Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
significance of “care” as an analytical category. As she explains, attentiveness to “care” enlivens considerations of what might be possible, how things could be, and how one might make a difference. As I elaborate throughout this work, how humans engage in their work with animals “involves not only detecting what is there, what is given in the thing [or, in this instance, the animal] …, but also [thinking about] what is not included in it and about what this thing [or creature] could become” (2011, 96). For Puig de la Bellacasa, “care” signifies “an affective stage, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (9). In lab contexts, any, some, or all of these modes of response are possible. To such assertions, I nevertheless add this caveat: when set within an experiential framework, care is also—and always—a moral enterprise (see Kleinman 2006, 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Tronto 2009).
If, then, we embrace Puig de la Bellacasa’s assertion that attentiveness to “care” and “caring” bears possibilities of “re-affecting objectified worlds” (97), the character and quirkiness of human-animal cohabitation in labs necessitate that the anthropologist be cognizant of the practices, ideas, and innovations that inform—or demonstrate—the vastly varied ways that “care” and “caring” are imagined in science. The polyvalent and elusive qualities of these terms figure in my efforts to detect moral thought and action. Intimate encounters with animals foster a host of responses: empathy, for instance, might just as easily redirect research design (Berns 2017; Berns, Brooks, and Spivak 2012) as one’s professional trajectory (Gluck 2016). Still other prominent possibilities fall beneath the aegis of welfare, manifested in enrichment practices where one strives to think like a monkey or a fish, sometimes, but not always, engendering a sense of transpecies kindredness (Franklin 2007; Haraway 2008). In other instances, the “reaffecting” of animals reconfirms the self as a moral being, defining notions of self-worth (see, for instance, Buckmaster 2015a) or demonstrating pride in one’s mastery of specialized skills, even in contexts that necessitate killing (Friese and Clarke 2012).
With these complex configurations in mind, Animal Ethos is organized around three analytical themes: human-animal intimacy, the dominant trope of “sacrifice” (the most commonly employed term for euthanizing animals), and serendipitous practices that uncover forms of animal preference and exceptionalism. One goal of this three-pronged approach is to avoid the polemics of asserting what is right or wrong, just or criminal, or kind or cruel, as typifies works that set activists’ condemnations of animal use against scientific assertions that animal experimentation spares and saves human lives. On such fronts I strive to remain neutral (and readers who seek guidance on how best to behave, respond, act, or think will be sorely disappointed). My stance springs in large part from the ethics of ethnographic engagement, informed by an understanding that suspending one’s judgment generates richer data and fosters deeper understanding. Throughout this work I found myself wrestling with an overarching question best phrased as follows: How do scientists think in moral terms about their work with animals when they go home at the end of the day? (Or, as activists might phrase it, How do they live with themselves, knowing what they do?) As such, my purpose is neither to justify nor to condemn animal experimentation. Instead, I focus on unscripted, personal, and often private understandings across a range of professional fields (from researcher and student, to animal technician and veterinarian, to activist) as a means to uncover and decipher the complex logic that informs, shapes, and transforms intimate, interspecies encounters.
As I demonstrate throughout this work, these sorts of moral entanglements have complex histories. In preparation for what follows in subsequent chapters, this introductory chapter covers a wide swath of terrain, and so I pause here to provide readers with a rudimentary roadmap. This chapter comprises four overarching sections. First, in “Accessing Animal Science,” I offer a brief history of the project and the premises that inform it. In the second section, “Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice,” I consider anthropology’s longstanding interest in morality as informing my own efforts to study quotidian thought, word, and practice in experimental science. Third, in “The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters,” I situate my work on human-animal encounters in science within the broader field of animal studies (Waldau 2013); I then turn to the paired themes of animal care and welfare, which, I argue, are informed by the entwined histories of scientific research and animal activism. The final section, “The Parameters of Ethnographic Engagement,” includes an overview of the methodological approaches from which data were derived and concludes with a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s organization and scope.
ACCESSING ANIMAL SCIENCE
Animal Ethos marks my most recent ethnographic engagement with moral realms of science. Initiated formally in 2010, Animal Ethos builds on two previous projects: the first, Strange Harvest (Sharp 2006b), spanned thirteen years of research (1991–2004) and addressed the sociomoral consequences of cadaveric organ transplantation (or the human-to-human transfer of viable organs, technically known as allotransplantation) in the United States. The second—based within five anglophone countries1—involved a decade (2003–2013) of comparative research in two competing realms of highly experimental transplant science, xenotransplant (henceforth, xeno) science and bioengineering. Practitioners within each are intent on alleviating the chronic shortage of human organs and associated human suffering, and imagined solutions include deriving parts from animals for human use or fabricating “artificial” or mechanical devices (most notably for the heart) in ways that might one day augment or fully replace the need for parts of human origin (Sharp 2007).
As an ethnographer, I am fascinated by how quotidian processes within domains of science evidence moral thought and action. For instance, midway through the first project I was struck by the preponderance of widespread, contradictory, and often unspoken moral premises that pervade transplant medicine, in which organs extracted from the dead are valued for their capacity to rejuvenate sick and dying patients struggling with organ failure. Transplanted organs—though widely regarded by involved parties as precious goods—are never openly commodified but, instead, are reconstituted through rhetorical refashioning as gifts that require no reciprocation. Whereas these transfers of much-needed body parts entail loss, intense grief, sorrow, and suffering, such sentiments—and talk of them—are obscured, silenced, and denied relevance by a host of involved parties who celebrate such body transfers as forms of rebirth.
I initially conceived the second project as an investigation of how xeno experts and bioengineers imagined the remaking of the human form. As I soon learned, specialists in each field had relatively little experience with human patients, which informed their respective imaginaries. I learned, too, that the day-to-day lives of experts in both fields were heavily populated with research animals. Animals figured prominently not only in research design, purpose, and outcome, but in how xeno scientists and bioengineers framed their work in distinctive historical, social, and promissory terms. Here, species mattered. Within xeno science, for example, simian and, more recently, porcine subjects proliferate, and the values assigned to each category of animal hinge on a species’ perceived proximity to us as appropriate human models or proxies. Bioengineers, on the other hand, have long relied on ruminants (especially ewes and male calves). The presence of these animals in laboratories shapes an altogether different moral trajectory.2 Baby bulls dominate engineers’ accounts of their profession’s history, how they imagine the field’s promissory future, and their own personal life narratives too. In essence, prized calves map out a temporalized progression of a profession’s mandate to eliminate human suffering and death. Together, these two previous projects define the substrata upon which Animal Ethos rests.
Boundary Work
This arc of anthropological engagement with clinical medicine and science has taught me to be alert to boundaries because it is at such sites that professional and personal dilemmas are likely to surface and, thus, where moral imaginaries proliferate (Beidelman 1993; DelVecchio Good 2007; Tronto 2009). Of longstanding interest to me are the border zones that demarcate the living from the dead, where sanctioned thoughts, words, and deeds contradict others that are (often deliberately) obscured, silenced, or rendered taboo, and, most recently, exist in research domains marked by an entanglement of humans with animals. Whereas my first project was anchored by transplanted organs and my second was framed by inventive