Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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present an alternative microcosm of sorts, where established human-animal hierarchies sanction the use of experimental animals in lieu of more valued human subjects. Where animals are concerned, the “outsourcing” of labor also entails its own scale of risk.
The number of animals employed in research is frequently cited in a wide range of venues—including animal activists’ websites, scientific publications, and welfare officers’ presentations—to underscore the vastness of animal involvement. Although figures vary widely, a summary prepared by the USDA for 2015 provides a sense of scale: the total number of animals who fall specifically under its purview sits at a precise 767,622, a figure that excludes rats and mice, creatures that, I am often told, comprise around eighty percent of all lab subjects.10 An altogether different account provided by the American Humane Society approximates that “more than 25 million vertebrates … are used annually in research, testing, and education in the United States. Unfortunately, no accurate and comprehensive figures are available on how many animals are used—or for what purposes—in the United States or worldwide.”11 An effort to determine how many humans occupy laboratories also proves elusive; needless to say, they are far outnumbered by their animal charges.
Reconstructing a history of animal experimentation in the United States is a complex affair, and I claim only cursory authority in this regard, deferring to a substantial canon produced from within the fields of the history of science, bioethics, and moral philosophy (Adams and Larson 2016; Blum 1994; Lederer 1992; Ritvo 1987). It is a relatively safe claim that, at the very least from within the historical trajectory of European and, more recently, American medico-scientific traditions, as long as humans have been intrigued by the workings of the human body, animals have inevitably been subjected to investigative procedures, many of which have been painful, invasive, traumatic, life-threatening, or fatal. As Nuno Franco explains, classic ancient Greek and Roman texts provide ample evidence that well-known figures, from Aristotle (fourth century bce) to Galen of Pergamon (second and third century ce) dissected and vivisected animals. Indeed, until the Renaissance, animals often stood in as human proxies in times and contexts in which the use of human subjects or cadavers was prohibited (Franco 2013, 239). Similar claims may be made for the Renaissance, most notably in the revival of animal dissection by the anatomist Vesalius (1514–1564) and in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1625), who championed vivisection as a methodological touchstone of scientific research. During the Enlightenment, René Descartes’s (1596–1650) claims that animals were automata bolstered the arguments of others who sought to justify vivisection. Each epoch also had its critics who on a range of grounds opposed animal cruelty, including Thomas Aquinas (twelfth century), John Locke (1632–1704), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) (Franco 2013). And whereas, as Franco explains, eighteenth-century Europe was marked by “the rise of moral consideration for animals,” the nineteenth century was characterized by a paired “medical revolution and the upsurge of antivivisection societies” (2013, 245–46).
One need only consider the research activities of Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) to realize that by the mid-nineteenth century animals had begun to figure prominently as experimental subjects in such fields as bacteriology, vaccine research, and surgery. Furthermore, practices and associated ethical frameworks traveled between Europe and the United States and informed research design and associated lab practices. An illustration that appeared in an 1884 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which depicts Louis Pasteur’s animal facility, demonstrates an American fascination with animal research in Europe. Entitled “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” the image shows Pasteur standing before a row of caged rabbits and taking notes.12 The artist also included drawings of dogs and rabbits in various stages of experimental use (reproduced in Franco, 254; see figure 1).13
FIGURE 1. “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments.” Harper’s Weekly, June 1884. Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine.
As this illustration and its accompanying article, “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” demonstrate, medical research was a subject of public fascination in the United States. Noteworthy here are the efforts of the reporter who visited Pasteur’s lab to strike a balance between praising medical research while remaining cognizant of animal welfare. The article begins by explaining that Pasteur initiated this research following futile attempts to save the life of a hospitalized five-year-old child infected with rabies four years before. As the reporter explains, “the experiments, cruel as they may appear at first sight, are made in the interest of humanity, and M. Pasteur is careful not to inflict needless suffering on the dumb creatures which he subjects to the operation.” The account concludes as follows: “‘The twenty vaccinated dogs,’ says M. Pasteur, ‘will all die of madness.’ The results of these trials can hardly fail to be largely decisive of the question one way or the other, and will be an unequivocal illustration of the value of experimental pathology.”
What I find most intriguing about this illustration 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 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