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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 long-deceased research animals (Sharp 2013). More recently, while working in a range of other laboratory domains, I regularly encounter affective responses 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 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 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 crab-eating 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.

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 long-standing 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 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 human-animal 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 Lévi-Strauss, 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 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 (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” (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

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.

“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 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 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

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 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 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 Rese-arch 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.

MODELING HUMAN-ANIMAL INTIMACY

Within laboratories, proximity assumes a range of forms where human-animal 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). 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, “Domest-ication 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 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 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 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).

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 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 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 one-fourth 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 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.

LS: How did you feel at first about doing this to the mice [that is, clipping off their toes and tips of tails]?

ALICIA: 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.

LS: Can you explain the numbering system to me?

ALICIA: 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].

LS: Are you in charge of this? Can you tell me what you do?

ALICIA: “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.”

LS: What does “sac” make you think of?

ALICIA: 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.

LS: Are you comfortable about learning this?

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 “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 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 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 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 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.”