Description
Book SynopsisWhat kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science?Animal Ethosdraws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel's quotidian and unscripted responses to animals.Animal Ethos exposes the richyet poorly understoodmoral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.
Trade Review"This book is crucial for anyone seeking to understand how researchers and lab technicians think about what they are doing when they work with animals fated to die at the end of their usefulness in producing data." * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *
"This book will be of clear substantive interest to social science and humanities scholars of experimental science and laboratory animals, while also being of general interest to anthropologists as well as medical sociologists of emotions, invisible work as well as death and dying." * Anthropology Book Forum *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moral Entanglements in
Experimental Animal Science
Accessing Animal Science
Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice
The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters
The Parameters of Ethnographic Engagement
part i: intimacy
1. The Sentimental Structure of Laboratory Life
Animal Welfare and Species Preference
Modeling Human-Animal Intimacy
The Intimacy of Laboratory Encounters
Affective Politics
Conclusion: Sentimental Values
2. Why Do Monkeys Watch TV?
A Monkey’s History of Visual Media
Primetime for Primates
Macaque Care in Practice: Welfare as Domestication
Coda
part ii: sacrifice: an interlude
3. The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals
Animal Erasures
Beyond the Trope of Sacrifice
Managed Suffering and Humane Care
Reimagining Moral Frameworks of Care
Conclusion: The Limitations of Humane Death
part iii: exceptionalism
4. Science and Salvation
The Politics of Animal Suffering
Specialized Practices of Animal Welfare
Eclectic Forms of Animal Exceptionalism
Conclusion: Totemic Creatures
5. The Animal Commons
The Ethos of Sharing
Uncommon Creatures
The Animal Commons
Conclusion: Other Animals’ Fates
Conclusion: The Other Animal
Notes
References
Index
