Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp

FIGURE 2. Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Latchmere Recreation Ground of Battersea Park, London, erected 1906 (presumed destroyed in 1910). Joseph Whitehead, sculptor. National Anti-Vivisection Society (U.K.), 1906, photographer unknown. Source: Wikicommons. Wikicommons image derived from Encyclopaedia Britannica entry “Advocacy for Animals,” 2010.

      I present this story as a means to highlight certain historical threads relevant to this present work, where several key themes will reemerge in the chapters that follow. Although the Brown Dog Affair is part of British history, its conspicuousness assists in foregrounding several issues of equal relevance to the United States. The first concerns the early, coterminous, public display of medical research as a public good, set alongside the rise of animal activism. This pairing will lead to the retreat of animal research to secured corridors of laboratory space. Second is the importance of realizing that research practices, animal welfare policies, and activism travel. Not unlike the Harper’s illustration of Pasteur in his lab, the animal rights movement likewise made its way across the Atlantic. Throughout the twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries, both activists and medical researchers in the United States have been known to turn to, consider, and draw inspiration from parallel developments in the United Kingdom. The third theme concerns the varying affective power of animal species. As I demonstrate later in this book, the dog looms as an iconic figure of medical research, and in the United States, not unlike in the United Kingdom, the social values assigned to dogs inspired significant welfare reforms over half a century after the Brown Dog Affair. Finally, the original monument (along with another that replaced it in 1985), offers a compelling entry point for considering the moral underpinnings of animal science. The monument to the little brown dog not only attests to the affective power of canines but also provides a relatively rare example of a public monument honoring lab animals. As I illustrate in subsequent chapters, memorials to experimental creatures proliferate in labs, mounted neither by activists nor in public parks but by lab personnel within the sheltered enclaves of research laboratories.

THE PARAMETERS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT

      The focus for Animal Ethos emerged slowly, taking several unintended turns along the way. During the summer of 2010, while I was in residence as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, I partnered with philosopher Michael Banner on a pilot ethnographic project concerned with morality in lab animal science. This joint endeavor helped me realize a desire to delve more deeply into day-to-day practices involving lab animals in the United States. Off and on for the next seven years, I grounded my research in university-based laboratories that employed mammals as research subjects.

      My reasons were as follows. First, as my initial work in the United Kingdom taught me, localized histories of animal rights activism, subsequent welfare legislation, and daily laboratory practices can vary significantly as one moves from one national context to another. My initial foray into laboratory science involved shadowing and interviewing lab staff of a range of origins in the United Kingdom, a country regarded elsewhere as home to the most stringent animal welfare and care policies. Staff explained that this reputation was tied to the country’s sustained history of animal activism. (My purpose is not to defend or refute such claims but, instead, to track how such assertions inform moral reasoning.) U.K. standards of care and ethical frameworks have a tendency to drift elsewhere (most notably in the form of what is widely known as the Three Rs—“replacement, reduction, refinement”—first proposed by Russell and Burch in the 1950s [1959]). As I later learned, laboratory practices are simultaneously similar and distinct as one moves within and across national boundaries. The United States also dominates the world stage in setting standards of welfare, care, and quotidian practices that might in some instances mirror those in the United Kingdom and in others reveal very different trajectories. Experimental science likewise has, at the very least, an uneasy relationship with animal activism, and, again, trends in the United Kingdom sometimes shadow accounts of what transpires in the United States. As a means to maintain control over the parameters of data collection, I chose early on to base the bulk of my research for Animal Ethos in the States, with occasional forays to the United Kingdom for comparative purposes.

      As noted above, during interviews, I was often asked where and with whom I conducted my research. Here I must underscore that, given the politically charged nature of working in animal laboratories, I strictly adhered to promises of confidentiality at all levels of reporting. Specialized fields of experimental research can involve relatively small communities of scientists and other staff (in the words of one neuroscientist, “We all know each other”), and thus my written and verbal assurances (via my institution’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB-approved informed consent process) that I would not disclose names of specific labs, institutions, individuals, or animals was an important step in winning trust and acquiring permission to conduct lab-based ethnographic research. Although my movements were sometimes redirected to block my access to trade secrets and the like, this was relatively rare (nor of any interest to me). A significant focus of concern was reflected in questions about any ties I might have to animal activists, who are widely perceived among lab personnel as an ongoing threat to the safety and security of scientific property, animals, and people. I learned early on to underscore that I was neither an investigative journalist nor an activist, although I made clear that I was involved in interviewing individuals who self-identify as such. In line with standard anthropological ethical practices, all names in this work are pseudonyms; I have also obscured geographical locations of research sites. I am grateful for the assistance and support I received: throughout this project I was welcomed as a guest and curious interloper who was encouraged to engage in and witness a range of day-to-day lab activities.

      Laboratory research encompasses vast realms of experimental science, and thus two additional parameters circumscribed my own activities. The first involved the decision to work exclusively in academic, university-based laboratories. Although some lab personnel move back and forth throughout their careers among industry (e.g., pharmaceutical), government (at, say, the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, or branches of the military), and university research, these are nevertheless fairly distinct domains of experimental animal science. Unlike the first two, academic research tends to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what is often referenced as “basic” or “pure” research most concerned with the advancement of knowledge (as opposed to, say, the profit-seeking pursuits of pharmaceutical companies). The bulk of my research occurred in evolutionary biology and neuroscience labs, although interviews involved specialists drawn from an even wider array of fields (including genetics, immunology, and primatology).

      Another key difference between academic and other contexts is scale. Academic labs tend to be substantially smaller than their counterparts in government settings and the pharmaceutical industry, and given that a core purpose in academic settings involves training scientists (ranging from undergraduate to postdoctoral students), the same personnel—regardless of station in a lab’s labor hierarchy—typically work together as a team for several years at a stretch (if not for a decade or more). Although academic labs