Finally, labor hierarchies inform rhetorical practices because laboratory research entails both scientific methods and emotional or affective labor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Hochschild 1983; Livingston 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Pols 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Wendland 2010). Although activists assume that scientific studies are predicated on the objectification of animals, my lab-based research taught me early on to be attentive to the affective dimensions of human-animal encounters. Lab researchers, regardless of station, think of many sorts of animals in individual terms. As I discuss at length in subsequent chapters, naming practices abound. A more rudimentary practice involves the use of pronouns. I rarely heard lab personnel describe an animal as an “it”; instead, gendered pronouns were the norm, even where large populations of what I reference as “generic” creatures were concerned (such as sprawling colonies of mice). I adopt this same practice throughout this book, referring to individual animals as “he” or “she.”
Finally, it is important to note that lab research is hard work, not merely because of the repetitive quality of many experiments or the long hours that animal feeding and cage cleaning entail, but because such activities so often require sustained, intimate contact across the species divide. Furthermore, labs are sites where care, and not merely welfare, is central to one’s daily work. A widespread understanding is that no one survives very long in a laboratory if he or she finds no joy in working with animals. Additionally, lab work can be a lonely experience because of the social stigma associated with animal experiments, and thus work dedication is crucial. These principles were taken seriously by staff and guided their quotidian practices in all of the labs where I was fortunate to conduct my own research.
THE BOUNDARIES OF INTERSPECIES ENCOUNTERS
Three broad categories—animals, morality, and affect—are of special analytical significance throughout this work; here I detail an associated overarching framework. In this section I first consider the question, What is a laboratory animal? I then show that this query is informed by historical processes pertaining to the use of animals as experimental proxies and associated lab animal welfare legislation. Although my project is firmly rooted in the United States, I briefly address relevant activities in the United Kingdom when they inform developments in the States. Finally, I consider the analytical significance of “suffering” with specific reference to regulatory concerns for animal “welfare” and consider how this concept is translated into practices of “care” through quotidian laboratory labor.
Testing Human-Animal Boundaries
In his edited volume What Is an Animal? anthropologist Tim Ingold urges readers to question the “capacities” we assign to our own species (such as tool making, symbolic and abstract thought, purposive action, or self-consciousness) in our efforts to assert our own “pre-eminence” in the world. As Ingold explains, “though humans differ but little from other animal species, no more than the latter differ from one another, that difference has mighty consequences for the world we inhabit, since it is a world that, to an ever greater extent, we have made for ourselves, and that confronts us as the artificial product of human activity” (1988, 97). Although his intended audience consists of ethnographers and archaeologists who study the socially enmeshed lives of, say, pastoralists or hunters with a range of animal species, Ingold’s provocations prove relevant to captive animals housed in research laboratories. This is because human “pre-eminence” is a foundational principle of lab research, where experimental animals are used specifically to avoid causing undue harm to (more highly valued) human subjects. In lab parlance, animals stand in as necessary “models” or proxies for humans and, unlike humans, animals’ lives are expendable. Yet Ingold is helpful for other reasons. As an iconoclast, he is intrigued by borders and boundaries, which, to borrow from Evelyn Fox Keller, clearly “constitute irresistible lures” (1995, ix). That is, Ingold is drawn to human-animal distinctions not for their precision, but for their precariousness. These sorts of circumstances, I assert, are what allow lab animals to enable moral projects.
Whereas the rules that govern notions of human-animal difference may be regarded within their respective social contexts as reflecting cultural “truths,” they also flag ambiguities, uncertainties, and anxieties. As anthropologists have long known (Bateson 1972; Douglas 1966, 1970; Evans-Prichard 1940; Leach 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963, 1969), interspecies boundaries are especially ripe in this regard because their integrity hinges on the ability to assert and maintain criteria that may well enable human “pre-eminence.” Ingold’s assertions are informed by long-established ethnographic projects, in which it is not unusual to encounter the blurring of interspecies boundaries, a sensibility widely documented, for instance, in pastoral societies. One discerns this in an assortment of disciplinary classics: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, for example, coined “the bovine idiom” to underscore how deeply enmeshed human lives were with cattle among the Nuer of southern Sudan (1940); June Nash has described in moving terms the affective dimensions of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking miners’ attachments to llamas during underground ritual sacrifices in Bolivia (1973, 1979); and Ingold’s own work exemplifies the intricacies of human-animal existence among Lapland reindeer herders (1980). A logic of interspecies intimacy will likewise be familiar to readers with pets or non-human companions, or to those who labor alongside working animals. Such relationships are not so much “encounters” as intimately entwined, morally inflected, and even troubled ways of being in the world (Haraway 2008).
Laboratory animals entail special problems, though, and a rendition of Ingold’s question What is a laboratory animal? provokes us in other ways. The literature that strives to answer such a question is replete with certain assertions and assumptions. Barbara Noske, an animal activist-anthropologist, describes the “object status” (1997, viii) of animals in commercialized contexts, asserting that lab animals are commodified creatures who occupy the outer edge of a continuum she dubs the “animal industrial complex,” a domain likewise inhabited by other creatures exploited by corporatized food production.8 As Noske reflects on these contexts, she offers an insight relevant to my own project, namely, that “unlike the animal food industry, which to a certain extent remains accessible to the general public, animal research tends to take place almost completely hidden from the public eye … behind closed doors and thick walls” (1997, 35).9 As we shall see, the hidden nature of animal labs bears with it repercussions not only for public perceptions, but also for its ability to inspire moral introspection among the humans who work there.
Although Noske writes as a defender of animal rights, her text helps us realize that lab animals can be so transformed that they no longer seem to be animals at all. This notion is captured elegantly by the concept of “biocapital” as first espoused by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (2003) and subsequently adopted by others (see Cooper 2008; Rose 2001; Sunder Rajan 2006; and Helmreich 2008 on the term’s history). Whereas these authors are most interested in molecular forms of life via artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs) and genomic science, similar arguments prove relevant to industrially farmed creatures and still others employed in laboratory research. As Nicole Shukin explains, such animals, as biocapital, evidence the “rendering” of life through associated scientific processes, be it, say, a Fordist-style assembly line at a slaughterhouse (2009) or methods of breeding, handling, and labeling experimental creatures. Within this framework, lab animals are transformed into sources of or, more literally, become (bio)capital.
To grasp this notion, one need only consider the print and online catalogues that inventory the availability of a wide assortment of species that have undergone extensive genetic refinement over many generations. Such efforts are designed to generate reliable, mass-produced, and marketable creatures who are tailor-made for use in, say, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, or toxicology studies