Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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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 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 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 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