Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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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 warm-blooded 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 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 human-animal 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 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 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