Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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