter reveal a range of possibilities in which animal sharing evidences unconventional attempts from within laboratories to broaden the parameters of scientific morality. As I argue, a propensity for various forms of animal sharing exposes yet another domain of animal exceptionalism that facilitates the emergence of an “animal commons” in lab science. I begin by considering long-standing initiatives to institutionalize or mandate the sharing of rodents in genomic research to demonstrate that, at least in some quarters, sharing has become routinized. Mice and rats proliferate in science, and a long-standing moral imperative evident in a few select fields involves efforts to “archive” or “biobank” cryogenically preserved tissues acquired from deceased creatures whose bodies are considered worthy of salvaging and reuse. This approach is increasingly more widely sanctioned, as is evident in literature extending back several decades. Importantly, biobanking is often touted as a means to economize in the face of overabundance. By fending off redundancy, participants share scientific knowledge while remaining mindful of the Three Rs, claiming that such efforts might

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reduce the numbers of animals employed in research experiments and, by replacing live animals with tissue cultures derived from deceased ones, offer new possibilities for refinement of experimental methods and protocols. I then turn to other serendipitous, often fleeting, and circumstantial examples of animal sharing that I encountered during the course of my own ethnographic research. These actions are more akin to the Rosen-Chen scenario than they are to examples encountered in the literature. In such instances, sharing commonly arises in contexts plagued by scarcity, involving the reuse of animals who might best be thought of not as overabundant but as remaindered or rare creatures. By way of illustration, I will focus on two prized categories of research animals, genetically altered pigs and various species of non-human primates. Finally, I revisit the pathways trod by still other creatures who are channeled out and beyond the confines of laboratories via what lab staff reference as “adoption” or “rehoming” (which I reference collectively as “rescue efforts”). These efforts arise primarily in response to welfare concerns and are marked by a determination to move certain kinds of creatures out of lab experimentation altogether by giving them away to members of alternative communities, including veterinary schools, high school programs, and lay households. As my data reveal, instances involving the reuse of deceased animals inspires less controversy than those involving the reuse of living creatures whose welfare fairly quickly rises to the fore. Although I am most interested in contexts in which researchers within or across labs share live animals, I begin this analysis with biobanking for several reasons. First, biobanking explicitly involves materials or products derived from deceased creatures (namely, their ova and sperm, and other cells and tissues, cell cultures, and associated data) and, as such, enables moral arguments that are more difficult to assert where living animals are concerned. Second, as noted above, cryogenic efforts to preserve and redistribute animal tissues dominate the scientific literature on sharing and, as a result, biobanking defines a baseline for still other obscured practices. Third, the use of living creatures generates specialized moral tales. Under such circumstances, I am especially intrigued by how efforts to share living creatures are understood as both moral and renegade and, in turn, by how associated conditions foster these shifts in moral thought and action.

the ethos of sharing What precisely do we mean when we speak of “sharing” in science? As a starting point, I propose that, in its broadest sense, sharing encompasses not

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only circumstances involving the recirculation of animals who are set on new trajectories as a result of their reuse value, but practices that are instigated in lab contexts by personnel who are cognizant of others’ needs. Whereas, certainly, one may profit from acts of giving (when perhaps an act of sharing anticipates future reciprocity), the primary motivation is to impart unselfishly one’s expertise, skills, knowledge, and resources to others. Because lab science can be competitive, lucrative, and therefore secretive, efforts at sharing depend on trust (see Tilly 2004). That is, one expects others to exhibit discretion when speaking publicly of an animal’s origins, to be respectful of one’s research, and to practice quality science: these are the reciprocal burdens that accompany entrusting one’s animals to others. Sharing is inevitably a social contract whose actions may extend well beyond the domains inhabited by the original transactional pair. As anthropologists have long known, the sharing and circulation of valued goods may inevitably entail their redistribution to others elsewhere. In lab science, redistribution sometimes entangles singular animals within relationships between discrete pairs of lab researchers; other times it may redirect the movement of significant numbers of creatures embedded in complex webs of professional relationships within or across diverse domains of science. In other words, sharing may easily extend beyond, say, two researchers such as Rosen and Chen, who make use of the same handful of animals, to contexts involving many litters or herds that circulate within regional, national, and even international scientific worlds.2

The Politics of Animal Reuse What then, if sharing is not merely a benevolent act and one that presumes benign behavior? As the Rosen-Chen scenario reveals, the needs of science can pit research goals against animal well-being, placing lab subjects at risk for being “reused in a painful and distressing way” (Stewart and Lang 2016b, 211). This springs in large part from the inescapable reality that lab animals are first and foremost commodified creatures whose use value is over-determined by the fact that they are born and bred solely for research purposes. As such, they figure prominently in what Donna Haraway has dubbed “lively economies” (2008; see also Franklin 2007; Franklin and Lock 2003; Strathern 2004; Sunder Rajan 2012; Waldby and Mitchell 2006). As Kaushik Sunder Rajan underscores, the profit-driven ethos that emerges through the pairing of contemporary biotech research with associated fields of the life sciences defines the very core of lively economies, whereby the “corporatization” of “the entrepreneurial university” drives attempts to patent forms of life (2012, 2–3).

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Within Sunder Rajan’s analysis, however, the lives and deaths of lab animals remain irrelevant when set against his efforts to decipher the effects of larger market forces. Here, Haraway’s original intervention is key: cognizant of biobanking and its consequences, she recognizes a lab animal as “the undead but always generative commodity of science” (2012, 93). Equally important is the realization that the harnessing of animal labor enables lively capital, whereby lab-based creatures are simultaneously transformed into human models and thus regarded as sources of biotechnical productivity, yet they are also capable of inspiring affective responses among the very humans who make use of and profit from them (Haraway 2012, 103–09; see also Barua 2016). Sunder Rajan is nevertheless astute in underscoring this as a contradiction: together, animal and human subjects enable the advancement of knowledge and capital in the life sciences. This contradiction lies at the very core of this chapter. Indeed, as much of this book demonstrates, the valueadded qualities of lab animals are entangled with and counterbalanced by this sensibility, or what Lyons et al., as cited above, reference as “common sense,” where living, injured, sickly, and dying animals are susceptible to pain and suffering, and where all deserve protection. When coupled with the additional layer of sentimental value, the notion that animals are mere commodities appears shallow, myopic, and flawed. According to Stephen Pemberton, humans and animals bear the potential for transforming each other in lab contexts. He argues that “we cannot understand how scientists discipline their experimental organisms without understanding how these organisms also discipline scientists, forcing them to care” (2004, 106, as cited in Haraway 2012) or, as rephrased by Haraway, “lab staff could not function as researchers if they did not function as caretakers” (2012, 106). In response to these entanglements, the remainder of this chapter follows a circuitous path, one marked by efforts to navigate contexts where animals are both “rendered” (Shukin 2009) for scientific use and capable of engendering eclectic, unconventional responses that push back against standardized approaches that transform them into products of scientific value. As I seek to demonstrate, efforts to share animals—be it through biobanking, lab reuse, or adoption—evidence yet another obscured dimension of scientific morality in the making.

Singular Creatures When animals are rendered into productive forms of capital within specialized, lively economies, their trajectories expose their worth as both lucrative, generic resources and their contrasting value as potentially “singular”

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(Kopytoff 1986) creatures worthy of salvation. This argument is equally relevant within arenas of productivity associated with the food industry, wildlife management, and the lab sciences (Barua 2016; Franklin 2007; Shukin 2009; Wilkie 2005). Many lab animals travel in linear fashion from a vivarium, where they were born and bred, to the lab where, following experimental involvement, they are euthanized, autopsied, and sectioned in a pathology lab, and then transferred to a cryogenic biobank, where, now reduced to cell cultures and the like, their rendered parts move on and outward to an array of still other labs that reuse them in new research projects. Other animals might follow alternative paths, moving from breeding facility to experimental lab, from which, rather than being euthanized, some will then move outward and onward to veterinary schools or high school classrooms, where, in retrograde motion, they labor within still other experimental or training contexts, and finally, once again escaping death, into adoptive homes. These various examples of animal redistribution flag the complexities inherent in efforts to track their biographies (Kopytoff 1986), and thus their movements may well uncover the workings of an array of specialized forms of sharing. Such diverse circumstances prompt an assortment of interlocking questions. Who within science engages in animal sharing? What kinds of animals figure most prominently in such transactions? What sort of moral work does sharing in science do? What are the circumstances that prompt standardized and sanctioned—versus innovative or renegade—acts, and what consequences ensue? As existing literature reveals, animal sharing is often set against the backdrop of the Three Rs, and, interestingly, authors might propose a fourth R to assert the morality of what they propose or do. These rhetorical enhancements of the Three Rs include “respect” (Tiplady 2012) and “responsibility,”3 alongside “remembering” one’s animal “partners” (Iliff 2002). As an alternative approach, I propose considering the potentialities embedded in a polyvalent fourth R, one that encompasses not only these suggested possibilities but also the “redistribution” of animals as valued resources and thus an eclectic form of “recycling” or “reuse,” as well as instances involving animal “rescue” work. In my efforts to do so, I first outline briefly the forces that instigate and inform sanctioned practices by considering examples in a literature whose authors advocate bureaucratized or mandated efforts to share animal tissues as reusable products of science. I then address more obscure, serendipitous practices involving living animals that exemplify a different sort of moral creativity at work. In this chapter’s final section, I consider how such practices, when bundled together, evidence an emergent animal commons.

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The Origins of Sharing in Science I have long been intrigued by the concept of sharing in lab contexts and the trust upon which it depends (Sharp 2002a, 2009b, 2016). As my encounters in the realm of experimental organ replacement have taught me, competitive, market-driven domains of applied science can foster secrecy, most evident in protectionist approaches designed to guard intellectual property within a specific trade. The inverse is also true: sharing can emerge in climates or contexts where investment capital is scarce. Throughout my research on artificial heart design, for example, I often watched bioengineers during presentations at professional conferences face questions from the floor regarding the specifics of implant design that sometimes challenged the veracity of data, but that more often were intended to encourage the speaker to detail procedures that others might attempt later in their own labs. Applied bioengineering is frequently beholden to private stakeholders drawn from industry or private venture capital; those who work in such environments regularly cite “proprietary knowledge” or “pending patent applications” as reasons to withhold information, answers that inevitably brought engaged discussion to a standstill. This is a very different configuration from that which characterizes labs that rely on government funding, a relationship that can bear with it the proviso that one make one’s procedures and data accessible to others. Whereas the former context is marked by secrecy, the latter is characterized by a sometimes mandated ethos of sharing and dissemination. These same problems can arise in experimental lab science, where an ethics of animal sharing is hobbled by the entanglement of proprietary knowledge, competition, and profit; associated secrecy; and, as some assert, by animal welfare policies that can stymie innovation. This particular configuration typifies contexts in the United States, where many domains of science involve for-profit research. Staff employed not only by the pharmaceutical industry but also within universities are increasingly involved (and often expected) to acquire patents and assert intellectual property rights over research conducted on their campuses (a trend that accounts in large part for efforts among researchers to establish autonomous “spin-off” companies so that they might maintain control over and profit from their findings). But a fickle market, paired with animal activism and heightened public concern for animal welfare, can render science vulnerable, a reality that may prompt efforts to maintain control over resources. An especially pronounced threat that troubles researchers on a quotidian level is resource scarcity, ranging from the retreat of investment capital and the drying up of

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federal funding sources to mounting difficulties to acquire “naïve” research animals who are protected by increasingly strict welfare policies. If we return to the Rosen-Chen scenario, decades ago Rosen might have had little trouble using rabbits acquired from farmers in her ongoing research, or, if she preferred, she might easily have wandered into Rosen’s lab and practiced surgeries on his animals. Whereas in the past such actions would have been normative, today they are renegade, suspect, and perhaps even illegal. Nevertheless, as I have discovered in the course of this project, scarcity can induce innovative efforts to share data, procedural knowledge, and lab subjects in ways not unlike Rosen’s and Chen’s actions (and thus when innovation itself is potentially morally fraught). Within such contexts, sharing necessitates overcoming the propensity to hoard valued resources, trusting others, and rethinking the values assigned to the lives and bodies of experimental creatures.4 Overabundance, as the flip side of scarcity, can also instill efforts to share as a humane response to animal welfare. Whereas animals have often been described to me during interviews as valuable “resources,” affective responses to excessive acts of culling and killing contradict their presumed objectification. Indeed, among the most perplexing and distressing experiences voiced especially by animal caretakers is the “senseless” or “wasteful” euthanizing of animals when a study unexpectedly comes to an abrupt halt; when the wrong batch of animals is delivered and cannot be returned to a vendor for fear of pathogen exposure; or when a research project takes an unanticipated turn because of shifts in personnel and the like. Certain kinds of animals are spared in these contexts, and sharing can arise in response as a moral innovation (if not obligation or imperative). Consider the sentinel, for instance: sometimes these are animals who have been rescued, salvaged, or reassigned through the efforts of individual caretakers, and as a result, their deaths are postponed when they are diverted from, say, laboratory use to a specialized cage on the bottom rack of a vivarium as a means to detect pathogen exposure in a colony. Sentinels, alongside still other animals who are adopted out of labs, may well follow divergent paths for sentimental reasons. When such animals are shared across domains, they are reconstituted: initially valued as expendable resources, their affective worth transforms them, at least temporarily, into singular, specialized creatures who are cherished for reasons that extend beyond their experimental usefulness. My point is that a variety of factors can induce sharing, including economic needs (springing from a scarcity of funding support), welfare (in response to wastefulness and associated efforts to salvage animal life), and sentiment (when favored animals or species are redirected along new

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pathways out and beyond the lab). All in some sense inspire wider investment in the ethics of the Three Rs, a rubric that can provide traction for innovations in lab animal use. Sharing, for instance, is most often espoused as a means to reduce and perhaps refine experimental animal involvement. As biobanking reveals, too, “replacing” in vivo with in vitro research may lie at the heart of proposals to share animals across research domains.

“The Sharing Principle” of Biobanking Sharing has long defined an area of ethical thinking and practice in the specialized fields of both human embryonic stem cell research and rodent genetics, where the former is driven by scarcity, the latter by over-abundance and unnecessary duplication. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on rodent genetics. According to Yuksel Agca, the cryopreservation of mouse and rat embryos, an arena now most often described as “biobanking” or tissue and cell “archiving,” dates back to the late 1970s (2012, 1657). As Schofield et al. demonstrate, by 1984 “the imperative to share” characterized efforts by the NIH to instate “a new sharing infrastructure” among scientists in the States and Canada who were working in either embryonic stem cell or mouse research (2009, 171). This “sharing ethos” has persisted to the present day, serving as a focus for a series of specialized meetings and subsequent policies, including those sponsored by the Wellcome Trust in 1996 that produced what became known as the “Bermuda Principles,”5 efforts in the early 2000s under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences,6 and the CASIMIR meeting in Rome in 2009, a project of the European Union (EU).7 Such initiatives are an outcrop of how to respond within science to the proliferation of emergent tissue economies (Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Melinda Cooper, in writing of the “dialectic of life and death” that characterizes associated research domains, asks, “What is at stake” amid these transformative processes when the lives of humans and animals are so deeply entwined (2008, 139, 148)? The “futures market” of research biobanking has deep roots in animal husbandry, which has long relied on the regional, national, and international sharing of both living animals (as studs or broodmares, for instance) and their by-products (especially of ova and semen) (see Wiggans et al. 2015). As Cooper underscores, the beef and dairy industries mastered long ago such processes as preservation, investment, and profit, activities that have inspired subsequent efforts involving the freezing and banking of, for instance, human embryos (and still other tissues) for later use (2008, 132–33). The human and animal life sciences converge in contexts involving biobanking, in which long-established animal husbandry practices have inspired the management of human tissues,

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processes that have informed efforts in lab animal research, as demonstrated by contemporary mouse genetics. In other words, the entanglement of the animal and human sciences involves processes of temporal looping, whereby each takes turns informing and advancing the research and market trajectories of the other. Where specific lab animals are concerned—be it via an initiative of the NIH, Wellcome Trust, National Academy of Sciences, or even a journal’s editorial board—associated policies and recommendations have striven consistently over the last twenty years to instill a participatory ethos focused squarely on “mouse repositories,” where cell and tissue samples generated in one lab or institution are transferred to an open-source archive and then cryogenically preserved in anticipation of being reused by others elsewhere (RSPCA 2008). As Schofield et al. reveal, such initiatives are driven by deep-seated anxieties: as the authors explain, “There is evidence that geneticists and genomic researchers are withholding data and research materials with increasing frequency” (2009, 171). In short, tissue archiving flags efforts to discourage secrecy and associated hoarding. Most recently, the CASIMIR report (authored by Schofield et al.) issued “a strong message” that funding sources, journals, and researchers should coordinate efforts “to facilitate the ready exchange of data and resources and to share good practices already implemented by some organizations and journals.” For instance, “funders should be willing explicitly to cover the costs of deposition of mice arising from projects into public repositories,” and, further, journals should mandate that “scientific papers . . . explain where and how to access data and resources generated as part of the investigation” (Schofield et al. 2009, 171).8 They further argue that journals should play an active role in “policing” publication claims, “implement[ing] [a] reactive policy, in a culture in which sharing is the ethical norm.” In other words they advocate, in quasi-regulatory fashion, policies that mandate animal sharing as ethical behavior. More specifically, they discourage “the patenting of mouse resources and genes” while pushing back against “a fear [within academia] of ‘helping the opposition’ ” (2009, 173). Resistance, nevertheless, remains a significant obstacle. As Jiaqi Lu and Jianfei Wang, writing from within industry, explain, “changing the mindset about confidentiality is a big challenge for all public and private organizations. Pharmaceutical R&D [research and development] has always been a ‘secretive’ activity, conducted within the confines of the R&D department, with limited external collaboration” (2015). In such a climate, data sharing is of “little value” if unaccompanied by the emergence of a non-competitive atmosphere through partnerships that cross research domains (2015, 56–57).

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Others have gone so far as to pit proprietary approaches against research progress: Patrick Taylor (writing in 2007 as the general counsel of a major research hospital) asks in reference to the sharing of human embryonic stem cells, “Is our science ethical if we do not share it?” He believes that “we must think beyond that inward-turning ethic, recognizing the vital link between research sharing and public benefit. Ethical clinical research requires justice, beneficence, and respect for persons,” where affected “persons” apparently include not only patients in need, but researchers too. In short, as a form of sharing, “altruism . . . must be presented in a forthright manner” (Taylor 2007, 399, 400). If we turn our attention to realms inhabited by lab animals, according to Agca the scientific menagerie is teeming with all sorts of creatures whose biomaterials qualify for genome cryobanking (2012). Specifically, Agca addresses mice, rats, swine, non-human primates, zebrafish, cats, and dogs, with special focus on the preservation of sperm, oocytes, embryos, ovarian tissues, and somatic cells (2012). Yet again, rodents lie at the forefront of innovation. Schofield et al. provide an apt example when they envision “a mouse ‘research’ ” based on the more general concept of the “Creative Commons” (2009, 172–73)—now more widely known as the “Science Commons”9—the latter described as “a set of resources available to all scientists, either as part of the public domain or on standard terms and conditions that facilitate scientific collaboration, efficient reuse of materials and data, and dissemination of knowledge” (2009, 173).10 The “creative commons” most certainly demonstrates possibilities for sharing in science, involving what Lewis Hyde, in writing of the commons more generally, describes as rights of access that are “bundled together” among parties who “are not individuals in the free market sense but a species, rather, of public or collective being” (2010, 24–27, 40–41). The limitation of such efforts, however, is that they focus squarely on the circulation of data in the public (or at the very least, within rarified professional) sphere(s) and, as such, are restricted to a domain of “knowledge commons” (Hess and Ostrom 2007, italics added). In contrast, I am most interested in transgressive acts akin to those of Rosen and Chen, in which “collaborative creativity” (Strathern 2005, 19) circumvents established protocols, perhaps by challenging propriety science, or, elsewhere, sometimes even flaunts welfare protocols to enhance animal well-being. Under such circumstances, the notion of a creative live animal commons is of greatest interest to me. As I demonstrate, some practices extend beyond mouse (re)use as guided by mandated practices of efficiency, evidenced instead in the creatively eclectic—albeit obscured—reuse of living creatures. Such responses bear

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the possibility of effectively pushing back against standardized approaches that presume the expendability of experimental animal life.

The Welfare of the Animal Commons As the aforementioned examples demonstrate, the primary thrust of many sharing initiatives emphasizes biobanking’s economic value, whereby an open-source approach to managing data and biological materials eliminates the necessity and expense of duplicating other scientists’ efforts. An inescapable undercurrent, however, is shaped by animal death and welfare. As authors most concerned with animal well-being frequently underscore, a consequence of data sharing in lab science is that duplication may become unnecessary, and, as a result, it embodies promissory possibilities for reducing the number of animals used overall in experimental contexts (see, for instance, “Critical Path” 2006; Lu and Wang 2015). For example, in 2008 the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) recognized a surge of interest in biobanking and spearheaded its own report on lab animal sharing. As their report asserted, the significant rise in the use of genetically altered (GA) mice “raises scientific, ethical and logical issues, in terms of the generation, breeding, maintenance, and use of these animals” (RSPCA 2008). In response, the RSPCA underscored the importance of the “application of the principles of the 3Rs,” whereby “archiving and sharing of GA lines can provide the opportunity for reduction and refinement.” According to the RSPCA, “there might also be a financial saving which, although it should not be the main factor, may enhance the overall benefit” (2008, 4–5). The report placed animal survival, care, and welfare front and center within the larger framework of biobanking. It argued that whereas scientific experiments may be an inevitable aspect of medical research, this does not preclude the need for vigilance in protecting the lives and well-being of all living creatures. As the report explained, “the number of genetically altered (GA) mice used in scientific procedures within the UK and internationally has risen significantly over the last 15 years and continues to do so. This raises scientific, ethical and logistical issues, in terms of the generation, breeding, maintenance and use of these animals together with challenges in terms of the application of the 3R[s].” In response, the report’s authors encouraged special attention be granted to “how archiving and sharing of GA lines can provide the opportunity for reduction and refinement,” whereby “the storage of frozen (cryopreserved) mouse embryos of gametes . . . preserves the genetic stock and eliminates the need to maintain the stock as live animals. These cryopreserved resources are often the best means of sharing the

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animals with other scientists,” so archiving could minimize “the number of GA lines maintained on the shelf”; provide “some instance” against loss due to “environmental disasters, disease outbreaks, genetic drift, and breeding failure”; reduce the need to replicate others’ work by facilitating sharing among researchers; and fend off the necessity of live transport. Such an approach carries the potential of being “a financial saving, which, although it should not be the main factor, may enhance the overall benefit” to animals themselves. The report concluded with a section specifically on “how to share” (RSPCA 2008, 5, 11). Indeed, in the course of my own research, young lab-based veterinarians I encountered in the United Kingdom in the early 2010s often cited reduction as a reason why they had accepted posts that combined lab-based, university work with teaching, so that they might impart this principle to their students. As several explained to me, they envisioned a time when in vitro research would replace in vivo lab work, potentially saving the lives of anywhere from a handful to thousands of animals in the future. In essence, the biobanking of materials derived from deceased animals might be redistributed for reuse and stave off or altogether eliminate one’s reliance in the future on colonies of living creatures. This ethos lies at the very heart of the journal Alternatives to Laboratory Animals (ATLA). Valerie Speirs, for instance, writing from the United Kingdom, offers examples where various breast cancer and aging research databases “avoid the need to set up further in vivo models by using surplus archival tissue from previous animal studies” (2015). According to Lu and Wang (who, again, write from within the industry), public concern for animal welfare plays a significant role in encouraging such alternative practices. As they explain, “with the strengthening social pressures to avoid the use of laboratory animals in drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies and academia are finding it hard to demonstrate the application of the Three Rs principles to the satisfaction of the public. The sharing of full details of the animal models used . . . would enhance the consistence of models . . . and reduce the numbers of animals used” (2015, 55). In short, Lu and Wang, alongside the RSPCA, flag a need to be vigilant with the Three Rs and, perhaps, even a need to expand associated codes of conduct and practice. Whereas the current literature on biobanking emphasizes economy over waste (and turns a keen eye on reduction), it nevertheless exhibits several blind spots. First, proponents of sharing through biobanking display a myopic tendency to focus on institutionalized efficiency and economically rational forms of data and tissue sharing over other concerns. Such preoccupations erase the fates of living creatures who are potentially of greatest

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value only once they are dead. As a result, associated welfare concerns tend to be about the numbers of animals spared but not about a life worth living (Svendsen 2015), or even more simply about notions of animal care. What, then, of other instances where “the ethics of sharing” is not mandated, where sharing arises in serendipitous fashion, and where that which is shared involves not samples derived from deceased creatures but those who still live and breathe? These sorts of alternative animal histories raise intriguing questions for lab science. As my forays into such realms have taught me, the sharing of living creatures, who are thus (at least temporarily) spared euthanasia, is just as much a part of daily practices as is biobanking, yet driven by an altogether different set of moral principles. For the remainder of this chapter, I explore domains of “lively capital,” specifically involving encounters between humans and the creatures under their care who are drawn into eclectic sharing practices such that they circulate within and beyond their original laboratory boundaries.

uncommon creatures If, as noted above, the scientific menagerie is bursting with species whose biomaterial may be banked and shared, what are we to make of live animals who travel beyond the confines of their original labs? I begin this journey by exploring the fates of specialized swine of xeno science; I then turn to instances involving various research primates. Subsequently, I consider the fates of still other creatures by revisiting practices framed by efforts to adopt out or rehome such affectively powerful lab animals as beagles and ferrets. In these instances, sharing, in Marilyn Strathern’s words, demonstrates the workings of “collaborative creativity” in science (2005, 15), practices I regard as simultaneously innovative and transgressive (Sharp 2016, 93).

Sharing amid Scarcity: The Swine of Xeno Science The line in the sand normally determined by guarded notions of proprietary knowledge can shift or vanish when research capital of various origins evaporates, and here xeno science is a case in point. By the 1980s pigs had begun to replace chimpanzees as an ideal “donor species” for humans in need of replacement organs (Calne 1997, 2005; Cooper, Gollackner, and Sachs 2002). Efforts came to an abrupt halt, however, when Robin Weiss, a preeminent immunologist at the University of Cambridge, reported that porcine endogenous retroviruses, or PERVs (sometimes described as “AIDS in pigs”), could infect human cells in vitro (Weiss 1998). It subsequently became clear that PERVs were not merely the result of opportunistic infections but were

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so much a part of this species’ history as to be embedded in the porcine genome (Denner 2003; Patience, Takeuchi, and Weiss 1997; Sypniewski et al. 2005). These bleak discoveries significantly hobbled the promissory qualities of pigs within xeno research. The field reached a state of crisis when some leading researchers called for a moratorium, instigating the retreat of investors who now saw the field as too risky to support. Some teams abandoned the field altogether and euthanized entire herds; others soldiered on in their efforts to breed genetically modified “knock-out” strains of pigs who someday might be PERVs free.11 Among the more innovative strategies to arise, however, involved a handful of researchers who began to share not only preserved tissues (such as ova and semen) but live animals with colleagues within and across international borders. One highly respected research group offered animals free of charge, asking that interested colleagues elsewhere merely shoulder the costs associated with animal transport. In this way, a lab rich in animals but short on investment capital might help sustain the field by entrusting others with more robust funding streams to carry on research amid scarcity (Sharp 2016). In essence, a futures market in pigs helped sustain a research field by transforming specially bred lab animals into potentially lucrative forms of speculative biocapital (Cooper 2008, 10). These attempts at sharing amid scarcity relied on entrenched networks of trust among colleagues intent on demonstrating through collective action the viability of experimental xenografts (Sharp 2016). In their efforts to preserve valuable animals in spite of the threat of PERVs, they instigated a specialized form of animal commons. Albeit driven primarily by a determination to protect and bank biocapital and associated knowledge, their collaborative efforts flagged not merely the financial promissory qualities of research pigs, but the role of trust in facilitating their creative efforts to preserve precious animals by dispersing them through a faltering scientific community. In some corners these porcine subjects engendered affective responses, too. During one interview, for instance, a senior researcher wiped away tears when speaking of his institution’s insistence that his herd be euthanized when funding was no longer forthcoming. He later relocated (to both another institution and another country) and proceeded to partner with a team willing to engage in animal sharing. In this and related contexts, the Three Rs expanded to include eclectic practices of animal rescue and redistribution.

Borrowed Monkeys Xeno science offers other examples of sharing, through efforts involving not only porcine subjects but NHPs, too, a development whose logic requires

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stepping back momentarily in time. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, xeno science relied on simian subjects to test the viability of transpecies organ grafting, and up through the 1960s chimpanzees were the animal of choice for xenografts destined for human use. Chimps, however, were becoming too expensive and difficult to acquire; accompanied by activists protesting their use in science, baboons emerged fleetingly as a viable alternative, as became evident in a handful of highly experimental and high-profile monkey-to-human surgeries (of which Baby Fae is the best known) (Altman 1984; Bailey et al. 1985; Starzl et al. 1993). Amid significant controversy, pigs in turn soon replaced baboons, and their newfound promissory status as an ideal “donor” species was accompanied by the shifting of baboons to experimental graft recipients, so today they stand in as proxies for human patients as a means to test the viability of implanting porcine grafts in other primate models. The expendability of both pigs and baboons became abundantly clear when anxieties over PERVs in the United Kingdom led to the retreat of investment capital, instigating what many consider the reckless use of droves of animals in the futile attempt to prove that xenografting could work. Indeed, profligate exploitation of research baboon colonies generated a scarcity of these animals in that country and subsequently throughout Europe, such that at least one firm considered hiring teams to capture and transport wild baboons derived from East Africa (a practice that had desisted decades before). These events, paired with a public backlash against the use of any NHPs in research, severely curtailed hopes of success for xeno research in that country and elsewhere. As one expert put it, xeno science was “dead in the water” (see Sharp 2011c, 2014). In the wake of the severe curtailment of funding, and the scarcity of baboons, eclectic forms of animal sharing emerged in some quarters of xeno science. Research baboons were so scarce or expensive that, by the mid2000s, during presentations at professional transplant conferences, the same animals were cropping up in accounts of different experiments based within the same labs. “Baboon #17” is a case in point. At one conference, the same animal appeared in PowerPoint slides given by a highly respected United States–based xeno researcher and in talks by his lab’s postdoctoral students over the course of several days. Each experiment focused on a discrete xenotranplant procedure, ranging from immunological responses at the cellular level to the number of days that a whole organ graft survived. I underscore that, whereas these experiments were most likely interrelated at some level, a postdoctoral student confirmed for me that they involved discrete experiments and procedures. At first I assumed that the

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reuse of Baboon #17 was an unusual event, but Baboons #7 and #13 also cropped up in repeated fashion (though not as often as #17). By the end of the first day, Baboon #17 had become a bit of a sensation throughout the conference because the monkey survived longer than any other on record with an implanted porcine graft.12 Similar patterns of baboon reuse emerged in the efforts reported by at least three other labs at this and other conferences (one based in the United States and two others abroad). This reuse of Baboon #17 (alongside #13 and #7) exposed how efforts to economize in a climate of scarcity can instigate animal sharing. When I asked a senior member from within the field about the ethics of this practice, he explained that baboons were “increasingly hard to come by—they are expensive and difficult to obtain, and their upkeep can be prohibitive, and so you sometimes have to make do with what you have.” If, momentarily, we bracket out animal welfare and suffering, a glaring concern that crossed my mind was whether one experiment might then run the risk of compromising the outcome of the others. As has often been explained to me in the course of my research project, reliable, verifiable data depend on having access to a “naïve” animal (as seen in the solicited critiques of the Rosen-Chen case)—one who has not experienced other experimental procedures or living conditions or been administered medications—not only to protect the animal from future pain and harm, but, as demonstrated here, to prevent altered research outcomes. Baboon #17 was far from “naïve”: he was a weathered veteran of xeno experimentation whose welfare was most certainly secondary to the desire to generate compelling data in a field threatened by the evacuation of financial support. The desperate search for baboons in the wake of faltering xeno trials in the United Kingdom led a number of experts whom I interviewed there to quit their jobs because they found the flagrant disregard for animal life intolerable. More recently, in contexts relevant to my current research project, I have encountered still other examples in which monkeys are shared among researchers. As typifies many academic neuroscience labs, postdoctoral students are assigned individual macaques with whom they work for the duration of their tenure. Consider Jaime (described in chapter 1), who has partnered day after day for several years at a stretch with the macaque named Rufus. The progress of Jaime’s research relies exclusively on what Rufus accomplishes at the computer monitor. Occasionally, however, his labmate Paul will “lend” Jaime “his monkey,” Perseus, so that Jaime can acquire comparative data; on other days, Paul might then borrow Rufus for similar reasons. Borrowing and lending take place at an abstract level, too, where Jaime and Paul share data collected from Rufus and Perseus, so that

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each monkey is subsequently embedded in the data set of both researchers for comparative purposes. Among the more remarkable forms of sharing I have encountered, though, involves the cooperation among three Anglo neuroscientists who each employ NHPs in discrete labs within same building at a research university in the Midwest. The directors of these labs are old colleagues; two, Maureen and Michael, were postdoctoral students together at a West Coast university after having worked together part-time as undergraduates under Sally, the director of the third lab. Now with established labs of their own, the three have worked for the same university and occupied the same wing of their building for over fifteen years. Although they focus on significantly different research projects, they encounter each other regularly in the halls and elsewhere, and together they cohost a monthly bag-lunch series where guest speakers or their respective postdoctoral students give presentations on their ongoing research. When faced with significant cuts in funding within the last five years, by the NIH especially, they have consolidated aspects of their operating budgets to save on costs, such that they now maintain one team of animal technicians instead of three as they had previously. When Sally initiated a new project that would involve working with newborn macaques, she turned to Maureen and Michael for help, asking if they would assist her in setting up a breeding program. Maureen and Michael happily complied; it offered an opportunity to expand their efforts at paired (rather than solitary) housing of their own animals, and the animal caretakers proved enthusiastic, intrigued by the prospect of housing monkeys as mates instead of wrestling with the ongoing challenges of monitoring adult-adolescent pairs with whom dominance was a constant welfare challenge because of the injuries the monkeys regularly sustained. The program proved successful, much to the delight of all involved staff, the majority of whom, regardless of station, would regularly go visit “the monkey babies” for the sheer delight of being able to “play” with them when they had some spare time. Sally has discovered, too, that this cooperative effect enabled her to engage undergraduates more actively in her research (something she had stopped doing a decade ago because research with her macaques was reserved solely for postdoctoral students, and ambitious undergraduates soon tired of data entry work and quit). A small cadre of undergraduates is back assisting with data input, but they have also been hired specifically to “play” with her “monkey babies.” In this instance, the sharing efforts that have emerged from resource scarcity have generated a few unexpected welfare innovations too.

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Transgressing Boundaries: The Recirculation and Rescue of Lab Animals There are still other forms of sharing that may not seem to be as dramatic as the borrowing or sharing of monkeys, yet they do bear significant possibilities for animal welfare. Specifically, I suggest that rescue work—in the form of adoption or rehoming of animals—also be considered an eclectic example of sharing across domains of science. As demonstrated in chapter 4, “rehoming” and the like are euphemistic terms that reshape thinking about the day-to-day lives of lab animals. These practices place welfare in a temporal relationship with research outcomes, where some animals are spared euthanasia by being redirected to other, presumably more humane, settings beyond the walls of the experimental lab. Such forms of animal recirculation might best be viewed as instances of serial sharing that transpire over time and across the boundaries that separate lab and public life. Not unlike the animal commons of xeno science, adoption, rehoming, and the like reference eclectic forms of sharing that rely on tightly knit networks of trust (see Tilly 2004). Beagles, as described in chapter 1, exemplify this, as the affective power of their species inspires forms of recirculation, invoking deliberate attempts to circumvent euthanasia. Beagles enable us to trace their paths as scientific resources of unusual value, a route that still other species follow but that is nevertheless normally obscured or black-boxed. Born and bred in a Class A vendor’s facility, lab beagles, once weaned, then move on to academic labs or pharmaceutical firms. Those who are spared euthanasia once research involvement ends are transferred to veterinary schools where they “work” as animals employed to teach students their craft. These dogs are taught a variety of new skills expected of house-bound hounds, and then a choice few make their way to private homes. Over time, these rescued animals circulate among industrial, academic, and domestic worlds. Still other animals might travel in retrograde motion, as with research livestock, for instance. As I have learned during visits to teaching programs at vet schools, pregnant heifers and ewes sometimes reside temporarily on a vet school’s farm, offering students opportunities to hone their skills in animal prenatal and obstetric care. These animals then return to their natal farms for milking (with or without their offspring in tow).13 Via such sharing practices, the farmer saves on the expense of feeding a gestating animal, and a school profits from having a cow or ewe on loan without the responsibility of coping with what to do with her long-term as she ages. Even lab-based sentinels may be understood as following these sorts of circuitous paths, especially if they were originally intended for research purposes but

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were derailed as a result of runt status or other factors that ruled them out as desirable research subjects. I have encountered parallel biographies for still other animals, including mice, rats, rabbits, and ferrets, in which each species occupies a specialized niche of sharing. As described in chapter 4, ferrets can inspire especially elaborate protocols of care even before they arrive, whereby research needs, affective power, and welfare converge and ultimately shape their long-term biographies as adoptable creatures. Animal technicians often report that ferrets are among their favorite lab animals because of their mischievousness, playful behavior, and curiosity. Overseeing “free” or “play time” for ferrets can be the highlight of a caretaker’s day, and videos of innovative ferret welfare and care are often featured at regional or national conferences on welfare compliance. In these delightful videos, ferrets are set free in hallways and kennel alleys where they frolic with each other, leap on and off structures, run through tunnels, and unfurl paper towel rolls. Unlike the pigs and primates of xeno research, the affective power of both beagles and ferrets readily inspires efforts to recirculate these exceptional creatures beyond the boundaries of experimental labor—bold, serendipitous efforts that might eventually transform into routine practices.

the animal commons In her essay “Sharing Suffering,” Donna Haraway contemplates “the labor of animals and their people” set amid the “scientific practices . . . [of] experimental labs,” or what she describes as their “shared conditions of work” (2008, 70). As she asserts, “instrumental relations of people and animals are not themselves the root of turning animals (or people) into dead things, into machines whose reactions are of interest but who have no presence, no face, that demands recognition, caring, and shared pain” (2008, 72). Haraway argues for a different order of coexistence, one grounded in “a “sense of sharing” that is “both epistemological and practical” and in which animals are not (mere) victims but the “significant others” of human lab personnel (2008, 72). As she explains, “people and animals in labs are both subjects and objects to each other in ongoing intra-action.” Through such “webbed existences” they labor together, where their “copresence” evinces powerful forms of “sharing” (2008, 71–22, 76; after Smuts 2001). Haraway’s provocative assertions alert us to the inseparability of human-animal “caring . . . and shared pain.”14 Within the framework of lab science, these responses fall under the aegis of animal welfare and the shadow of caretaker fatigue. But Haraway takes this further, heeding those

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processes in science that render animals “into dead things.” In so doing, she insists upon vigilant attention to living animals who, as generative creatures from whose bodies scientific by- (or, perhaps better phrased, bio-) products are derived. Intriguingly, for Haraway, both the living and dead creatures of experimental science inspire strong affective responses. Haraway offers an intriguing entry point for considering still other modes of sharing (and caring) in animal science. If, at this point in this book, we take interspecies intimacy as a given in lab contexts, what might we glean from the examples provided above—involving rodent biobanking, herds of genetically altered pigs, and baboons and macaques in xenotransplant and neuroscience research—that exemplify either sanctioned or unorthodox forms of sharing among lab personnel or with others elsewhere? Such practices alert us to an obscured realm of the moral landscape of experimental science. In this final section, I consider sharing to be a polyvalent category, and my analysis is framed by alternative readings of the Three Rs. In the context of redundancy or scarcity, sharing instills processes that involve reconstituting, recycling, or rescuing animal life, together demonstrating still other eclectic forms of animal exceptionalism.

Life’s Redundancy: Reconstituting the Biovalue of “Dead Things” As demonstrated above, an ethos of sharing in science is just as likely to emerge from scarcity as from abundance. Strategies such as tissue and data banking focus squarely on efforts to eliminate redundancy and often inspire bureaucratic solutions characterized by standardized and complex rules of access, whereas the absence or evaporation of capital and other resources (and especially of animals themselves) can inspire eclectic (or, depending on one’s point of view, renegade) innovations that are context specific. In experimental lab science—and as demonstrated by the Rosen-Chen scenario— such efforts are read as subversive; yet, as my data reveal, although undetected and obscured, they might well be widespread and, in some quarters, part-and-parcel of acceptable, quotidian laboratory practices. Although sharing bears with it the potential for refining the Three Rs, one must not assume that concerns for animal welfare drive such efforts. A presumption implicit in the three elicited critiques of Rosen’s and Chen’s paired actions is that they circumvented and ignored regulatory apparati. This may well be true. Of greater interest to me, however, is how this scenario exposes moral flexibility in experimental science, a reality that characterizes the day-to-day not merely of lab activities but within regulatory bodies, too. In their study of IACUC decision-making, Scott Plous and

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Herold Herzog encountered a remarkable propensity for flexibility and eclecticism, evident in what they describe as “low interrater agreement” across institutions when committees were given the same experimental protocols to evaluate (2001), findings that resonate with Laura Stark’s research with IRB panels (2011). In other words, those charged with imposing welfare requirements exhibit a range of moral sensibilities when determining protections for either animal or human subjects. In light of this, I ask, what differences emerge where living versus dead lab animals are involved? In response, I return to the theme of animals as lively capital. Maan Barua, writing of captive lions and elephants in the film and tourist trades of Gujarat, India, demonstrates how the “encounter value” of animals, via their entanglement with humans, transforms them into “a currency of exchange, [thereby] generating capital for those harnessing [their] liveliness” (2016, 735; see also Haraway 2003; Shukin 2009). Whereas Barua is interested in animals of wild origins, as we shall see, such processes are equally relevant to the consequences of biobanking. As Barua explains, animal values must be “harnessed”; further, in “virtual contact zones . . . encounters are engineered such that they have a fetishistic currency of their own, circulating with immense velocity, but at the cost of effacing the ecologies of animals with no room for the subject to respond” (2016, 737). Although here Barua imagines film as exemplifying a “virtual contact zone,” biobanking similarly transforms once-living creatures into abstract data, a specialized sort of “fetishistic currency” of science that likewise “effaces the ecologies,” or species-specific origins, of the original creatures from whom such data have been derived. In other words, efforts to share animals as “dead things” obscure their origins via scientific processes that render them fit for repeated human use. As a result, such animals become precious in a double sense: first, because they are resources of scientific value and second, because of their affective power. Again, as Barua explains, elephants who star in films attract throngs of admirers, thus increasing their use value beyond the confines of the movie screen. Lab-based animals, too, inspire affection—and in response, protection—from caretakers, who may begin to treat them as singular creatures. In lab-based contexts, the affective potential of animals is pivotal in shaping the trajectory of their lives (and deaths). Yet no animal is merely one or the other—that is, a source of biocapital or a target of affection. Instead, as Svendsen and Koch’s work reveals (2014) lab animals (perhaps not unlike film-star elephants of wild origins) are “multiple” (Mol 2002) beings whose entanglements with humans render them capable of being many things at once, moving in and out of different registers that are

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shaped by temporal and spatial contexts and sentiments. Returning to Haraway, their affective power is pivotal. Rhoda Wilkie provides yet another cogent illustration of the entangled economic and affective worth of animals, in this instance on farms. In her analysis of livestock production in Scotland, she illustrates how animals are valued both as sources of capital and as intimates by farmers. She explains, The attitudes, feelings and behaviours of those working with livestock cannot be isolated from the position of both humans and animals in the division of labour (breeding, storing and finishing) and the socioeconomic context in which commercial and hobby livestock production occurs. For example, those involved with breeding animals express varying degrees of emotional attachment whist those preparing livestock for slaughter express varying degrees of emotional detachment . . . [yet] any animal that deviates from the routine process of production can stand out from the herd, become individually recognized, have more meaning to the worker, and thus become more than “just an animal.” (2005, 213, 215)

The possibility of becoming “more than ‘just an animal’ ” similarly complicates our understanding of human-animal entanglements in the lab. As is true in Wilke’s example, interspecies encounters in experimental science are likewise “complex, ambiguous and dynamic,” and affect, as a “productive paradox,” reconfigures lab personnel (like livestock producers) as simultaneously “empathetic carers and economic producers” (2005, 213).15 Human “carers”—be they on Scottish farms or in animal labs—oscillate between concerned detachment and sentimental attachment to their charges, who are regarded at times as “sentient commodities” and at others as “individually recognized,” or unique, creatures. As a result, a single animal is simultaneously commodified (or “deanimalized”), decommodified, and recommodified according to context (be it during a market sale or a lab vendor purchase); unique characteristics (including illness or other “snags,” unusual markings, behaviors, or human-like habits); and usefulness (in siring or bearing offspring, for instance) (2005, 217–19). According to Wilke, these seemingly contradictory values are part and parcel of the grand arc of animal care: one may indeed manage animals as commodities, but feeding, cleaning, health assessment, welfare, productive potential, and an animal’s temperament all shape still other values assigned to them. More generally, caretakers (be they on the farm or in the lab) are acutely aware of what Wilke labels an animal’s “biotic attributes” alongside the creature’s “social and sentient characteristics.” Together these understandings maintain an animal’s “ambiguous status” as a “sentient commodity” (2005, 223–25).

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These processes entail that the human be “multiple,” too, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the categories of “animal technician,” “caretaker,” and even “caregiver,” seemingly interchangeable yet also recognizing the “ambiguous paradox” of working with animals, at the very least, on multiple registers at once.16 In other words, to regard lab animals merely as biocapital, and lab personnel more generally as objectifiers of non-human creatures, obscures the transformative power of sentiment and exceptionalism. An animal’s “worth,” so to speak, is flexible, contextual, and polyvalent, evidenced clearly in sharing practices within and across laboratories. Although an animal’s status as a living creature versus a “dead thing” may lead to the foregrounding of economic value over other statuses, even dead things can inspire sentimental responses within and beyond science. Consider again Barua’s elephant film star: a specific elephant may be long dead yet appear repeatedly on the screens of movie houses and private homes scattered across India, persisting as a charismatic and beloved creature who inspires new visitors each season to enclosures that house other captive members of her same herd. Similar encounters characterize various “virtual contact zone[s]” in agricultural husbandry: one need only consult the web-based profiles posted by stud farms to admire the attributes of bulls—with names like Hoover Dam, Buddy Love, Tour of Duty, and Cowboy Troy—whose prized traits are advertised on the web and transported via FedEx, creatures who may well have died several years prior but whose prized exceptionalism lives on through virtual catalog sales of their semen,17 rendered valuable through their intimate breeding and care on their natal farms. Back in the laboratory, Oncomouse may well begin as and be imagined with relative ease as a singular, prized creature now widely celebrated in lab science for her uniqueness, and made readily available, in turn, through biobanking. Her paired biovalue and sentimental power persist as bits and pieces of genomic material derived from multitudes of progeny that proliferate worldwide. Set alongside legions of long-deceased rodentia, still other individually known animal intimates—like the macaques named Rufus and Perseus—are similarly transformed, albeit via more eclectic acts of sharing in which pairs of animals (by way of their human counterparts) are transformed into data that preserve both biovalue and sentiment.

Recycled Life: Welfare’s Conundrum If animals are more than valued sources of biocapital, what do we now understand of their worth if we loop back to Rosen and Chen? As responses to this case study assert, welfare proves at least as important and inescapable

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a factor in its power to challenge or even derail the commodification of animals in science. Indeed, Stewart and Lang (2016) caution that Chen’s and Rosen’s actions could be “reported” to the NIH, implying significant sanctions are in order. Whereas Rosen and Chen regarded the shared rabbits as valuable resources and readily available research tools, animal welfare ultimately trumps such efforts at sharing. And although Chen’s willingness to allow Rosen to “borrow” a few rabbits might at first glance appear an innovative response within the framework of the Three Rs (thereby reducing the need to acquire additional animals on which Rosen might hone her skills), Chen’s rabbits were nevertheless protected by IACUC oversight from unapproved involvement in other experiments. In short, their paired actions are a flagrant disregard of animal care, or what Tiplady (2012) terms the fourth R—respect. Still other Rs that surface here involve perceptions of animal redundancy and efforts, in response, to reuse, recycle, and rescue a host of living creatures. As described earlier in this chapter, the preservation, banking, and sharing of the bioproducts of deceased lab animals indicate increasingly routinized and normative practices. Yet the last decade also bears witness to a steady increase in proposals to pool research resources above and beyond mouse repositories in the name of reducing the numbers of live animals used. In the words of Lu and Wang, “with the strengthening social pressures to avoid the use of laboratory animals in drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies and academia are finding it hard to demonstrate the application of the Three Rs principles to the satisfaction of the public. The sharing of full details of the animal models used in drug discovery would enhance the consistency of models between establishments and reduce the numbers of animals used to set up and validate the models” (2015, P55, cf. “Critical Path” 2006). Here Lu and Wang specifically propose the sharing of Big Data as a means to avoid redundancy and reduce animal deaths. One encounters similar intentions in Agca, who calls for genome cryobanks and other archiving systems (2012), his arguments corresponding to these encountered in the RSPCA report of 2008. Yet unlike the majority of authors advocating biobanking, archiving, and the “creative” or “science commons,” the RSPCA went beyond financial incentives and the value of animal use reduction to underscore the need to protect individual creatures who are shared across scientific domains. Cognizant that tracking is itself a key to animal welfare, among the document’s closing recommendations was that “good records of archived stock should . . . include . . . a passport for each stock containing welfare and scientific data” (2008, 13; see also Burgeon and Rosewell 2003), an assertion

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that echoes Duran and Tinkey’s critique of Rosen and Chen (2016). As this assertion of best practices reveals, the archived, biobanked mouse is now less than the sum of her parts, traveling via welfare oversight and by passport as cryogenetically preserved fragments, assisting science and possibly protecting legions of unborn creatures from future experimental involvement. These are indeed practices derived from the management of still living lab animals, and they figure too in adoption practices, where rescued beagles, for instance, are tattooed, chipped, and possibly tracked for the remainder of their adoptive lives. But the reuse of live animals not only highlights the significance of welfare and care: sharing can also emerge from their affective power. Consider the contrasts offered by Baboon #17, the macaques Rufus and Perseus, and Lucifer the ferret. The sharing of each of the primate subjects occurs because resources are scarce. Baboon #17 is clearly expendable, and he regularly shifts hands from one researcher to another, managed very much as a research tool. In contrast, although Rufus and Perseus are certainly regarded from the start as prized, individual creatures with specialized skills within their particular neuroscience lab, they are also inarguably precious scientific resources. Yet the sharing of Rufus and Perseus is facilitated, too, by their affective power, whereby the friendship of their respective postdocs enables them to trust each other with their monkey “partners.” Each postdoc remains vigilant in caring for both monkeys, driven not only by the premise that a “happy” and “healthy” monkey produces quality data, but by their trust in one another to guard an animal’s welfare. For this and other, deeper affective reasons, each “cares” for the monkey he occasionally borrows as he would the one with whom he regularly partners. These are different facets of a specialized sociality that epitomizes interspecies encounters in science in which humans and animals are “significant others” (Haraway 2003) of one another. Elsewhere, in Michael’s and Maureen’s labs, macaques circulate in and out of Sally’s breeding facility precisely because of their camaraderie, affection for one another, and desire to enhance the lives of their respective captive monkey charges. That is, their affection for one another inspires renegade acts of animal sharing. Finally, if we move to the lab that houses the ferret Lucifer and his compatriots, affection and care are thrust front and center. To return to chapter 4, caretakers in one lab have set strict preconditions before agreeing to take on a ferret study, insisting that animals be housed in pairs and accompanied by the promise of rehoming. Here, sharing is not facilitated merely by the affective power of a species; rather, sentimental values are deployed to defend the parameters of research from the start, where animal

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rescue, out and beyond the confines of the lab, emerges as informally mandated sharing. In this context—alongside others involving a host of mammalian species—we encounter the consequences of human-animal “webbed existences,” alternative moral frameworks of “caring, and shared pain,” in which rescue work emerges as a transgressive practice, breaching lab boundaries and defying the ingrained notion of animal sacrifice as a legitimate welfare practice.

conclusion: other animals’ fates Interspecies entanglements that instigate animal sharing uncover highstakes moral processes. Animal sharing entails challenging standardized lab practices on multiple fronts, involving, for instance, defying welfare standards, resisting the lucrative draw of proprietary secrecy, or redirecting research protocols that then alter housing and euthanasia practices. Whereas biobanking and the open-source management of research data derived from dead creatures figure increasingly in efforts to foreground sharing as an ethical practice in lab science, a host of other, serendipitous approaches define another invisible moral realm that shapes—and redirects—the quotidian laboratory lives of experimental creatures. Within such contexts moral thinking assumes many guises, at times driven by desperate efforts to sustain a faltering research domain, at others facilitated by strong bonds of trust among colleagues who strive to “make do” with whatever animals are available, and at still others to intervene and alter the management and care of at least one of many species that populate one’s vivarium. These actions expose the complexities of human-animal entanglements whose outcomes are wobbly and unpredictable. None of these trajectories guarantees animal well-being will figure front and center; likewise, none confirms the inevitable neglect of welfare regimes. If any sort of predictability is possible, it may well lie in the impetus that initiated sharing in the first place. In this light, of special concern to me is the fate of the other animal. As I have demonstrated, sharing often surfaces under conditions of scarcity—be it of funding or animals themselves. At first glance, such conditions may seem a far cry from, say, the endearing beagle or ferret who is rescued from the lab and rehomed offsite to a school classroom, vet school kennel, or private home. Yet within each scenario, and for each animal shared, there are others whose fates remain uncertain. These include the prohibitively expensive or scarce NHP who is reused, its species later “retired” and replaced by prolific, expendable herds of genetically altered swine; a mischievous pair of

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ferrets who are rehomed, unlike the drove of rodents who are born, circulate, and sacrificed within a neighboring vivarium; and the adorable beagle who becomes a house-based pet while beside her stands the lanky hound who continuously recirculates in and out of experimental and teaching contexts. The biographies of shared lab subjects expose unusual forms of animal exceptionalism; these same creatures, however, by virtue of their diverted paths, also flag species hierarchies. Such hierarchies place biocapital in tension with the affective power of some species over others. In this light, what might be the fates of the other creatures who do not experience redistribution, reuse, or rescue? When bundled together, these are the sorts of thorny conundrums that trouble moral thinking and action during attempts to share in laboratory contexts. Sharing forces lab personnel—be they researchers, veterinarians, or animal technicians—to grapple with conflicts that arise between research needs and welfare obligations, an animal’s commodification and its affective power, and the desire for profit and a longing to protect animals from further harm. These potentialities are embedded within an animal commons, where radical acts of exceptionalism figure as “ambiguous” yet “productive paradoxes” that might enable at least some creatures to “deviate” from being “just an animal” (Wilkie 2005, 213, 215) and thus transform emergent practices of animal (re)use into innovative approaches to welfare and care.

Conclusion The Other Animal

In early 2016 I was invited to a regional gathering of animal technicians who meet sporadically over the course of the year to socialize, attend recertification seminars, and host speakers who work at the cutting edge of animal care and welfare. This affair was simultaneously a potluck meet-and-greet, vendor fair, and lecture event. The food ranged from vegan to carnivore, and the modest array of vendors consisted of local entrepreneurs, several of whom had once worked in laboratories and subsequently established spin-off companies. One booth that caught my eye displayed a prominent, oddly phrased banner that read “Empathy with Pain,” and, as their two thirty-something sales representatives explained, they were there to market a topical product designed to anesthetize tissue in anticipation of ear, tail, and toe clipping of mice and rats. As one elaborated in an earnest and light-hearted tone, “pain shouldn’t be an option” during such procedures. In another corner, four female animal technicians of varying ages and levels of seniority were comparing digital phone photos of their dogs, all of whom had been adopted from no-kill rescue shelters. Each time someone new entered the increasingly crowded room, they inevitably received a warm greeting and often a hug from one of the event’s organizers or board members. Following a quick meal served on paper plates, we filed into a stylish auditorium to hear a presentation by Derrick, a fortyish Anglo biologist and fish expert, on the welfare of a small minnow known as the zebrafish (Dano rerio). Derrick began with an image of a brackish pond somewhere in South Asia, where the species originates; the photo was designed to underscore the species’ hardiness and experimental versatility as well as its use in research, ranging from genetics to cancer to toxicology. Another slide showed a close-up of a fish swimming in a tank, and the accompanying text read, “He’s not just a fish. He’s hope.” The “o” of “hope” had been replaced with a small red heart. 224

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Derrick’s presentation was an in-depth tutorial that debunked the idea that fish—unlike warm-blooded, furry creatures—are too unsophisticated biologically to experience suffering. Over the course of an hour he displayed bright and seemingly innocuous images that, as we soon learned, in fact revealed sickly fish, followed by videos that contrasted healthy and stress behaviors. Throughout the evening Derrick guided us slowly and methodically through the lives of zebrafish, undermining assumptions about their being “low sentient animals.” Of special concern was his determination to dissuade us from responding to them as we would to mammals. For instance, whereas humans might view overcrowding as detrimental to our own well-being and that of many other species, zebrafish feel safest when they can cluster and swim together in tight schools. When housed alone in clear water, they exhaust themselves in endless, futile efforts to seek safety; and whereas fish housed in pairs may appear to engage in playful behavior, they are in fact ensnared in a chronic battle over dominance that exhausts and shortens the miserable lives of both. Plants—albeit only certain types—can provide shelter for and foster a sense of safety in an otherwise stressed creature. In essence, we were being taught to discard anthropocentric empathy (Gruen 2015) and instead to think like a fish. Given that my research for Animal Ethos has focused exclusively on mammals, this workshop forced me to rethink my own privileging of warm-blooded creatures. Currently, many corners of lab science burst with discussions of the promissory qualities of zebrafish, a species that has become increasingly popular over the last few decades as a means to forego rodent work especially. An essay titled “Five Reasons Why Zebrafish Make Excellent Research Models,” displayed on the website of the United Kingdom’s National Centre for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animal Research (NC3Rs), is a case in point. As Carol Brennan, an addiction researcher funded by NC3Rs, explains, zebrafish are “genetically similar to humans . . . [and] easier to house and care for than rodents. . . . [The] impact of any genetic mutation or drug treatment is easy to see[:] . . . [they] have lots of offspring . . . [and it is] easier to introduce genetic changes [in their embryos than in those of other species].”1 As Brennan’s assertions help reveal, zebrafish are at the forefront of efforts to refine, reduce, and replace the use of “animals” in research and testing,2 such that the lives and fates of mammals are now entwined with those of zebrafish. Nevertheless, this insistence in some quarters that we heed the well-being and welfare of fish is widely regarded as both odd and renegade by those who find it difficult to fathom their suffering or place a fish’s welfare on equal footing with (or in the same pool as) more “sentient” animals (Goodwin et al. 2016;

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see also Agca 2012). From such a vantage point, one might not merely presume that the zebrafish is “just an animal” (Wilkie 2005) but even question whether it is really an “animal” at all. When framed as such, the zebrafish emerges as the quintessential other animal. By recasting the zebrafish as a sentient creature that suffers, Derrick countered forcefully for this species’ protection, care, and welfare.3 Indeed, over the course of my project I have occasionally stumbled upon efforts by a range of parties to thwart the euthanizing or “termination” of research fish by rescuing them from laboratories. In the words of one activist, “we accept any animal, no matter how large or small, because all life matters,”4 a statement that echoes those offered by several animal caretakers proud of home-based aquariums that are well-stocked with rescued ichthyic research subjects. As all of these parties would assert, my attempts to decipher moral thinking in science are informed by myopic understandings of which creatures matter most in the day-to-day of laboratory life and death. Whereas a key premise of my own project has been that mammalian life offers a potent entry point for ethnographic engagement, an expanded horizon—one that encompasses other lab-based species that might range from fish to frogs to slime mold—reveals yet another black box of experimental sentiment, welfare, and care. As Derrick’s presentation taught me, meaningful interspecies encounters can extend well beyond cross-mammalian entanglements, foregrounding the need, as others have stressed, to “think like” salmon (Lien 2015) or even like forests and trees (Kohn 2013; Wohlleben 2015), mushrooms (Tsing 2015), or microbes (Helmreich 2009; Paxson 2008). In the end, I find myself reflecting on what my own study might offer beyond insights about the sentimental leverage of warm-blooded animals and their power to reconfigure moral thinking in science. From the onset I presumed that lab labor hierarchies would shape the works and lives of professionals whose research is dependent on experimental creatures, and that conflicts between experimental design and welfare could instigate moral thought and action that might breach the boundaries of mandated, regulatory, or bioethical frameworks. This mélange of hunches, assumptions, and hypotheses were borne from my earlier work in the field of cadaveric human organ transfer: I learned through long-term ethnographic immersion that nurses and social workers, for instance, thought differently about the reuse of human organs than did, say, surgeons; that an official ethos and associated rhetoric obscured the private responses of lay parties whose lives were altered by human organ transfer; and that the paradoxical necessity of a donor’s death in saving others’ lives shaped the charged moral tenor of debates regarding methods of organ procurement, the staging of

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promotional and celebratory events, sanctioned and renegade mourning practices, and the pursuit of highly experimental research that is driven by strong desires to alleviate suffering and stave off the growing shortage of reusable human parts (Sharp 2006, 2013). Subsequent research in highly experimental realms of organ replacement in turn taught me to be attentive to quotidian life (Brodwin 2013; Das 1999), not to ignore activities at the margins (Brodwin 2000), and to pursue that which remains veiled, obscured, or unsaid (Casper and Moore 2009; Favret-Saada 1980). These have proved potent techniques for detecting moral quandaries and associated imaginative processes for which, nonetheless, resolution might prove elusive (Beidelman 1993; Lambek 2010; Lambek et al. 2015; Livingston 2005, 2012). Similarly, Animal Ethos has been not a quest for moral solutions but, as Janelle Taylor (2005) advances elsewhere, an “-ing,” that is, a concern for morality in the making. Anthropologists reside comfortably in states of sustained animation; a disciplinary ethos requires that one suspend judgment, garner trust, and cultivate other ways of knowing and being in the world. These are not trivial skills. One’s mastery of social immersion and its associated imaginary can engender intense joy and crippling sorrow, and the successful and productive ethnographer waivers precariously somewhere in the middle. Such work is especially perilous when one straddles ethical boundaries, bears witness to unsettling domains of human conduct, and, in turn, wrangles with the consequences of professional agnosticism when confronted with troublesome knowledge. Michael Jackson—a self-identified existential anthropologist—regards these struggles as vital to ethnographic inquiry. According to Jackson, attempts to decipher other forms of world-making anchor the ethnographer somewhere “between one and one another” and, as a result, bear the power to provoke deep personal introspection (2012). As a medical anthropologist, I have found this to be especially true in contexts framed by suffering (see also Kleinman and Kleinman 1997; Livingston 2012; Wendland 2010; Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016). Animal Ethos has proved to be among the most emotionally challenging projects I have yet to pursue— and as jarring at times as my earlier work that involved pediatric organ donors—engendering, at unexpected moments, an ethics of practice best expressed by the phrase emblazoned on the vendor’s banner: “empathy with pain,” or what Lori Gruen more effectively describes as “entangled empathy” (2015). As my own consciousness has deepened, I have struggled to resolve various moral paradoxes intrinsic to laboratory science. To be more concrete,

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this involves the knowledge that animals employed in research number in the millions; that physical and psychic pain, and further, death, are inevitable consequences for the vast majority of these experimental subjects; yet terms such as “suffering” and “killing” are taboo, though they may well be part and parcel of daily laboratory life. In turn, animals’ experimental participation has salved or saved the lives of humans and animals I hold dear; understandings of care and welfare are simultaneously rigid, regulated, and malleable; imaginative thinking, alongside innovative practices of care, pervade many realms of lab science; and “suffering,” though, again, a taboo term, applies to both animals and humans who cohabit laboratory worlds. As these insights and their accompanying moral quandaries reveal, ethnographic immersion in lab science complicates presumably objective ways of knowing, whereby one’s cognizance of an associated scientific imaginary can bear with it existential—and ethical—consequences. A brief example offers a potent illustration. A late foray in the field involved a visit to a state university’s veterinary school that has set the standard for animal adoption for half a century. Staff who administer the program are deeply committed to the long-term well-being of animal research subjects, whose origins are diverse and range from farms and homes to Class A breeders and pharmaceutical labs. Visiting their program is, in short, a humbling experience. Later that same week I encountered staff in a neuroscience lab on the other end of this university’s campus who were traumatized by the sounds of dogs who, twice a week, were prepped for MRI scans. The dog’s cries, as one young woman explained, were so difficult to listen to that the majority of staff with whom she worked sought refuge in other parts of the building on the “howling days.” Worse yet, she insisted, were the experiences of the MRI technicians who were required to stay on-site to run the machines. It is important to underscore that those who described these experiences as “traumatic” were not engaged in the project but merely inhabited a lab within the same wing; that is, they were not directly involved in the MRI experiments. These lab neighbors were nevertheless at a loss of what to do. As the MRI technicians explained to them, the dogs howled because they were frightened by the noise made by the machines (which I later learned was not the case—the howling occurred prior to anesthetizing them for the procedure). When I then recounted this story to a colleague who trains dogs and horses, she explained that “animals are known to make very unusual noises when they think they are going to die.” In short, these were most likely sounds of fear. Just as important is the fact that these experiences deeply unsettled the human staff. Their story was a request for help.

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As it so happened, in late 2016 the American news media was aflutter with a story involving the research of Attila Andics and his neuroscience team at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, where research findings revealed that dogs do not merely infer human’s desires through tone of voice, but distinguish vocabulary, too. Andics’ team borrowed dogs “volunteered” by local pet owners, placing them in MRI scanners to track left and right brain activity, their work demonstrating that dogs and humans employ the same domains of the brain to process verbal information. Soon, news stories in the United States provided still other accounts and striking photos of similar, well-established practices in a lab at Emory University (Berns, Brooks, and Spivak 2012), followed by a New York Times bestseller in 2017 by psychologist Gregory Berns (see figures 16 and 17). Headlines proclaimed, “Your Dog Really Does Know What You’re Saying, and Brain Scan Shows How,” “With Dogs, It’s What You Say—and How You Say It,” and “Their Masters’ Voices: Dogs Understand Tone and Meaning of Words.”5 Reporters and their audiences were captivated by this discovery, and in the United States and United Kingdom at the very least, news accounts reported how dog owners inevitably nodded in assent, tickled that what they already knew about their animal companions had now been confirmed by neuroscience research. The newsworthiness of the story did not end there, however: readers were equally intrigued by how the dogs had been trained to cooperate during these experiments. As noted above, MRIs are noisy contraptions that require one to lie still for prolonged periods of time with one’s head, and sometimes entire body, encircled within the “donut” of the MRI. Many human patients report intense claustrophobia, and an equally common complaint is that the noise generated by the machine ranges from annoyingly monotonous to unbearably loud. Andics’ team had overcome these obstacles by employing dog trainers skilled at using positive reinforcement to prepare animals for otherwise stressful procedures. In response, their canine charges willingly enter the MRI and lie still without restraints or sedation. Other researchers elsewhere, who had formerly struggled to control frantic dogs, reported similar success stories after realizing the need for patience, kindness, and the expertise of behavior specialists well-versed in the rewards of positive reinforcement with dogs, where the outcome involves far less stress for both the animals and the human researchers.6 As I was concluding this final chapter, the problems at the state university campus had yet to be resolved. Strangely, none of the staff had encountered either mainstream press or scholarly accounts of Andics’ or Berns’ lab research. As a result, I concluded that my role as researcher had to shift, and

figure 16. The terrier Callie in an MRI scanner, watching images of faces projected on a screen. Photo by Gregory Berns. Reprinted with permission.

figure 17. Research volunteer Patricia King and her dog, Kady, after completing a scan session. Kady’s ears are wrapped to keep a set of ear muffs in place to protect her hearing from loud scanner sounds. Photo by Gregory Berns. Reprinted with permission.

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I began asking probing questions about what they needed, forwarding relevant literature by researchers who had faced similar predicaments, putting them in touch with animal experts based on their own campus, and, I hoped, instilling a sense in all involved parties that this is a research challenge that can be overcome without confrontation or accusation, and one that can involve all personnel (including one’s neighbors down the hall). I cannot say how this will unfold in the long term; after all, much of this rides on the ability and willingness of involved staff to assume an empathetic, selfreflexive stance (Gluck 2016) and learn to “think like a dog.” In light of this sobering tale, I conclude this book by offering some general counsel, at the very least, to those who aspire to work within—or outside— experimental laboratories, be they nascent lab researchers, animal caretakers, or advocates for animals’ rights. What follows is a set of propositions; though briefly phrased here, they are rooted in the more substantial analyses that define this work as a whole. In so doing, I take Jackson’s assertion to heart, with this caveat: ethnographic research can inspire introspection not merely in the anthropologist, but in the reader, too. What follows is my modest attempt to stimulate difficult dialogue, encourage respectful debate, and perhaps even offer constructive advice. I anchor these reflections in a set of moral proclamations. Wisdom Sits in Unpredictable Places.7 Perhaps the most confounding finding of this project—albeit, perhaps, not that unpredictable—concerns lab-based labor hierarchies. Animal care technicians often possess the deepest wisdom about the habits, preferences, and needs of both particular species and individual creatures, yet they may have little power to instigate change. A well-run lab inevitably has animal technicians who campaign effectively and ceaselessly for innovative welfare and enrichment interventions that affect the well-being of animals under their care. In many instances, this requires significant patience to win over or educate a lab’s principle investigator. In instances where this occurs, researchers praise and celebrate the wisdom gleaned from staff caretakers. Dissonance and resistance is most common where nascent lab researchers are concerned: intent on demonstrating to themselves as much as to others that they can shoulder the challenges of handling, culling, and killing animals, the assistants often objectify animals more than any other lab personnel. As a result, youth and inexperience can have serious consequences for lab animals. Among the more striking findings to emerge from my research is that whereas the childhoods of caretakers and veterinarians are typically overrun with all sorts of house pets or farm animals, as a rule, my interviews

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reveal that, surprisingly, the vast majority of lab researchers had no personal, sustained contact with animals prior to entering their professions. These divergent histories subsequently inform affective responses to lab animal subjects. This sobering realization needs to be incorporated into lab research training: nascent lab researchers should be taught and mentored not merely by senior researchers, but by experienced animal caretakers. In turn, a required ethics curriculum (and here I mean sustained, classroom-based and not brief encounters with online training) that addresses the complexities of animal care and welfare (from regulated behaviors to serendipitous responses) should precede any hands-on work with experimental creatures. I wonder, too, what might happen if scientific researchers, animal care technicians, and lab-based veterinarians staged cosponsored conferences. In the rare instances in which I have stumbled across research conference workshops, panel discussions, and poster sessions staged by caretakers on innovative forms of lab animal enrichment, attendance is sparse and inevitably attracts only other caretakers (and the occasional anthropologist). I have witnessed elsewhere the power of an integrative approach to transform thinking: conference organizers of the oldest bioengineering organization regularly host a keynote speaker from another field whose work is designed to encourage members to “think outside the box” (Sharp 2011). And within organ transplant circles, professionals of all stripes flock to hear the personal accounts of organ recipients and donor family kin, both of whom bear the affective power to promote introspection and new ways to understand such key categories as death, reciprocity, grief, and commemoration. What, then, might arise if professional conferences focused on laboratory research entailed drawing together representatives from all rungs of the lab labor hierarchy on the same panels, roundtable discussions, and keynote engagements? Such proposed encounters bear possibilities of transformation for all involved parties. Think Like a Monkey . . . or a Dog . . . or a Fish. Although “empathy with pain” is certainly a peculiar phrase to ponder, it raises important questions about where to locate the boundary of lab-based human-animal encounters. Among the most significant lessons I have learned over the course of this project has been the importance of learning how to “think” in speciesspecific terms. In this light, a reality that has never ceased to surprise me is the dearth of animal behaviorists in research labs. Although laws require that animals be inspected and cared for by veterinarians, one should not presume that veterinary schooling included training in animal psychology. This reality strikes me as very odd. In several instances, the universities

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whose labs I have visited have been home as well to internationally renowned primate, canine, rodent, and other species behavior specialists, and in two instances, such specialists were members of the same department. Strangely, lab-based staff regularly reported they had never considered consulting these experts on how to work with lab animals. This was true even in those instances where principal investigators cited the works of animal behavior experts (Jane Goodall being the most prominent) as among their favorite authors. I conjecture that this trend springs in large part from the rigidity of disciplinary boundaries and, possibly, hierarchies of scientific knowledge (in which the quantitative and experimental trumps the qualitative and observational). It is just as likely, however, that dominant understandings that, say, a lab rat is “not an animal” or a lab-raised macaque is “neither a pet nor a wild animal” relegate these creatures to zones that then fall far outside the purview of behavioral wisdom. Animal caretakers are nevertheless aware of the transformative power of behavioral knowledge, though all too often they learn in serendipitous ways—by word of mouth, or from conference presentations—that true enrichment is based in species-specific wisdom. Derrick is a case in point: through sustained experience, careful observation, inquisitiveness, and consults with animal experts, he slowly developed a sophisticated knowledge of stress-related behaviors in fish. One encounters similar breakthroughs in other quarters, where perhaps what are now known as the mouse, rat, and rabbit “grimace scales”—developed through the efforts of Jeffrey Mogil and colleagues at McGill University and Matthew Leach of Newcastle University—have inspired new approaches to lab animal care (see figure 18).8 In short, laboratory worlds might be radically transformed by bringing behaviorists into the fold and, more generally, by fostering the spread of tutorials that enable lab personnel to “think” like a rat or a ferret or a fish. Resolve the War of Two Worlds. A widely unchallenged assumption that pervades laboratory domains is that research stands at cross purposes, and even at war, with animal rights activism. Members of each camp readily resort to hyperbole in describing the other: lab researchers are careless and heartless murderers whereas activists are naïve, myopic terrorists (again, see Figure 9). Yet throughout my research I have found that these two groups often inhabit common ground. I am fortunate to have worked in well-run laboratories where animal care matters to all personnel. Obstacles to better care in such milieus most often stem from a lack of imagination and not callous abuse. Consider the issue of social housing for monkeys: definitions of the practice are themselves fluid, in which interpretations of

figure 18. Mouse Grimace Scale used in assessing pain. Courtesy of National Center for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs), United Kingdom, www.nc3rs.org.uk/grimacescales.

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“social” result in assorted configurations ranging from a large group housing unit where four or more monkeys together can climb the same ropes and artificial trees, to the stacking of cages to hold a pair of animals, to solitary caging within a room that contains other, similarly caged monkeys. Or consider once again the howling dogs in the MRI or the solitary zebrafish who cannot school. I do not believe that anyone on staff wants dogs to be frightened of procedures or for fish to be stressed to the point that they die of exhaustion, but a lack of training, knowledge, and know-how will most certainly ensure that animals will suffer. Animal activism is premised on the understanding that lab existence is in and of itself torture for any creature, and that those who engage in such work will always objectify living creatures. A more subtle—albeit certainly controversial—reading is that, as a rule, all parties care deeply about the well-being of lab animals and abhor suffering. Rather that continuing to demonize one another, I would encourage these parties to seek common ground. Nowhere is this more likely to occur than in cooperative efforts to rescue animals from euthanasia, an alternative path often regarded by both research staff and activists as the best outcome for any animal. As long as rehoming efforts remain quiet, protected, and, all too often, in-house affairs, lab personnel and activists will continue to wage war with one another over the meaning and proper ways to “rescue” lab animals (and, in turn, speak of them publicly). Activists can suffer from what I have come to understand as temporal myopia, where the rescue of a lab-based animal all too often foregrounds the here and now. The discourse surrounding lab beagles is a case in point, asserting that a dog’s abuse is readily evident in her inability to navigate stairs; that, even as an adult, she is not house-trained; and that she demonstrates confusion when asked to walk on a patch of grass. Yet these public displays offer only short-term evidence of the ramifications of a life spent indoors in a laboratory kennel. Adopted lab beagles are unquestionably quirky (as are other animals rescued from shelters), yet they can usually learn new behaviors with relative ease. More profound and troubling to me are the fates of primates released from labs. Whereas public attention is focused squarely on the rescue act itself, little thought is given to the longterm consequences and associated expenses required to house those animals who might survive for decades. Numerous sanctuaries have already reached the bursting point in their ability to care for retired lab NHPs. In such instances, involved activists are acutely aware of these challenges, but lab personnel far less so. Labs, industry, and funding agencies should share the costs associated with caring for “retired” NHPs in the long term. Rather

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than presume that rescue groups will shoulder such burdens, research budgets should include line items associated with post-research adoption and care. Sanction an Open and Flexible Language of Suffering and Death. As I have learned throughout the course of this and previous research, the silencing of sentiment engenders serious ethical and moral consequences. Semantic policing does not alter thinking; it merely drives renegade ideas underground or into private realms of experience. As my work elsewhere demonstrates, too, the repression of emotional responses shifts an often unbearably heavy burden of responsibility onto those charged with the care of the dying and the dead, and they then feel embattled or devalued in the workplace; in some instances, they may even cease to care (Sharp 2001). This bears significant repercussions for both the welfare of animals and the psychic well-being of human personnel. In short, the inability to speak of animal suffering is deeply entwined with that of human well-being. I am not by any means proposing the rigid adaptation of a standardized, alternative lexicon. Instead, I urge readers to integrate Jackson’s stance of critical self-reflection and thus a quasi-existential ethos into laboratory practice. As I have learned over the course of this project, lab personnel are far from unanimous in their understandings and acceptance of such terms as “sacrifice,” “terminate,” “euthanize,” and “kill.” Within a single lab a seasoned veterinarian might be adamant that animals be described as making “sacrifices” for science, whereas the director might insist that her postdocs not shy away from other terms because she believes they serve as poignant reminders that so much of their research is “terminal.” Euphemisms bear the simultaneous power to obscure, demean, or elevate specialized actions and skills. Most important, then, is not (all too often futilely) to attempt to direct how personnel should think and speak (and perhaps not question), but instead to allocate time for difficult discussions and regularly encourage efforts to wrestle with the complexities innate to the human use of animals for scientific pursuits. Push Back against Unnecessary Science. As both professor and scholar, I am keenly aware of the capacity of youth to reshape social and professional worlds. When confronted with redundant research, unsettling practices, or questionable science, I urge nascent scientists to draw on their ability to make such discernments and, at the very least, to vote with their feet. One’s desire to progress professionally should not require compromising one’s moral code of conduct by working on a project that seems questionable,

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wasteful, redundant, futile, or cruel. Those with aspirations in, say, neuroscience, toxicology, and genetics need to think carefully and critically about the short- and long-term significance of the work they might do. More broadly, all lab personnel, regardless of station within a work hierarchy, should always opt for the least invasive techniques and methods, strive for ongoing innovative approaches that honor the Three Rs approach, and master “empathy with pain.” Anthropologists are accustomed to being asked by skeptics why their research “matters”; the same line of questioning should be applied regularly to the use of animals in research. One’s responses should be thoughtful, deep, reflexive, and personal. Many fields now incorporate required coursework in ethics and morality, and, again, I assert that the same approach should be the mainstay of pre-laboratory involvement with animals. Throughout one’s career one should seek out mentors wellversed in animal behavior, keeping in mind that such specialists may well be the animal technicians charged with animal care. Throughout the full arc of one’s career, one should remain alert to the reality that welfare and care are not static, mandated evaluative categories but essential and ever-evolving domains that both enable state-of-the-art research and affect the contour of one’s personal, moral core. Memorials and Mourning Matter. Grief, strangely, remains widely unrecognized and elusive as an inevitable and significant aspect of experimental laboratory life. Erasure has its consequences. When institutionalized practices exile grief to private realms of experience, this can provoke shame, exacerbate social isolation, and deplete one’s sense of self-worth. In spite of bureaucratized practices that devalue grief in science, memorial practices nevertheless materialize regularly in lab contexts. Wakes for monkeys, bulletin boards chock full of photos of favorite deceased animals, commemorative wall plaques, and reliquaries of animals’ remains expose the intractable collective desire to grieve, the cathartic power of memory projects, and the importance of pushing back against an ethos that devalues mourning as inappropriate within the boundaries of objective science. This eclectic assortment of memorial projects nevertheless occupies rooms and hallways accessible only to authorized personnel, and thus they remain relatively private affairs. But what if these and other memorials were to occupy public space? In this vein, Susan Iliff, a veterinarian, suggests that lab animal memorials demonstrate an ethics of practice, arguing that they define an “additional ‘R’ ” of “remembrance” (Iliff 2002). Among the more successful projects, in Iliff’s opinion, appear to be those that simultaneously celebrate and mourn

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figure 19. Crossing Over, sculpture of three mice in a boat, installed 2015. Steve Worthington, sculptor. This sculpture is located in the lobby of a West Coast research institute, accompanied by a plaque that reads, “Please take a moment to honor the legacy of research animals whose contributions have saved lives and expanded our understanding of the brain, science and medicine.” Photo by the author. Used with permission.

deceased animals, and within her essay she features a range of plaques, tombstones, and ceremonies that commemorate animal involvement in science (and, more specifically, in pharmaceutical research). These sorts of projects bear the mark of institutional oversight. But what if, in turn, there were also a proliferation of still other spontaneous or more personalized memorials, conceived by lab personnel yet staged in public venues? In response, I return to the efforts of caretakers in one hospital who, as described in chapter 4, erect a funeral wreath, altar, and poster that features the photos of individual monkeys from a research colony, all of whom died when a hurricane hit their city (see figure 15). Although this memorial began as a singular event, it is now staged annually in a public hallway of the hospital, in full view within an area that receives significant pedestrian traffic. Yet another even more elaborate and recent memorial graces public space in a Seattle-based research institute, where staff insisted that the

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figure 20. Natty sculpture on a lab window ledge in a West Coast research institute, installed 2015. Steve Worthington, sculptor. Photo by the author. Used with permission.

architectural plans for a new building incorporate a means to commemorate animals’ contributions to science. Their efforts led to engaging a local artist whose life-size sculptures of lab mice are now scattered throughout the building, standing as reminders to anyone passing through the lobby and up and down the central staircase of the importance of animals’ participation in science (see figures 19, 20, and 21). Especially noteworthy is that the building’s architecture incorporates transparency, where laboratory windows look out into public space. Visitors, then, can view lab personnel at work. In addition, those who labor within can look out onto stairways and into the public atrium and, in so doing, gaze not only into common areas

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figure 21. Sprightly sculpture on a ledge near an interior staircase of a West Coast research institute, installed 2015. Steve Worthington, sculptor. Photo by the author. Used with permission.

but view the mouse sculptures too. This and other similarly creative designs facilitate encounters with memorial projects that transfix one’s gaze, at least momentarily, on the animals themselves. In so doing, they bear the potential to shift how staff and visitors conceive lab animal life and death. Laboratories Are Moral Worlds. To conclude, laboratory science is not merely a realm of rarified activities circumscribed by regulatory bioethical apparatuses. Animal labs are also serendipitous and creative worlds of moral thought and action. As I have sought to demonstrate throughout this

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work, the human-animal encounters intrinsic to experimental research are complicated, troubled, messy relationships. If ethical science is marked by adherence to established rules, moral science recognizes and incorporates this messiness. Moral science nags at accepted beliefs, challenges standard practices, and sparks introspection. As such, it bears possibilities of transformation among human personnel who, as “the other animal” of experimental science, cohabit hidden realms overrun with mice and monkeys, dogs and rats, ferrets and fish, and legions of an even broader range of captive species deemed essential to the advancement of science.

Notes

introduction 1. Namely, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. 2. Associated clinical heart research has long employed canine subjects too. 3. Sample classic works include Bateson 1958; Geertz 1973; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Malinowski 1922; Mauss 1967; Mitchell 1956; Needham 1962; Turner 1964. Within anthropology, morality is known by a range of terms, including ethos (Bateson 1958); the logic of culture, local knowledge, ethical systems (Geertz 1973, 1983; Malinowski 1926); and the moral imagination or imaginary (Beidelman 1993). I merely scratch the surface here to give a general sense of its range of associations and meanings. Indeed, culture, as anthropologically conceived, is a term used to designate moral systems. 4. Here I provide a brief recapping of an earlier, more detailed discussion (see Sharp 2006b, 3–9, 31–37). Recent works addressing anthropological engagement with morality and ethics include Fassin 2012; Faubion 2011; Heintz 2009; Keane 2010; Laidlaw 2002; Lambek 2008, 2010; Lambek et al. 2015; Zigon 2008. For earlier interventions, see Edel and Edel 1968 (1959); Parkin 1991; Pocock 1986; Wolfram 1982. 5. See Latour and Woolgar (1979, 27) for a discussion of “The ‘Anthropology’ of Science.” 6. Of course, archaeology has always been concerned with the study of objects and artifacts. 7. The anti-vivisection movement dates back to the late nineteenth century (Tacium 2008). I return to this below. 8. Noske may well be credited with addressing their “abject” status (Kristeva 1982) too. 9. Today, one might easily contest Noske’s assertions regarding the relative openness of the food industry, at the very least in the United States. See, for instance, Michael Pollan’s discussion of his inability to gain full access to a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAPO) (2006).

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10. USDA, “Annual Report Animal Usage by Fiscal Year.” 11. Humane Society, “Questions and Answers about Biomedical Research.” 12. Harper’s Weekly, June 21, 1884, 392. The accompanying story appears on page 395. 13. See also U.S. National Library of Medicine Digital Collections, “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” http://resource.nlm.nih.gov /101425984, NLM unique ID: 101425984, NLM image ID: B029951, accessed December 2016. 14. Comparative opinions proved a bit more complicated: U.S. researchers conceded that guiding principles (especially those known as The Three Rs— replacement, reduction, and refinement) were derived from the United Kingdom, whereas U.K. researchers regarded U.S. approaches as “lax” and more commonly allowed profit motives to overshadow animal welfare. I note that these are opinions and not statements of fact. 15. For instance, the organization known as American Humane was established in 1877. Initial concerns included child labor laws, slaughterhouse conditions, the fates of working animals, and animal transport. In 1959 American Humane merged with the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), forming the International SPCA. See www .americanhumane.org, accessed January 2017. 16. For an informative discussion, see Lederer 1992. 17. Ashton Macfarlane, who worked with me as a Radcliffe Institute Research Partner throughout the 2015–2016 academic year and subsequent summer, provided invaluable assistance interviewing undergraduate researchers.

chapter 1 1. Compassion fatigue originates in contexts involving human patients; it subsequently drifted into veterinary medicine and animal rescue work (see Figley and Roop 2006; Rank, Zaparanick, and Gentry 2009) and from there into research laboratories. 2. Enrichment is the focus of the following chapter. 3. For an example of high-profile research that was brought to a halt because it had not included animal research, see Eakin 2015. 4. On the ironies of cures that might kill willing experimental human subjects, see DelVecchio Good 2001; DelVecchio Good et al. 1999. 5. I suspect, too, that entry-level lab assistants—many of whom are college graduates with research aspirations—regard mice as sitting at the bottom rung of the evolutionary tree of lab research. Expressing preference for rats over mice, then, may flag efforts to “move beyond” mice, in the words of one interviewee. Such assumptions overlook the reality that mice, in terms of their numbers, are the most widely used and, even, most popular experimental model. 6. Arguments regarding sentience increasingly include considerations of empathy; this has led some researchers to question and abandon some of their

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own research. See Cavalieri and Singer 1993; Corbey 2005; de Waal 2008; Panksepp and Lahvis 2011. 7. More senior researchers sometimes spoke of cats, an animal used more often in the past than today, their reduction springing, in large part, from public outcry over the use of creatures widely categorized as beloved domestic pets. As will become clear below, dogs remain a standard lab animal. 8. Benedict’s reasoning was certainly shaped by Mauss’ notion of reciprocity, which also relied on pairs of social actors (Mauss 1967). 9. Indeed, Scheper-Hughes and Lock conclude their 1987 essay with a discussion of emotions as a potent analytical framework. 10. This photo did not appear in the original Life article but can be viewed, alongside the full range of photos, here: Ben Cosgrove, “‘Concentration Camp for Dogs’: Revisiting a Grisly LIFE Classic,” Time, November 20, 2014, http://time .com/3589751/concentration-camps-for-dogs-revisiting-a-grisly-life-classic/. A letter to the editor of Life, published in the February, 22, 1966, issue, confirmed that Lucky was “now in beautiful shape. He has lately developed into a public personality. . . . He will soon go to a new home” (Christine Stevens, President, Wichita Falls [Texas] Humane Society). Another reader identified the photo of “the feeble collie” as “our Reddy.” Though rescued, he did not survive. 11. In the 1960s, Life and Sports Illustrated were both owned by publisher Henry Luce. Phinizy began as a reporter for Life and shifted to Sports Illustrated with its first issue in 1954, where he remained as a writer and photographer for the remainder of his career (New York Times, “Paid Notice: Deaths Phinizy, Coles,” July 14, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/14/classified/paidnotice-deaths-phinizy-coles.html.) 12. I thank Ashton Mcfarlane for this insight and for alerting me to Lederer’s essay. 13. As cited in www.vintag.es/2014/concentration-camp-for-dogs-1966 .html, accessed April 2016. 14. It is not coincidental that public concern, rhetorical tropes, and legislative responses to animal rights coincided with the civil rights movement in the United States, similarly drawn at times along lines of north and south. This regional and class (and potentially racial) distinction persists to this day among people involved in rescuing abandoned and ill-treated pets. “No kill” shelters and their devoted staff and volunteers do a lively trade in rescuing animals from “kill” shelters from southern states (ranging from Kentucky to Georgia and beyond). In New York City such dogs, if mongrels, are sometimes described pejoratively as “southern dingos” (a lesson I myself learned a few years ago when my son and I “adopted” a dog from Georgia through a New York–based shelter). 15. At least some of this research helped facilitate surgical advancements in heart transplantation and artificial heart design that I track in my previous work (2006b, 2013). 16. As reported on the Last Chance for Animals (LCA) website, http://www .lcanimal.org/index.php/campaigns/class-b-dealers-and-pet-theft/what-are-bdealers (accessed May 2016), and in the film Dealing Dogs: The Betrayal of

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Man’s Best Friend (2006), distributed by HBO. See also the press release from the office of Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA), “Roybal-Allard Amendment Blocks Funds to License Dealers of Randomly Sourced Cats and Dogs,” Washington, July 2015, http://roybal-allard.house.gov/news/documentsingle .aspx?DocumentID=397872. 17. For information regarding the use of chimpanzees in U.S.-based research, see the paired websites The First 100 and The Last 1,000, which have been meticulously catalogued by philosopher and animal ethicist Lori Gruen: http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu/ and http://www.last1000chimps.com/, accessed November 2016. 18. Some credit pressure from Rep. Roybal-Allard, alongside other members of Congress and paired with PETA, for this development. The NIH announced in late 2015 that it would phase out research with macaques at one of its Maryland labs. See Grimm 2016. 19. Indeed, during a public discussion I attended in 2016 involving a renowned author interested in farm animal welfare and a leader of a national animal welfare organization, the latter celebrated the freeing of great apes from research while skirting the potential increased use of pigs as research subjects in the wake of new protections for apes and, potentially, monkeys. 20. The Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (JAALAS) devoted its March 2015 volume to exploring the proliferation of the Three Rs on an international scale. 21. The home page of the USDA has at times provided a direct link to the U.K. Home Office (homeoffice.gov.uk), which oversees lab animal welfare in that country. See also Rowan 1991 and http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/files/7914/1041/1800/05-The-Three-Rs-for-web.pdf, accessed May 2016. 22. Zeder’s essay provides a comprehensive review of relevant literature; to facilitate reading of this passage I have deleted her embedded list of citations. 23. Zeder argues for recognizing mutualism as a biological process, an approach reminiscent of current theories in epigenetics. As she explains, “mutualisms in nature involve essentially symmetrical, codependent relationships driven by selection operating on mutation-induced changes (behavioral, morphological, or physiological) in both partners” (2012, 162, citing Schultz, Mueller, and Currie 2005). 24. This logic pervades the beautifully illustrated, oversized publication known as Casey’s Awakening, published by the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research, Inc. Casey’s Awakening tells the overlapping stories of a lab visit by a school class, including a student named Casey (who decides by the end to be a laboratory vet technician) and a scrawny, lonely, and very hungry mouse from the city streets, also named Casey, who sneaks through the outer door and is given a tour by a confident and well-cared-for lab mouse named Six. Throughout their respective tours, both Caseys learn of the productive work that lab mice (alongside animal technicians) do for science, and of the

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comfortable lives these mice lead. Lab mouse Six is highly cognizant of—and a willing participant in—experimental research (Conover 2000). 25. See, for example, Baskin 1974; Crockford 2000; Harris 1996; Vigne, Peters, and Helmer 2005; Zeder et al. 2006. 26. http://www.criver.com/find-a-model, accessed April 2016. 27. https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/find-and-order-jax-mice, accessed April 2016. 28. Phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) is widely used in biological research because of its isotonic properties—in other words, it is non-toxic to most cells. Alicia is describing part of the process involved in preserving tissue after the mouse pup has been euthanized. I thank Robert Huber for his assistance on clarifying this point. 29. This idea of protecting animals from experiencing fear when they are killed is a very old understanding in pet ownership and animal husbandry; I suspect that in lab contexts the integration of this idea systematically reveals the impact of Temple Grandin’s work in slaughterhouses (Grandin 2008). 30. This is because baby mice do not respond to CO2 exposure as do more mature animals, and so they suffer significantly before they die. 31. For a similar account consult Ari Handel’s narrative in National Public Radio’s The Moth radio hour episode entitled “Don’t Fall in Love with Your Monkey” (recorded June 16, 2004, duration 14:47), https://themoth.org/stories /dont-fall-in-love-with-your-monkey, accessed May 2016. 32. A mouse dam may eat her young as a fright/flight response when breeding conditions are not optimal, including, for example, poor nesting materials or being disturbed too often by a curious human. Barbering is an extreme version of grooming, where a dominant mouse strips another of its whiskers and hair in response, for example, to overcrowding. 33. This trend is reminiscent of findings that arose in my earlier work on human organ transfer, where I learned to anticipate hearing donors’ family members say they balked at granting consent to the procurement of corneas (eyes), hearts, or bone (see (Sharp 2006b). 34. Within research programs based in veterinary schools, animal technicians are sometimes referred to as “husbandry specialists.” 35. As Ducarme, Luque, and Courchamp explain, the notion of “charismatic” species originates in the conservation movement and is associated with efforts to garner public support for animal protection and welfare. For their analysis, based on a Web of Knowledge map of “charismatic” as used by conservation biologists, see “What are ‘Charismatic Species’ for Conservation Biologists?” (2013). 36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog, accessed April 2016. 37. For an account of the preponderance and social character of Moscow’s strays, see Schoofs 2008. 38. See Hasiwa et al. 2011 and http://www.navs.org/what-we-do/keep-youinformed/science-corner/animals-used-in-research/dogs-in-research/, accessed April 2016.

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39. Beagles have been ubiquitous throughout. A word graph of the usage of “dog” and “beagle” in scientific articles cited in the Google Books database for the last two hundred years demonstrates the relatively steady employment of dogs (including beagles and related hounds) from 1800 until the mid-1960s. By the 1970s citations spike significantly in specific reference to beagles, and the pronounced rate of citations has remained steady into the 2000s (showing signs of dropping only in recent years). I am indebted to Ashton Macfarlane for this information (accessed/generated November 2015). 40. Reputably, the beagle was among the top choices for purebred house dogs in the United States throughout the 1950s following the onset of Charles Shultz’s popular cartoon “Peanuts” in late 1950 (Associated Press 2013). 41. Activist organizations often invoke “debarking” (otherwise known as a ventriculocordectomy or vocal cordectomy) as a common, inhumane surgery offered by vendors for lab personnel who are averse to the noise. (Typically, the surgery reduces the volume of a dog’s bark; pet owners sometimes opt for this surgery for a noisy animal.) The lab animal technicians and labbased vets whom I have interviewed all underscored that this practice is now uncommon. As one vet explained, “if you can’t take the noise, then you don’t belong in the kennel.” I underscore here that my research activities are limited to academic laboratories; I remain unfamiliar with industrybased practices. None of the dogs I encountered in the course of this project had undergone this surgical procedure. Several lab vets have informed me that this practice is increasingly rare and now prohibited by many academic IACUCs. 42. PETA reports a darker side to this process, involving the euthanizing of unadopted dogs; see http://www.peta.org/blog/purdue-university-kills-dogs/, accessed June 2016. This is not a standard procedure where my research was based. A practice worth noting is that in at least one school, new owners who adopt dogs are required to inform the program if the dog changes hands or to return the dog to the school facility if they no longer want it. The director explained, “We know where all of our dogs are even years after they’ve left the program.” This practice parallels that of no-kill shelter programs in various parts of the United States, where, to track subsequently lost animals, adopted dogs are microchipped and required to wear a tag that identifies the shelter from whence they originated. As noted earlier, lab dogs also bear permanent ear tattoos as part of a UDSA registry. 43. Most often they appear to be American foxhounds, harriers, and treeing Walker coonhounds. 44. In contrast, non-human primates who are “retired” from lab research are funneled into animal sanctuaries. Yet another species that is a target of rescue work is the horse, with efforts focused especially on Premarin (PMU or pregnant mare’s urine) industrial broodmares and their discarded foals. As reported by Saving Horses, Inc., the latter industry has been reduced significantly in the last decade in the United States, though it proliferates overseas in China. See http://www.savinghorsesinc.com/PMU_Nurse_Mare_Foal_Rescue .php, accessed May 2016.

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chapter 2 1. This is known as a Köhler problem, named after a psychologist widely associated with Gestalt therapy who, early in his career in the 1920s, ran an NHP research station on the Canary Islands. There he studied the problemsolving abilities of captive chimpanzees and macaques. When he placed food out of reach, some subjects stacked crates to obtain the food and others used sticks to extend their arms’ length beyond the confines of their enclosures. See Köhler 1976 (1925). 2. See Andrews 2005; Baum 1998; Belmonte 2008; Butterfill and Apperly 2013; Call and Tomasello 1996, 2008; Heyes 1998; Lincoln, Andrews, and Rosenblum 1995; Povinelli and Vonk 2006; Seed and Tomasello 2010. 3. Indeed, a range of NHP species are employed as laboratory subjects, including chimpanzees, gorillas, spider and squirrel monkeys, marmosets, baboons, and several types of macaques, including rhesus and crab-eating. Macaques, for instance, are especially favored in neuroscience, whereas studies of language acquisition have involved chimpanzees and gorillas. A report issued by the Institute of Medicine subsequently informed decisions at the NIH (Altevogt et al. 2011) initially to significantly reduce the number of chimpanzees used in research by retiring 310 animals from federal labs in 2013 while retaining fifty animals. As of November 2015 the NIH announced it would retire the remaining fifty and begin phasing out NIH funding for chimp research at other non-NIH institutions (Reardon 2015). Some predict that whereas these new policies protect the futures of chimpanzees, many labs will simply shift to using other monkeys. 4. As noted in my introductory chapter, I use “animal (care) technician” and “caretaker” interchangeably throughout this work. 5. I thank Ashton Macfarlane for his research assistance on this section. 6. Klüver, who was a member of Butler’s department at the University of Chicago, retired in 1963. As described by Nahm and Pribram (1998), Klüver neither taught nor trained graduate students. This might account for the limited knowledge among others within his discipline that he conducted research that involved showing movies to monkeys. 7. I suspect that Klüver’s monkeys were administered peyote (mescaline); see Nahm and Pribram 1998. A cebus is also known as a capuchin monkey; a Java monkey is a type of macaque; a lemur, although a primate, is not a monkey. 8. This may have been the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Scalp Treatment” from 1952, later renamed “Indian Whoopee” by Castle Films, http://gogocartoon .com/woody-woodpecker-episode-044-scalp-treatment, accessed November 2015. Another possibility is a much older Cubby Bear “Indian Whoopee” cartoon from 1933. 9. For more details see Blum 1994 (38), in which she describes how Rumbaugh and colleague Sherman Washburn first tested programs intended for use with chimps and macaques, whose activities helped alert them to bugs in their programs.

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10. For details on the AWA, see Silverman, Suckow, and Murthy 2014; the “Improved Standards for Laboratory Animals Act,” Public Law 99-198, Food Security Act of 1985, Subtitle F—Animal Welfare, https://awic.nal.usda.gov /public-law-99-198-food-security-act-1985-subtitle-f-animal-welfare, accessed November 2015; “Updates on Environmental Enrichment for Nonhuman Primates” (1999, 2006, and 2015), http://awic.nal.usda.gov/environmentalenrichment-nonhuman-primates-resource-guide, accessed November 2015. For a comprehensive review of practices, see Lutz and Novak 2005; Woolverton et al. 1989. 11. For a comprehensive work on macaque social organization, see Thierry, Singh, and Kaumanns 2004. 12. Key sources that inform this passage are: Bloomsmith, Keeling, and Lambeth 1990; Butler 1958, 1961; Klüver 1933; Nahm and Pribram 1998; Premack and Woodruff 1978; Segal 1989. 13. Patterson prefers the designation GSL, or “Gorilla Sign Language.” 14. See http://www.koko.org/, accessed December 2015. 15. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbQUWgKjnqM, accessed November 2015. 16. For a sense of how philosophers have tackled Planet of the Apes as an icon of interspecies popular culture, see Gruen 2013 and other essays in this volume. 17. For fear of digressing too much, I do not detail Harris et al.’s own somewhat frustrating efforts to evaluate how a handful of individual monkeys in their own labs responded to television images under controlled conditions. A source of frustration for the research team was how the experimental setting itself proved distracting for the animals. For example, one animal was consistently agitated, and the authors posited that other monkeys were disturbed by noises outside or by the nearby proximity of the surgical room (1999). 18. Colleagues have described similar trends in France (R. Mayeri, personal communication, 2016) and Denmark, at least in the 1980s (L. Koch, personal communication, 2015). 19. Personal communication, October 21, 2015. 20. Monkeys in these contexts include rhesus as well as crab-eating—also known as long-tailed or cynomolgus (“dog-skinned”)—macaques. 21. NPR’s The Moth: True Stories Told Live, “Don’t Fall in Love with Your Monkey,” recorded June 16, 2004, http://themoth.org/posts/stories/dont-fallin-love-with-your-monkey, accessed November 2015. 22. These efforts echo earlier housing practices described by Humphrey for his macaques: “The monkeys were housed in cages in the home colony, each paired with another non-experimental monkey. . . . They were unable to see other monkeys except for their cage-mate, but the cages faced a large window which looked onto a wood in which sheep and other animals were frequently in view” (1972, 397). 23. “Cheetahs: Against All Odds,” from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, season 7, episode 4, 2002, Animal Planet, http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-

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shows/wild-kingdom/videos/cheetah-vs-gazelle/, accessed November 2015. Interestingly, lab personnel had selected a one-minute clip from the episode so that it appears as though the adult female cheetah successfully tackles a Grant’s gazelle, a type of African antelope. In the full segment, the cheetah struggles to hold down the gazelle, even when joined by several cubs. She is badly injured and the gazelle escapes. Within the lab, technicians had turned off the sound so that there was no narration. Note that one of the animal technicians confuses the cheetah with a leopard (see below). 24. Harris et al.’s experiments involved placing individual monkeys in a cage equipped with a lever so that they could turn images on and off. They videotaped singly caged, unfamiliar monkeys from their own facility engaged in dominant, subordinate, and neutral positions relative to other monkeys, as well as a segment of a technician providing “food enrichment” and involved in daily cage cleaning (1999, 50). Not all monkey viewers showed interest in the images; some were more attentive to other sounds, and interest declined over time among those who did appear attentive to the videos. These authors concluded that “even under the optimum conditions of a quiet room free of distractions, TV was not a potent reinforcer for most individually housed rhesus monkeys in our study” (1999, 51). They suggested, “A final point to consider in the lack of shaping of many of the animals is their age. All of the animals in this study had been singly housed for the majority of their lives, with an average age of 15 years. Perhaps younger animals would react to TV enrichment differently” (1999, 52). 25. For example, see Butler (1961), who describes research monkeys as “Ss” (subjects) and by numbers 301, 312, and 313. I discuss this practice in my book The Transplant Imaginary. 26. Again, see The Moth, “Don’t Fall in Love with Your Monkey.” 27. I address the deaths of animals in part II, “Sacrifice,” chapter 3. 28. The biographies of animal caretakers working the United States reflect a different employment trajectory: the majority whom I interviewed had chosen lab work as a profession, often discovering the field while working as a veterinary technician in a private practice or when they were studentsin-training. Some dropped out of veterinary school for financial reasons and gravitated toward lab work. Regardless of national origin, however, all animal care technicians spoke of solitary lives and the frustration or loneliness associated with an inability to talk about their work outside the lab. Thus, the statements that follow are derived from interviews with U.K. caretakers; they reflect similar statements made by their counterparts in the United States. I return to the biographies of U.S.-based caretakers in subsequent sections of this work. 29. R. Mayeri, personal communication, October 2015. 30. See Mayeri’s TEDx talk, “The Art and Science behind Chimpanzee TV,” published July 9, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZrMtujVnY4. 31. See http://rachelmayeri.com/blog/2011/04/18/primate-cinema/, accessed December 2015.

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32. See http://rachelmayeri.com/blog/2011/01/06/saimiri-cinema/, accessed December 2015.

chapter 3 1. All are standard practices; see Cressey 2013. 2. Gendin underscores that these figures accounted for “only about 5 percent of all animal deaths at the hands of human beings” (1986, 15). 3. I address the relevance of animal technicians’ experiences in chapter 4. 4. Foundation for Biomedical Research, https://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna /servlet/detail/NLMNLM~1~1~101438471~153146:It-s-the-animals-youdon-t-see-that, and http://fbresearch.org/new-billboards-ask-the-public-todecide-who-they-would-rather-see-live-a-rat-or-a-little-girl/. The latter is known officially as the “RatHer Poster” and is part of FBR’s Research SavesTM campaign. See also http://fbresearch.org/store/, accessed January 2016. 5. On a deeper level, though, the billboard also implies that the rat dies (or must die) so the child can live. So, killing the rat saves the child. As a result, the billboard implores the rat to live a certain kind of life that, in part, produces certain important possibilities that follow in the aftermath of the animal’s death. I thank Jen Van Tiem for these important and eloquently phrased insights (personal communication, October 2016). 6. As I detail elsewhere, medical practitioners often innovate, a process that I found to be pronounced among transplant surgeons. At issue is the distinction between “innovation” and “experimentation” (Sharp 2006a, 2013); see also Faulkner and Kent 2001; Worthington 2015. For an informative example of risk-taking gone awry, see Eakin’s account in the New Yorker of efforts by neurosurgeons Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph Schrot at the University of California, Davis, to employ a wound-infection procedure to combat Enterobacter in human patients with a deadly form of brain tumor known as glioblastoma multiforme (BGM). Among the many subsequent institutional responses included the FDA’s mandate that data generated from animal studies must precede work with human patients (Eakin 2015, 60). 7. For a discussion of the hierarchy of value assigned to patients of diverse backgrounds, see Kramer 1983. 8. Scanning techniques include X-ray, CT scan, and MRI. 9. Vertebrate dissection is often preceded by anatomy lessons involving other species that illustrate progressive stages within an evolutionary framework. Thus, prior to dissecting a fetal pig, students might first dissect an earthworm and then a crawfish. 10. See “Protesters Poster” at https://fbresearch.org/wp-content/uploads /2016/02/Poster_Resources.jpg, accessed January 2016. Also available for download on the NIH Website link to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna/servlet/detail/NLMNLM~1~1~101438472~153 147:Thanks-to-animal-research,-they-ll-#, accessed January 2016.

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11. One could perhaps argue that communication studies with non-human primates could qualify as research with a single animal. Consider, for instance, the gorilla named Koko. In some neuroscience labs where I have conducted research, individual postdoctoral students may work one-on-one with an individual monkey; comparative data may be generated solely by a practice known as borrowing another researcher’s monkey (I address this in chapter 5). 12. For in-depth works on animal activists in the United States, see Jasper and Nelkin 1991, 1992; Pike 2017. 13. For a meticulous accounting of animal names, see Gruen’s curated webpages for the first one hundred chimpanzees of the lab established by Robert Yerkes in 1925 and the last one thousand chimpanzees used in research in the United States, http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu/ and http://last1000chimps .com/, accessed November 2016. 14. An IACUC is an oversight committee mandated by law that assesses, approves, and monitors the ethical use of animals in research within a given institution. It is sometimes referred to as an “animal IRB [institutional review board].” IRBs are charged with human subjects research oversight. 15. I focus in more sustained fashion on animal care technicians in part III. 16. For an analysis of this monument, see Doss 2013. 17. This concern for warhorses surfaces, too, in fiction, theater, and film, as evidenced by the popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel, War Horse, which inspired a stage play adapted by Nick Stafford and the Handspring Puppet Company and, subsequently, a film directed by Steven Spielberg. 18. For a comprehensive catalogue of K-9 memorials to military, fire, police, and other rescue dogs, see http://www.cpwda.com/k9_monuments.htm and http://vetsadoptpets.org/militarywardogmemorials.html, accessed January 2016. 19. I know of only one U.S. public relations image that specifically references a lab animal’s work, and it is a poster produced, yet again, by the FBR that features two lab rats with the caption “Best supporting role in a medical drama”—an image that successfully obscures any reference to heroics or, for that matter, death. See http://fbresearch.org/store/, accessed January 2016. 20. See also the Swedish film Mitt liv som hund (“My Life as a Dog”) by Lasse Hallström (1985). The film focuses on a boy who identifies with Laika, the title referencing the fact that she died in space because no plans were made to bring her safely back to earth. The bodies of two other Russian space dogs, Belka and Strelka, were taxidermied and displayed publicly; similar plans were contemplated for Ham’s remains to be displayed at the Smithsonian. Instead, following necropsy by Air Force personnel, his skeleton was preserved and displayed at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and his fleshy remains were buried at the monument site in Alamogordo (Roach 2010, 160–63). I address similar practices involving contemporary lab animals’ remains in chapter 4. 21. As cited in http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/russian-scientists-buildmonument-to-honor-lab-rats#.uuWK4aYke, accessed February 2016; http://

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bioengineer.org/monument-to-lab-mice-mouse-knitting-a-dna-strand/ and https://www.fli.de/en/press/historical-exhibition/, accessed November 2016. 22. These are not necessarily the sole means of providing lab personnel with training in bioethics, legal codes of conduct, and local institutional requirements. Other training may well be imparted through workshops, lectures, and classwork, for example. The online tutorials I briefly describe here are best understood as a bureaucratized form of accountability through certification, a trend that became a mainstay of federal guidelines under the Obama administration in a wide range of contexts that lie well beyond science. 23. A system widely used in the United States is the CITI Program (Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative); see https://www.citiprogram .org/, accessed January 2016. 24. Rats are iconic figures in laboratory ethics training. Consider, for instance, the University of Utah’s Research Administrative Training Series (RATS), https://education.research.utah.edu/, and the IRB-Research Assessment Tool (RAT) of Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, whose documents feature a stylized silhouette of a rat, http://www.ethicsresearch.com/images /IRB_RAT_User_s_Guide.revised_3-11-05.pdf, accessed January 2016. 25. I am indebted to Stefan Helmreich for alerting me to this passage. See https://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/animal-welfare-act-quick-reference-guides, accessed January 2016. It is important to underscore that this sort of exceptionalism varies internationally. An especially well-known example involves protections applied to the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). For a recent discussion of debates over whether to extend welfare protections to all cephalopods see Nosengo 2011. 26. Coding—as encryption—is also a form of secrecy. I thank Alice Lyons for alerting me to this (see her poem “ ‘something permanent’ (for Eileen Gray),” 2013, installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, October 2013–April 2014, http://www.alicelyons.ie/work/something_permanent.html, accessed January 2016). As I describe elsewhere in this study, many naming practices involving lab animals actively obscure their individual identities. In professional conferences, for instance, one never names a monkey but instead refers to it as, say, “Baboon #17” (see Sharp 2013). 27. See https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/customer-support /technical-support/breeding-and-husbandry-support/mouse-identification, accessed January 2016; Inglis 1980, 51; Dickie 1975, 25. 28. Max Ritvo (1990–2016), whose cancer, Ewings sarcoma, defined a focus for his poetry, employs a naming system reminiscent of Stephanie’s in “Poem to My Litter.” Consider these stanzas: My genes are in mind, and not in the banal way That Man’s old genes are in the Beasts. My doctors split my tumors up and scattered them Into the bones of twelve mice. We give The mice poisons I might, in the future, want For myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball . . .

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I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children. I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2, But now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites. They don’t know they’re named of course . . . (Ritvo 2016) 29. During a preliminary presentation of these arguments, a colleague in neuroscience objected that “sacrifice” was an outdated term and that numerous journals now required that one described the act as “killing” in articles submitted for review. I have been unable to verify this statement, one which she subsequently retracted. Quite possibly, her initial objection signals an emergent trend. 30. OED Online, s.v. “sacrifice,” entry 4, “To kill (an experimental animal) for scientific purposes,” www.oed.com, accessed January 2016. 31. Interestingly, the OED Online provides an example from the satiric newspaper Punch (1850, XVII, 130/2) with the droll statement, “A newspaper advertisement announced that ‘A Professional gentleman is instructed to sacrifice three young sound Horses at half their cost.’ We wonder what deity horses could be sacrificed to?” (First entry under 3c., “To sell or get rid of at a sacrifice, esp. in commercial use. Also absol.” OED Online, www.oed.com, accessed January 2016. Italics in the original.) This entry and those noted in the next signal shifts in meaning, specifically where animals are concerned, from religious to commercial to scientific usage. 32. For a description of the spatial and temporal ordering of ritualized phrases of lab sacrifice that draws on Hubert and Mauss, see Lynch 1988, 275–79. 33. The etymologies of these two terms are distinct: “to sack” a laborer or, more commonly, “to be sacked” most likely refers to a fired laborer leaving his place of employment with his sack of tools (see Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “sack,” entry v.3, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sack, accessed January 2016). 34. This response comes naturally to me: in Madagascar, where I worked in the 1980s and 1990s, one is always careful to stoop or crouch before others of higher status—ranging from elders to rulers—to ensure that one’s head is beneath theirs, an action that serves as a silent acknowledgment of social hierarchy. 35. I should note, however, that “compassion fatigue” is emerging as a recognized category of experience among veterinarians and animal technicians (Ayl 2013). I address this in chapter 4. 36. This orientation informs a long-standing debate in laboratory science, embedded in the Three Rs (Russell and Burch 1959) approach, that I discuss below; for a summary of alternatives from three decades ago, see Gendin 1986, 34–46. 37. For a detailed discussion of the ramifications of this logic where human tissue samples are concerned, see Skloot’s study of the HeLa cell line (2010) and Banner on the Alder-Hay scandal in the United Kingdom (2014). I revisit this theme in chapter 5.

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38. Lynch notes that scientists in a neuroscience rat lab describe such an animal as a “good” or a “bad” one, where the latter either did not produce “good” data or “behaved in the inappropriate (docile) way . . . while it was alive.” A “good” animal was one who “could be treated as a standardized member of a cohort” (1988, 271, italics in original). 39. A similar logic surfaces elsewhere in contexts involving working animals. As a muleteer once explained to me, you can never fully retire a working mule, unlike a horse, because it will die within a year if it has nothing to do. 40. Haraway makes similar claims in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003a). 41. Lynch points out that sentience is “carefully screened from official accounts of the data and findings of biological research using animal subjects” (1988, 268–69). Again, though, this does not preclude recognition of what he describes as the “naturalistic” or “common sense” animal during everyday human-animal lab interactions. 42. I encountered a similar trend during my earlier research among xenotransplant researchers who make use of pigs. Pigs are widely regarded as “utilitarian” creatures raised almost exclusively for human consumption and butchered within the first year or two of life; as a result, few people in the food, farming, veterinary science, and research industries could tell me how long a pig could live (Sharp 2013, 2014). 43. For a detailed overview of macaque social structure written with research audiences in mind, see the web posting of the Primate Info Net, Library and Information Service of the National Primate Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets /entry/rhesus_macaque/behav, accessed February 2016. 44. Such practices, which I refer to as a form of “animal commons,” defines the focus of chapter 5. 45. This sentiment resonates in uncanny ways with the preference among lab animal caretakers to show predator-prey videos to lab monkeys, as described in chapter 2. Perhaps these videos demonstrate to the monkeys themselves the brutality of wild nature. 46. An alternative read of cribbing is that it evidences gastric distress associated with stress, as cited in http://www.parelli.com/horse-cribbing.html. Note, too, that cribbing is sometimes described as a form of “stereotypy,” a term used most often in reference to humans diagnosed with autism; see https://www .aspca.org/pet-care/virtual-pet-behaviorist/horse-behavior/cribbing (both accessed October 2015). 47. A lab worker’s sensitivity to animals is not limited to vertebrates; for an account of a researcher who monitored the emotions of his lab ants, see Lynch 1988, 280. On the methods employed in transforming chimps into research subjects, see Wieder 1980. 48. Because such positions are often regarded as requiring no formal training or former experience, the pay is low compared to the salaries of researchers and veterinarians.

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49. For a discussion of the values assigned to a researcher’s ability to hold, sooth, trick, cajole, disorient, or tickle an animal during painful or frightening procedures (several of which do not necessarily appear to calm the animal at all) see Lynch 1988, 281. 50. See, for example, Wieder 1980. Today, some animal technicians refer to this as the “One Health” approach of veterinary medicine, underscoring (somewhat erroneously) its focus on empathy as a means to anticipate and respond to an animal in distress. For discussions of the “One World, One Health” approach, see http://www.onehealthinitiative.com/, accessed January 2016; Cardiff, Ward, and Barthold 2008; Jordan and Lem 2014; Schwabe 1984. 51. Among the best known Platonic method examples is of a group of men chained together inside a cave, all of whom can see the shadows of figures dancing on the wall. This is their only reality until one man breaks free, steps outside the cave, and sees the source of the images—others moving figurines before a fire, their shadows then projected on the cave wall. First confused, the man soon comprehends the new reality, but when he returns to explain to the others what he has learned, they do not believe him and accuse him of being irrational (see Sorensen 1992, 108). 52. As one friend remarked, “It sounds like someone being released from prison,” although even ex-prisoners receive some follow-up attention, given that many must report to parole officers. 53. The same is true in medicine: new recruits to medical school have yet to be socialized to depersonalize patients. See Good 1994; Hafferty 1991; Klass 1987; Konner 1987.

chapter 4 1. For a sardonic, fictional parody of this concept in science, see Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1971). 2. For yet another analysis of moral contradictions inherent in oncology, see Livingston 2012. 3. The same might be said for animals too. Again, see Kotzwinkle 1971 for imaginative accounts of this. 4. Marmosets are small New World monkeys indigenous to Brazil. I return below to the use of marmosets in labs. For a detailed discussion of macaque personality, temperament, and social behavior within and across species see Capitanio 2004 and Godelier 2004, 325–26. 5. C. Buckmaster, personal communication, February 2018. 6. This shift to the center and the popularization of animal rights are evidenced in a flyer I encountered in an elementary school playground in my neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I was writing this chapter. It read: “THE HAMPSTER RIGHTS MOVEMENT / Want to save a hamster? / Then join the hamster rights movement! We meet Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at the park after school, if you can’t meet on any of those days become a part-time member! We will help baby hamsters find homes and celibrate [sic]

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holidays like annual hamster day! Free baby hamsters are also up for adoption so adopt one today to save a life and receive a free pets comic book! / Sighn [sic] here to become a member and save hamsters all over the world.” 7. The Anti-Defamation League provides a comprehensive overview of attacks throughout the University of California system by several radical animal rights groups, spanning 2006–2011, alongside those on other campuses between 1987 and 2009. See “Animal Rights Extremists Target the University of California,” archive.adl.org, accessed June 2016. 8. Such is not the case among those I have interviewed in the United Kingdom, where numerous people had firsthand experience or knew close colleagues who had faced break-ins and death threats. 9. For a case in point, see PETA’s web page “Help Animals by Watching Movies with Friends!” The list opens with a section on “Family Movies” that include Babe, Free Willy, and Charlotte’s Web. See http://www.peta.org/action /activism-guide/animal-rights-movies/, accessed June 2016. 10. As noted earlier, very few U.S.-based lab personnel reported direct contact with animal rights protesters. I suspect this may spring from a growing trend in activist communities to diversity their efforts: many groups have broadened their foci to encompass a wider range of concerns, including horse racing, cosmetic testing, the fur trade, meat industries, and “kill” shelters. Many posters today target children especially in an effort to rally their support in ending the use of captive animals in zoos and circuses. 11. Activists sometimes deface the latter, too, and the RAT/HER billboard stands out as a prime example, the image spray-painted over with the words, in all caps, “THE RAT WHO DESERVES THE SAME RESPECT AS ALL SENTIENT BEINGS” (S. B., personal communication). 12. As I was in the midst of writing this chapter, the tragically entwined stories of the seventeen-year-old lowland gorilla named Harambe housed at the Cincinnati Zoo and the three-year-old boy who fell into Harambe’s enclosure were unfolding on the news. Zoo personnel shot and killed Harambe and saved the child. Whereas the bulk of my conversations with lay people about the incident revealed struggles over the complexity of the ethical dilemmas involved (Which life was of greater value? Could the zoo have saved both lives? Who, if anyone, should be blamed for the incident—the child? The child’s mother? Zoo staff? Harambe?), during an interview the day after the news broke, an activist with three decades of field experience underscored that the story’s true value was that it demonstrated why zoos should not exist at all. This sentiment pulled me up short: as a parent I was disturbed by the images of a toddler being dragged by the leg through a pool of water by an adult gorilla. Yet my activist informant’s attention was focused elsewhere (as were many news stories). CNN, for instance, ran a series of stories about whom to blame, one of which included a photo of a child protester holding a placard that read “keep the brats out of the habitats” (Grinberg 2016). When I asked two lab employees during interviews what they thought of the incident, their responses focused on the fear the mother must have experienced, given this was not a

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“tame” but a formidable, “wild” animal, and the tragedy of the loss of life of an “intelligent” and “endangered” creature. 13. Henceforth, I will use “rescue” as a general term that also encompasses “adopted” and “rehomed.” I do so not in deference to activists but because it best reflects the moral, active decision to move lab animals out of labs instead of euthanizing them or shifting them to other research projects. 14. Again, see Lori Gruen’s websites The First 100 and The Last 1,000 at http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu/ and http://last1000chimps.com/. Accessed November 2016. 15. I delve into this more deeply in chapter 5. 16. I suspect that their statements are based on anecdotal and impressionist logic—that is, what they have heard from other colleagues or at professional conferences. I believe, too, that the primary source is a 2015 YouGov survey involving one thousand Americans that focused on the legal rights of animals in which questions about lab research were embedded in a haphazard (and, frankly, poorly conceived) assortment of others about the care of animals in a range of domains. Two of eight questions concerned the “smartness” of chimpanzees and dolphins, one addressed positive/negative opinions of “animal rights groups,” and two concerned pet ownership. In response to the question, “If you had to make a decision between supporting medical research and supporting animal rights, which one would you pick?” 51% chose medical research, 27% animal rights, and 22% responded “don’t know.” Male respondents outnumbered females in support of medical research, the reverse being true for animal rights. See “Majority endorse animal rights” April 21–23, 2015, https://today.yougov .com/news/2015/04/29/majority-endorse-animal-rights/, accessed June 2016. 17. It is less clear how the monkeys fared, given that animal technicians spend far more time in the company of lab animals and often even stay late or sleep in a lab to keep an eye on an ailing animal. Typically, researchers go home. During my previous research on artificial heart design, I encountered one lab where the director required his graduate students to remain and care for their respective calves following the surgical implantation of heart devices. Students learned that researcher and calf were, in the words of one, “tethered” to one another, and that it was improper to abandon an animal to someone else’s care following an invasive surgery of one’s own doing. Students not only kept vigil beside “their” animals but used this time to collect data throughout the recovery period. Two who were trained in this lab expressed great nostalgia for this period of their professional lives. They then introduced similar practices once they set up their own labs. 18. Citations referencing supporting literature have been omitted; for a full list see Ball 2006. For government and professional guidelines that inform Ball’s overview, see AVMA 2001; USDA 2002, 2004. 19. Second ellipsis in original. 20. Buckmaster holds a PhD in neuroscience. 21. Haldane was intrigued by how the human body responded to gas exposure, and he often used himself, and sometimes his son, as experimental subjects.

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He was especially interested in mining disasters. Haldane is credited with inventing the gas mask used during WWI and, based on his experiments with animals, he also devised an early version of a decompression chamber for deep sea divers (Goodman 2007). 22. There has been a significant upsurge since the 1960s (Ashton Macfarlane, literature word search and personal communication). 23. Indeed, Alicia has noticed a standardized practice. In guidelines from Sylvania State University, “the lower right position on each rack is designated for a sentinel cage for that rack.” Source: Penn State Rodent Health Policy, http:// www.research.psu.edu/arp/animal-health-welfare/rodent-health-surveillancedisease-prevention#animalquarantine; one encounters similar guidelines and wording through the University of Washington (http://depts.washington.edu /auts/Specific%20Pathogen%20Free%20Training.pdf), Florida International University (http://research.fiu.edu/facilities/acf/sop/sop-501-02.pdf) and Duke University (https://vmw-lmsc.duhs.duke.edu/production/DUHS_Common /DLAR/SOPs/RHMP_Sentinel_Animals_SOP(DLAR-VET-203).pdf). I thank Ashton Macfarlane for his research on sentinel practices. All sites accessed April 2016. 24. For a discussion of animal personalities, see Ogden 2012. 25. “The Big Animal Research Debate” occurred in 2013 and involved debating societies drawn from over thirty universities. The motion under consideration was whether all forms of animal research should be banned, and it was inspired by the efforts of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice (CASJ) and an article written by Dan Lyons of the University of Sheffield. Source: www.animalresearchdebate.org, accessed June 2016. 26. Susan Iliff (2002) offers an important overview from around the world of lab animal memorials sponsored by pharmaceutical corporations and other research institutions. I consider the relevance of these memorials in my concluding chapter. 27. Some readers may find the accounts that follow in this section disturbing because they involve the dismemberment of dead animals’ bodies, so they may wish to skip to the chapter’s conclusion. 28. Note that Lynch likewise describes decapitating rats and saving their brains in a neuroscience lab, and how unwanted body parts are then discarded (1988).

chapter 5 1. See Council 2011. 2. The HeLa cell line is perhaps the best known, and infamous, example of this; see Landecker 2000; Skloot 2010. 3. See “ASU’s [Arizona State University’s] Position on the Importance of Animal Study in Research,” which proposes “responsibility” as a fourth R (https://researchintegrity.asu.edu/animals, accessed August 2016).

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4. For a discussion of the differences inherent in sharing versus hoarding and of the relevance of trust, see Tilly on “how to hoard opportunities” (1999, chapter 5). 5. The Bermuda principles (forged during a professional gathering hosted in 1996 on that island) address the public release of data derived from the DNA sequencing of the human genome. The three associated principles involve the rapid release of data to the public, the immediate publication of completed sequences, and the assertion that the entire sequence be freely accessible to the public for both the welfare of science and society (WellcomeTrust 1997). 6. Most notable is the report known as “UPSIDE: Uniform Principle for Sharing Integral Data and Materials Expeditiously” (Cozzarelli 2004). 7. The CASIMIR meeting, sometimes referred to as the “Rome Agenda,” was a project in which Schoenfield et al. were key participants. CASIMIR stands for “Coordination and Sustainability of International Mouse Informatics Resources.” Funded by the EU, its charge includes “life sciences, genomics and biotechnology for health” (see http://www.casimir.org.uk/, accessed October 2016). For an overview of the meeting’s recommendations, see Schofield et al. 2009, especially 171–73 and footnotes 1–9; see also http://tinyurl.com/12hyvq, accessed July 2016. 8. By 2009 Nature was already doing so; see “Sharing Principle” 2009. 9. See http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/database-protocol/, accessed July 2016. 10. For a debate concerning the statement that “the mouse community does not share its strains” paired with an overview of hindrances, see Behringer 2009. See also Taylor’s (2007) discussion of new ethical guidelines for the sharing of human embryonic stem cells by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), in which he argues that “mutual trust among researchers” . . . “promotes innovation” in a field of “genuine public benefit.” 11. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR for short, might well render this challenge obsolete. CRISPR is a genetic editing technique that provides researchers with a means to alter an organism’s genome by simultaneously adding, replacing, or deleting (“knocking out”) multiple aspects of its DNA by using, for instance, the enzyme Cas9 or “guide RNA” (gRNA) to do so. The technique, sometimes described in lay terms as “molecular scissors,” is a far more rapid and comprehensive method of gene editing than heretofore existed, and it bears the potential to alter significantly the course of xenotransplant research, a field long stymied by the immunological challenges transpecies grafts pose. See, for example, Yang et al. 2015. Thus far, its lucrative potential has entangled animals in assertions of proprietary ownership. For example, as Martz reports in an article on the application of CRISPR/Cas9 in efforts among Yang et al. at Harvard University to “knock out” sixty-two porcine genes involved in the encoding of PERVs, “Harvard University holds issued patents covering the CRISPR technology used in this study, and has filed patents covering the PERV deletion and other

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aspects of xenotransplantation. Licensing discussions are ongoing between the university and eGenesis,” the latter a spin-off company founded by Harvard investigators (2015). 12. The procedures involved here are complex: at this time, grafts were typically implanted abdominally or elsewhere to test immunological responses, and thus the porcine kidney did not replace one of the baboon’s natal kidneys. Under such circumstances, it is relatively easy to imagine how and why the same baboon might be used in a range of experiments because the implanted graft could conceivably be surgically removed at a later date, assuming the monkey did not die of complications associated with, say, wound infection or hyperacute rejection of the implanted tissue. 13. In milk production, offspring are usually separated from their mothers soon after birth; whereas female offspring might be fed formula and raised to be milk producers themselves, male offspring are often euthanized at birth. 14. For similar arguments from caretaker literature, see Buckmaster 2015a, 2015b. 15. Wilke likens this relationship to that of physicians and their patients. 16. I thank Jen Van Tiem for her comments regarding this idea of the human multiple in lab science. 17. See https://www.bovine-elite.com/directory2016.asp and http://cattle visions.com/index.php, accessed July 2016. I wish to clarify that the bulls whose names I list here were still very much alive when I consulted this catalogue.

conclusion 1. NC3Rs, “Five Reasons Why Zebrafish Make Excellent Models,” April 10, 2014, https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/news/five-reasons-why-zebrafish-makeexcellent-research-models. These arguments share similarities with those proposed for why pigs should replace NHPs in xenotransplant research; see Sharp 2014. 2. See the NC3Rs web page, “Who We Are and What We Do,” https://www .nc3rs.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do, accessed November 2016. 3. For an account of similar arguments made in aquaculture in defense of salmon, see Lien 2015. 4. This phrasing evokes the title All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (1972) (alongside the Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” from which his various book titles derive). As I note earlier, Heriott is a favorite among animal technicians. 5. Karin Brulliard, The Washington Post, August 31, 2016, https://www .washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/08/30/confirmed-your-dogreally-does-get-you/; James Gorman, The New York Times, August 29, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/science/with-dogs-its-what-you-sayand-how-you-say-it.html?_r=0; Nell Greenfield Boyce, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 30, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2016/08/30/491935800/their-masters-voices-dogs-understand-toneand-meaning-of-words.

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6. See, for instance, the online call to dog owners from the Emory Center for Neuropolicy, http://www.neuropolicy.emory.edu/Participate/index.html (accessed November 2016); for a discussion of MRI readings of unrestrained, alert dogs, see Clark 2012; Friese and Clarke 2012. 7. After Basso 1996. 8. See https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/grimacescales, accessed November 2016.

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Index

activism, animal, 2, 13, 20, 23–25, 48–49, 71, 73, 113–14, 162, 163–64, 166–68, 202, 235; rescue work, 42, 43, 48, 66, 68, 70–75, 114–15, 164, 167–68, 181, 198, 201, 203, 210, 220–36, 235–36, 244–48; in Australia 165–66; in the United Kingdom 14, 23–25, 68–69, 116, 163, 207, 208, 212 adoption, of animals. See also rescue affection, limits of, 63–66 affective politics, 67–74 Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania (AACT), Australia, 165–66 Agricultural Bill of 2016, 47 Alternatives to Laboratory Animals (ATLA), 208 American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS), 144 American Humane Society, 20 American Sign Language (ASL) and non-human primate communication, 87–87 Ames Research Center, 83 Andics, Attila, 229 animal,10, 14–16, 18, 120–21, 126, 217–18, 226, 233; depersonalization, 59–60, 114–26; distinctions, 1–2, 7, 15; encounter value, 1, 14–25, 217– 18; enrichment, 144, 146, 169, 232; erasure, 114–26; exceptionalism, 31, 66–67, 155–223, 172–92; favoritism,

41–49, 159; generics, 113–26, 172; genetic refinement, 16–17; handling, 55, 59, 231; heroes, public lives of, 115–19; housing, 2, 4,84, 142; as human proxies, 20–23; intimacy with humans, 1, 7, 15, 17, 33–104, 217–18; lives and deaths, 107–54; management and training, 145, 196– 97;; moral consideration of, 21; multiples, 18; naïve, 196–97, 203, 212; naming, 122–26, 138–39, 173–75, 193–94, 219; “object status” of, 16; overabundance, 203; patenting, 199, 202, 205; psychology, 232–33; rare or remaindered, 198, 203, 209–15; rescue/adopting/rehoming, 168, 177, 178–81, 198, 200, 214–15; reuse of dead, 198, 216–20, 222; sharing and scarcity, 195–212, 216-23; sentimentality, 219, 221; as singular creatures, 200–1; trust, 59; value and worth, 36–39, 112, 217–18; wild versus lab, 52–53, 140–41, 143, 178, 217 animal commons, 195–223, 215–22 animal industrial complex, 16 Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 163 Animal care technicians, 2, 18, 93, 99, 125, 128, 138, 170, 175, 195, 231, 233; in academia, 171, 173–75; animal welfare and, 63, 77–78, 95–98, 142–43, 146–47, 152, 159–61, 176– 81, 215; biographies, 66, 170; burden,

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Animal care technicians (continued) 28–29, 68, 94, 100–2, 157; burnout, 100–1, 170; characterization of, 166–67; language used by, 12–13, 59, 127–28, 176; love and, 169–70; memorial work, 119, 138–40, 154, 182–83, 186, 190–91; pets, 181, 64, 182; social stigma of being, 162–64, 166–68 Animal Planet, 96, 101 Animal Welfare Act of 1966 (AWA), 24, 35, 46–49, 70, 84, 88, 121, 147 Animals in War Memorial, London, 116, 118 Anti-Defamation League, 163 anti-vivisection societies, 21, 24, 46; Anti-Vivisection League, United Kingdom, 114; Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden, 24. See also activism, animal; vivisection Aquinas, Thomas, 21 artificial reproductive technologies (ART), 16 Aristotle, 21 Arluke, Arnold, 17–18, 55, 94 100–1, 111, 128–29, 140, 153, 162, 194 Australia, activism 165–66 Baby Fae, 211 baboons, 28, 64, 89, 102, 135, 147, 191, 211–12, 216, 221, 249, 254, 262, 265–66, 282–83 Bacon, Francis, 21 Banner, Michael, 26, 109, 255 Bateson, Gregory, 15, 102, 243 Bayliss, William, 24 Beidelman, Thomas, 6, 8, 159, 227, 243 Benedict, Burton, 40, 51, 63, 245 Berger, John, 1, 2, 77, 82, 95,182 Berns, Gregory, 4, 229–30 “Big Animal Research Debate,” 179 Big Data, 220 biobanking, 135, 197–98, 200–1, 204– 5, 207–9, 216–17, 219–22; as futures market, 204; human, 204–6; mouse repositories, 205, 216; geneticallyaltered (GA) mice, 207–8; sharing

principle of, 204–8; hoarding and, 205 biocapital, 16–17, 53, 101, 210, 217, 219, 223 bioengineering, 5–6, 17, 28, 35, 56, 141, 202, 232 bioethics, 2–3, 7–9, 20, 49, 64, 149–150, 170, 195–96, 202, 204, 212, 232, 237, 254 biography of things, 10 Birke, Lynda, 17–18, 55, 94, 100–1, 111, 128–29, 140, 153, 194 black box, of science, 35, 53, 183, 214, 226 Blue Cross of the United Kingdom, 116, 117 Blum, Deborah, 82–84, 93 boundary work, 6–8; and humananimal encounters 14–18 bovine idiom, 15, 40 breeding, selective, 36, 53–54, 57–58, 160; vendors, 53–54 Brown Dog Affair 24–25 Buckmaster, Cindy, 4, 162–63, 174–75, 259, 262 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 69 Burch, R. L., 26, 49, 136, 147, 151, 255 Butler, Robert, 78–81, 84, 89, 249, 251 canine. See dogs Carbone, Larry, 18–19 care and caring, 3–4, 7, 14, 18–20, 84, 97, 112, 215–16, 151, 169–71, 195, 221–22; humane, 140–49; logic of, 3, 84,111–12, 151; in practice, 93; reimagining moral frameworks of, 149–52; settings, 109; writing about, 93. See also compassion caretakers; animal care technicians CASIMIR report, 204–5, 261 cats, 47, 64–65, 68, 86, 181, 206, 245–46 Charles River Laboratories, 53–54 charismatic species, 30–31, 48, 67–68, 70, 74, 162–64, 219, 224–25, 247; the “other” animal, 224–41. See also cats; dogs; non-human primates (NHPs); ferrets; zebrafish

Index chimpanzees, 116, 135–36, 140, 168, 209, 211, 246, 249–50, 251, 253, 256, 259 Choose Cruelty Free (CCF), Australia 165–66 “Circulating Reference” (Bruno Latour), 9 Clarke, Adele, 4, 17–18, 40, 55, 59, 128, 139, 147, 263 conditioning of animals, 68, 75, 80, 102 Collins, Frances, 48 commons, in science, 195–-222; creative 206, 220 compassion, 35, 113, 138–39, 142–43, 153–54, 163, 167–86; care and, 142, 153, 168–71, 183; ethos of, 170, 186. See also compassion fatigue compassion fatigue, 35, 158, 215, 244, 255 “Concentration Camp for Dogs,” 42–44, 46 Coombs, Robert H., 131–32 Cooper, Melinda, 20, 204 CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), 261–62 “Crossing Over” sculpture 238 Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, United Kingdom 24 cryopreservation, 204, 206, 221 culling, 12, 30–31, 36, 53, 57, 63, 113, 160, 203, 231 Das, Veena, 11, 12 data banking, 216, 222 De la Bellacasa, Maria Puig, 3–4 death: of animals, 1, 6–7, 12–13, 18–19, 30–31, 36, 42–47, 58–59, 107–31, 157–59, 163, 186–89, 192–94, 200, 207, 228, 236–37, 252, 258; diverted, 203; good death, 134–36, 148–49; humane, 67, 152–54; innovation and, 111–15; language, 236; as moral contract, 134–36, 167, 169; profundity of, 107; purpose of animal, 112– 13; speaking of in a laboratory setting, 107, 126, 182, 228. See also

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289

death talk; memorials; rescue; sacrifice; welfare death talk, 6, 7, 12–13, 42, 108, 113, 126, 130, 138; as taboo, 157 Department of Defense, 47, 90 Descartes, René, 21 DelVecchio Good, Mary-Jo, 6, 41–42, 157, 244 dogs, 19, 28, 29–30, 38, 41–42, 49, 54, 67–68, 72–74, 86, 121, 135, 166, 173, 228–29, 241; adopting/ rehoming/ rescue, 48, 66, 68, 70–75, 167, 214, 224, 235; beagles, 39, 43, 52, 67–75, 121, 135, 167, 214, 222; beagles, battle over lab use of, 70–71; beagles, history of, 71–73, 235; breeding for laboratories, 42–49, 69–70; cost of using, 70; enrichment, 74; iconography of dogs in science, 68–70; labto-vet school donation trade, 72–73, 228; mongrels, 43, 74; MRIs and, 228–30, 235; relationship with humans, 55, 73; sacrificing, 73; sentience, 50, 60, 68, 218, 228–29; sentiments regarding, 48–49, 65, 67–69, 73–74; social worth, 45; stolen, 43–46, 68; stray, 48, 69 dogs, named lab animals: Astro, 65; Callie, 230; Kady, 230; Laika, 116, 118–19; Lancer, 43, 46, 75; Lucky, 42, 75; Marmaduke, 65; Nancy, 70–71; Peanuts, 45; Pepper, 43, 45, 46, 75; Reds, 43, 46, 75; Sid, 70–71 domestication, 37, 51–55, 62, 78; consequences of, 41; definition of, history of, 53–54; pathways to, 51, 54; primate, 92–102; species choice and preference, 52 drug trials, human, 149–50 emotional, attachments, 35–36, 100, 159, 177, 203, 217–18; detachment, 1, 42, 56, 121–22, 174, 218; detachment, mastering, 56–60; distress, animal, 36–37; responses, 36, 157– 58. See also empathy; exceptionalism; affection; affective politics

290

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Index

empathy, 3–4, 32, 38, 56, 63, 166, 178, 224–27, 232, 237, 244–45, 257, Enlightenment, 21 enrichment, 30, 36; active versus inanimate, 89–90; down time stimulation, 30, 77, 86, 90–91, 94–95; primate, 77, 84, 86, 88–91, 94–95, 100–2, 137, 160, 179; staff, 65. See also manipulanda; welfare Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, 229 erasure, of animals, 114–26, 151–54, 237. See also invisibility; figureground reversal; ways of seeing ethics, 49, 195, 237; first person virtue, 159; morality versus, 7–9; profitdriven, 199. See also bioethics; ordinary ethics ethnography, 2, 5–10, 15, 18, 26–27, 78, 100, 112, 129, 147, 159, 226–31; moral dilemmas of,108–111 euthanasia, 12, 35, 38, 52, 57, 59, 65, 72, 99–100, 127, 134, 138, 146–47, 158, 160, 168, 171, 176–77, 179, 187–88, 194, 201, 203, 209–10, 214, 236 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 15, 40 everyday ethics, 8–11. See also ordinary ethics exchange systems, 40 exceptionalism: animal, 31, 66–67, 155–223, 172–92; eclectic forms of, 177–92; sanctioned forms of, 172–75 experimental animal science, moral entanglements in, 1–32, 38; history of, 20–23 FBI, 163 ferrets, 121, 168, 177, 189, 215, 241; adopting/rehoming, 180, 222; preparing for research, 172–73; Reo, 168; Rolo, 168 figure-ground reversal, 10–11 food industry, 16, 108, 121, 133, 201 Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), 110–11, 114, 134

Franklin, Sarah, 16–17, 40, 53, 199, 201 Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Germany 119 Friese, Carrie, 4, 17–18, 40, 55, 59, 128, 139, 147, 263 Galen of Pergamon, 21 gene editing. See CRISPR; genomic science generics, animal, 54, 113–26, 172, 199, 202, 205. See also modeling; patents genome cryobanking, 206 genomic science, 16, 135–36, 197, 205, 219, 261–62 Giorgini, Frank, artist, 184 Goodall, Jane, 140, 233 Gorilla Foundation, 87 Grandin, Temple, 147, 247 Great Ape Project, 48 grief, 6, 35, 138–39, 160, 232–33, 237 grimace scales of rodents, 233–34 Gruen, Lori, 18, 225, 227, 246, 250, 253, 259 Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, 49,196 Ham the Space Chimp, 116, 119 Haraway, Donna, 15, 17, 40, 41, 50, 70, 121, 126, 199–200, 215–18, 221, 256 harm, 15, 19, 30, 35–39, 75, 83, 85, 99–101, 135-36, 143, 149, 151, 157–58, 162, 167, 175, 193-214 Harper’s Weekly, 22–23, 25 Harvey, William, 68 Hearst, William Randolph, 46 Heart of a Dog (Mikhail Bulgakov), 69 Herriot, James, 127, 170 horses, 45, 53–54, 61–62, 66, 68, 116–19, 121, 133, 142–43, 148, 228; memorials, 116, 119 Hubert, Henri, 40 human-animal relations. See interspecies encounters Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), 42, 46, 48 Humphrey, Nicholas, 80–81

Index hydrophobia, studies, 21–23, 68 identification systems for animals, 20, 37, 57–59, 69–70, 122–26, 173, 175, 196, 224; ear notches 37, 173; microchips, 73, 73, 157, 173, 221, 248; numbering, 37, 57–58, 122, 211–12, 221, 254; tags, 157; toe and tail clipping 37, 57–58, 122, 173, 225–26; tattoos, 37, 74–75,122, 157, 173, 221, 248. See also naming practices Illif, Susan, 119, 237 Ingold, Tim, 14–15, 18, 40 Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Russia 119–120 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs), 9, 35, 115, 119, 141, 143, 148, 158, 170, 184, 195–96, 216–17, 220, 248, 253 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), 27, 119, 149–50, 217, 253, 253; informed consent process, 27, 150 interspecies encounters, 1–4, 7–18, 40–74,90–100, 124–29, 134–49, 163–68, 177–81, 192–93, 209, 218–33, 241; prior experience with animals, 63–67, 232, 237 interspecies intimacy, 35–46; 54–56, 74–75; mastering detachment, 56–60 invisibility, 7–8, 12, 19, 227; of lab animals, 119–26. See also erasure; figure-ground reversal; ways of seeing Jackson, Michael, 9, 107, 227, 231, 236 Jackson Labs, 54 Kant, Immanuel, 21 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 15 killing, 4, 31, 36, 58, 126, 138, 228, 231; art of, 108; the good death, 148-52; humane, 111, 113, 128, 136, 147, 153; laboratory lexicon of, 127–31, 236; moral logic of, 113; numbers of animals in labs killed annually, 108; qualification of, 128. See also death; euthanasia; sacrifice Kleinman, Arthur, 109, 112, 153

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Klüver, Heinrich, 78–79, 81, 89 knowledge commons, 206 Koch, Lene, 10, 99–100, 124, 187, 217 Koch, Robert, 21 Kohn, Eduardo, 3, 226 Koko the gorilla 86–87 Kopytoff, Igor, 10, 114, 185, 201 laboratories: animal housing, 99–100; encounters, intimacy of, 55–74, 163; hierarchies of need, 171–75; public face of research, 165–66; sanctioned/ taboo speech, 11–14, 157, 228; sanctioned, 11–14; sentimental structure of, 30, 35–75, 148–49; moral economy of, 131–34 laboratory personnel: Aaron, 138, 147–48; Alicia, 56–60, 63, 171, 175, 176; Amar, 190–91; Cassandra, 169; Chen, 195–99, 203, 206, 212, 216, 220–21; Corrine, 190–91; Cosmo, 135; David, 159; Derrick, 224–25; Douglas, 137–41, 147, 159; Eric D., 92; Esteban, 115, 132–33, 137, 147; Felix, 187–88; Jaime, 60–62, 212–13; James, 135–36, 151; Katie, 134–35; Marta, 187–88; Mary, 179; Mattie, 190–92; Maureen, 213, 221; Michael, 213, 221; Patrick, 135–36, 151; Paul, 212–13; Rose, 59–60, 63, 75, 146–47; Rosen, 195–99, 203, 206, 212, 216, 220–21; Sally, 213, 221; Samantha, 66–67, 135; Sarah, 135–36; Sasha, 149–50; Sondra, 145–46; Stephanie, 123–24; Susan, 73, 141, 159; Tess, 182; Tom, 190; Ursula, 126–27, 131; Will, 67 labor hierarchies, 3, 11–14, 18, 23–25 Laika the Soviet Space Dog, 116, 118–19 Lambek, Michael, 2, 8–11, 227, 243 Latour, Bruno, 8–10, 128 Law, John, 9 Leach, Edmund, 15, 17, 40, 192 Lederer, Susan, 18, 20, 24, 37, 46, 70, 244 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 40, 68, 192

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Life magazine, 42–47, 74 lively economies, 199 Lock, Margaret, 16, 131 Locke, John, 21 Lutz, Catherine, 41, 88–89 Lynch, Michael, 122, 125, 127, 129, 139, 147 macaques, 49, 52, 60–62, 65, 77, 92–102, 121, 132–33, 135, 137, 140, 147, 158–59, 184–85, 190–91, 212–13, 216; rhesus, 38–39, 61, 66–67, 77–81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 93–94, 132–33, 168, 173, 178 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 10 manipulanda, 85–86, 95, 98–99, 157, 172. See also enrichment Marks, Jonathan, 50–51 marmosets, 89, 101, 122, 135, 159, 178–79, 249, 257 Matania, Fortunino, artist, 116–17 Mattingly, Cheryl, 8, 42, 109–10, 159, 194 Mauss, Marcel, 40 Mayeri, Rachel, 102–4 memorials, 24–25, 31, 116–19, 136–40, 168, 181–92, 194, 237–40, 253, 260, 270; cherished dead, 189–92; memorial walls, 182–83; remains and relics, 185–89, 194; trophies, 188–89, 193. See also monuments mice, 52, 54, 58–63, 65, 120-21, 143, 197; biobanking, 203–7, 220–21; Grimace Scale, 234; as lab domesticate, 53; memorials, 119-20, 238–40, 184; mouse fanciers, 53–55; patented, 53–54, 143, 219; poem to, 254–55; stress behaviors, 247; killing and preservation, 57–60,107, 204. See also rodents Michael, Mike, 100, 140 modeling, human–animal, 1, 6, 15, 19, 37–41, 49–55, 63–64, 68, 73–75, 82, 99, 113, 124–26, 130, 135, 181, 195, 200, 208, 211, 220, 225, 244, 262 Mol, Annemarie, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 36, 77, 92, 109, 111–12, 121, 125,

129, 153, 157, 217, 226, 250, 255, 261 monkeys. See non-human primates. See also baboons; macaques; marmosets Monument to Laboratory Rats and Mice, Russia, 120 Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Russia, 118 Monument to the Little Brown Dog, United Kingdom 25 morality, 6–7, 32, 237; consideration of animals, 21; creativity, 201; entanglements, 1–32; ethics versus, 7–9; everyday, 5, 8–14; imaginary, 8; laboratories, 8, 18–19, 159, 240–41; moral flexibility, 216; morality in the making, 227; scientific, 2, 108, 197; theoretical interest in, 8; worlds, laboratories as, 240–41 Moser, Ingunn, 92, 153 mourning, 6, 35, 109, 138–39, 154, 160, 182–83, 227, 232, 237; wakes for monkeys, 138–39, 237. See also death, memorials; monuments MRIs, 228–230, 235 multiple, the animal, 10,12, 18, 113, 125, 217, 219 mutualism, 52–54, 60–63 naming practices for animals, 122–26, 138–39, 173–75, 193–94, 219 NASA, 83–84, 116 Nash, June, 15 National Academy of Sciences, 205 National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS), United Kingdom, 25, 70 National Centre for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animal Research (NC3Rs), United Kingdom, 225, 234 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 47, 69, 204–5, 220 National Research Council, 48, 69 necropsy, 12, 36, 100, 126, 134–35, 140, 187, 201 Needham, Rodney, 39

Index New England Primate Research Center, 48 non-human primates (NHPs), 19, 36–38, 48–50, 67, 75–104, 135, 171, 211, 241; baboons, 89, 135, 147, 191, 211–12, 216, 221; boundary blurring, 82; breeding, 140, 213; Cebus monkeys, 79; chimpanzees, 48–49, 50, 64, 74, 76, 78, 82–83, 90, 135–36, 140, 209, 211; communication, teaching, 50, 87; domestication, lab, 94–100; downtime stimulation, 77, 86, 90–91, 94–95; empathy, 84–86; enrichment, 77, 85–86, 88–91, 100– 2, 137, 160, 179; ethics of use, 64, 48; expense, 64, 140, 178, 211; gorillas, 48, 86–87; housing, 77, 85, 94–95, 146, 158, 233, 235; as human proxies, 51–52, 78, 83; Java monkeys, 79; lab monkeys, distinction, 133–34; lemurs, 79; living spaces, 95–102, 160, 179; macaques, 49, 52, 60–62, 65, 77, 92–102, 121, 132–33, 135, 137, 140, 147, 158–59, 184–85, 190, 191, 212–13, 216; macaques, rhesus, 38–39, 61, 66–67, 77–81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 93–94, 132–33, 168, 173, 178; making of, 78; marmosets, 89, 122–23, 135, 159, 178–80; memorial projects, 184–85, 186–89, 191, 238; primate psychological well-being (PWB), 85; rescue and retirement, 179–80, 235 sacrificing, 137–40, 179, 187–89; sentience, 38, 60, 64, 77; sharing, 140, 210–13, 195–209, 216–19, 221–22; social habits, 140; visual media, 78–104; “think like a,” 56, 62, 104, 148; training, 60–63; wakes, 138–39, 160; welfare, 64, 213, 92–102; non-human primates, named lab animals: Abel, 83–84; Annie, 137–38, 159; Austin, 82–83; Baboon #3, 212; Baboon #7, 212; Baboon #17, 211–12, 216, 221; Baker, 83–84; Buster, 137; Darwin, 137, 159; Festus, 122–23; Gabrielle, 89; Ham

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the Space Chimp, 116, 119; Hatty, 61; Hercules, 89; Koko, 86–87; 125; Moses, 123; Nemo, 189; Nimrod, 189, 192; Perseus, 212–13, 219, 221; Rufus, 60–62, 212–13, 219, 221; Sarah, 76, 78; Sherman, 82–83; Spartacus, 132–33, 147; Xena, 89 Noske, Barbara, 16 Novak, Melinda, 88–89 numbering. See identification systems Oncomouse, 219 One Health, 257 ordinary or everyday ethics, 2, 8–9, 11, 227 organ transplants, 5–6, 69, 130–131, 183, 188, 202, 226–27; cadaveric human-to-human, 5; memorials to donors, 183–84; monkeys in, 209, 211–12; pigs, 209–11 Pasteur, Louis, 21–23, 25, 68; hydrophobia studies, 21–23, 68 Pasteur Institute, 24 pastoral societies, 15, 40–41; Nuer, 15, 40 patents, 54, 113-26, 191, 172, 205, 202, 205 Patterson, Francine “Patty,” 87 Pavlov, Ivan, 68 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 48, 114, 163–64, 246, 248, 258 pets: classroom, 180, 214; house, 31, 38, 41, 51, 55, 57, 63–72, 95, 121-23, 135, 148, 153, 214, 245, 247–48, 259; lab, 133, 168, 214, 229, 233; ownership outside the lab, 65–67, 135, 177, 182, 185, 223, 231; photos of, 182; stolen, 42–48 Phinizy, Coles, 43–46, 69 photographing lab animals, 181–82, 185, 194 pigs and piglets, 51, 99, 124–25, 151, 166, 173–74, 177, 187; Arnie, 128; classification of, 10, 64, 124–25; fetal, 51, 67; human proximity, 51; as

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pigs and piglets (continued) research subjects, 10; sentience, 50; sharing, 209–10; xeno science and, 209–10, 216, 222 Planet of the Apes, 87–88, 89, 96; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 88 Pols, Jeannette, 92, 153 Porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERVS), 209–11 Premack, David, 76, 78 primate. See non-human primates (NHPs) Primate Cinema, 102–3 proxies, animal, 20-23. See also modeling public awareness, 37, 46, 65, 68, 74, 110–11, 163, 202, 208 quantitative index, 125, 127 rabbits, 134–35, 141, 168, 195–96, 203, 220; Gypsy, 168; Humphrey, 191–92 rabies. See hydrophobia rats, 52, 54–55, 63, 65, 82, 107, 113, 121-47, 173–80, 189, 197, 215; killing, 59, 107; memorials, 120, 184; RAT/Her billboard, 110, 165–66. See also rodents redemption. See salvation rehoming, of animals. See rescue rescue/adoption/rehoming, of animals, 42, 43, 48, 66, 68, 70–75, 79, 114–15, 164, 167–68, 177-81, 198, 200–1, 203, 210, 214–15, 220–36, 235–36, 244–48; as escaping death, 201. See also activism; welfare research, compliance, 3; funding, 202–3, 210–11; in vivo versus in vitro, 204, 208 See also Institutional Review Boards (IRBs); Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs); welfare; labor hierarchies research scientists, 3, 11–14, 18, 23–25, 134, 170, 187–88; postdoctoral students, 27, 29, 47–48, 60, 93–94, 98–100, 115, 121, 125–26, 132, 139–40, 145–46, 152, 171, 174–75,

186, 189, 194, 211–13, 221, 236, 253; novice, 39, 56–60, 63, 127 Rhesus Project, 83–84 Richardson, Ruth, 162 risk, outsourcing of, 20 Robbins, Joel, 19 rodents, 19, 49, 63, 206; breeding, 53–54, 57–58, 65; colony management, 54; cryopreservation, 204–5, 207–8, 221; genetically–altered (GA), 53–54, 121, 207–8; handling, 57–58, 145; memorials to, 239–40; mice, 52–54, 57–58, 121, 141, 159, 176, 178, 195, 205, 241; mouse repositories, 205, 216; patenting, 54 205; rats, 54, 63, 64, 110–11, 116, 121, 123–27, 129, 131, 147, 166, 180, 233, 241; sacrificing, 57–60, 126–27, 129, 131, 147; vivaria, 39, 53, 57, 145, 171, 176–78, 180, 189–90, 201, 203, 222, 222–23. See also identification systems; mice; sentinel; rabbits; rats rodents, named lab animals: Arthur, 168; Casey, 24–25; Harriette and Harry, 123–24; Oncomouse, 219 Rogers, Fred, 87 Rouse, Carolyn, 42, 150 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), United Kingdom, 205–8, 220, 244 Rumbaugh, Duane, 82–83, 249 Russell, W. M. S., 26, 49, 136, 147, 151, 255 sacrifice or “sac,” 2, 17, 31, 35, 57–60, 73,105–54, 126–27, 129, 131–32, 157–94, 166–68, 222, 236; definition, 128–29, 131, 139; trope of, 126–40 salvation, human, 72, 130, 160, 182–83, 194, 201 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, 82–83 scarcity, 31, 130, 198, 202–4, 209-22 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 3, 9, 10, 17 sentimental structure: affect and, 39–42; of laboratories, 30, 35–75

Index sentience, 38, 50, 60, 68, 225, 244, 218, 228–29; dog, 50, 60, 68, 218, 228–29; non-human primate, 38, 60, 64, 77–89 sentinels, 161, 203, 214, 260; origin in science, 175; preferential treatment, 176–77; as standardized exception, 175–77 sharing lab animals, 195–209, 211–12, 216–23; ethos of, 198–209; origins in science, 202–4; politics of, 199–200 shelters, “no kill” 181, 224 Shukin, Nicole, 16, 100 Singer, Peter, 170 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), 43, 48, 114 Space Race, 50, 116 species preference, 42–49, 63–64, 135, 141, 159, 169 species substitution, 113–14. See also modeling speech: sanctioned/taboo, 11–14. See also death talk Sports Illustrated, 43, 45, 47, 74 stem cells, 206 Stepan, Nancy, Leys, 51 Strathern, Marilyn, 10–11, 209 suffering, 14, 18–20, 112, 157, 215–16, 225, 228; alleviating, 157, 170; blackboxing of, 35; burdens associated with lab animal, 35; coding, 161–63; human, 42; intentional, 19; language, 236; laboratory context, 18–19, 21, 23; managed, 140–49; morally justified, 19; politics of animal, 161–68; reducing, 66; signs of, 161–62 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 199 Svendsen, Mette, 10, 18, 40, 67, 99–100, 124, 153, 187, 194, 209, 217 swine. See pigs Tasmania. See Australia, activism Taylor, Janelle, 109, 227 Taylor, Patrick, 206 taxidermy, 190-92, 253

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television: people and, 91–92; primates and, 76–86, 89–90, 102–4. See also visual media theories of embodiment, 41 thought experiments, 150 Three Rs (reduction, refinement, replacement), 26, 49, 55–56, 136, 142, 151–52, 176, 197–98, 204, 210, 220, 233–34, 237; animal sharing and, 201, 207, 216 Tilly, Charles, 199, 214, 261 tissue banking. See biobanking totems, 40, 182, 192–194 Totemism (Claude Lévi–Strauss), 192 Trobriand society, 10 Tropical Storm Allison, 184–85 trust, 27, 59, 69, 146–147, 162, 199, 202-5, 210, 214, 221–22, 227, 261 ungulates, 53; cattle/cows, 6, 214; horses, 54, 68, 116–17, 142–43; sheep/ewes, 6, 214 United Kingdom, 23–25, 49, 68, 77, 140, 163, 178, 207, 225 U.S. Cavalry Museum, 116 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 9, 35, 45, 47, 70–71, 84, 121, 170; environmental enrichment, requirement of, 84–85; inspectors, 47, 84 United State Department of Health and Human Services, 114 University of Cambridge, 26, 80, 209 vendors, animal, 53–54; Class A (purpose bred), 47–48, 67, 69, 71, 228; Class B (random source), 47, 67, 69; licensing, 47 Vesalius, Andreas, 21 veterinarians, 46, 98, 100, 113, 117, 127, 142, 170–71; biographies, 66, 180–81, 231–32; euthanizing animals, 12, 127, 186, 236, 255–56, 257; in labs, 2, 18, 28, 35, 55, 68, 100,139, 141–47, 152, 158, 163, 181–82 , 195, 197, 223, 238, 247; vet

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veterinarians (continued) schools, 62, 72–73, 112–13, 168, 198, 201, 208, 214, 228, 251 Virga, Vent, 142–143 visual media, in laboratories, 78–81, 82–90, 96, 102–4; television for primates, 76–92, 96–98; video games, 77, 82–84; primate desire, 82–84 vivaria. See rodents vivisection, 13, 21, 24–25, 45–46, 70, 114, 243 Waldby, Catherine, 20 Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 90 war memorials to animals 116–19 Wayman, Stan, 42, 46 ways of seeing, 1–2, 15, 77, 82, 95, 102,182, 243; ethnographic, 112. See also erasure, figure-ground reversal; invisibility Weiss, Robin, 209 welfare, animal, 2, 4, 14, 18–20, 23–25, 30, 36, 59, 77, 160, 172, 195–97, 203, 207–9, 224–25, 231; affective, 47–48; animal commons, 207–9; boundaries of, 151; defining, 164; as domestication, 92–102; legislation, 12, 29,

47–49; monkey wisdom and, 84–86; oversight, 221; reforms, 25, 37, 74, 84; shaping, 36; sharing and, 219–22; specialized practices of, 168–77; species preference and, 42–49, 63; training in, 161 Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom 205 White, Betty, 87 Wilkinson, Iain, 109, 112, 153 Williams, Robin, 87 Wilson, Peter, 39, 51 Woodruff, Guy, 76, 78 Woolgar, Steve, 9, 111, 128 World War I, 116–17 Worthington, Steve, sculptor, 238–40 xeno science, 6; monkeys in, 210–13, 216; pigs in, 209–10, 222 xenografting, 211–12, 216 Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory, 76 zebrafish, 31, 36, 224–25, 241; schools, 225; suffering, 225 Zigon, Jarrett, 11 zoos, 1, 18, 76, 82, 86–87, 95, 98, 103, 116, 143, 167, 177, 258