Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
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