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).
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