Caring for the Multiple and the Multitude: Assembling Animal Welfare and Enabling Ethical Critique

Abstract

This paper constitutes a speculative bioethical intervention into the challenge of developing cultures of care and assembling enriched environments for genetically-altered mice in laboratory environments. The principles of the 3Rs-to reduce, replace and refine the use of laboratory animals-established in the late 1950s, are still the institutional and international starting point for humane animal experimentation. However, the proliferating diversity and numbers of genetically-altered animals used in biomedical research is a challenge to the application of these universal principles. The different capacities of the many mice brought into being through scientific practices constitute biomedical experimentation as a multiple, challenging the identification of universal refinements. In this paper, I argue they constitute a multitude: their indefinite number and irreducible multiplicity is both a threat to these principles and an opening to the possibility of new bioethical formulations. Drawing on ethnographic research with scientists and policymakers involved in animal welfare and biomedical research, this paper explores emerging strategies for reassembling animal welfare in the face of the multitude and the multiple. Using insights from Žižek, Haraway andHinchliffe it seeks to demonstrate the value of a speculative ethics, which, instead of the seeking new universal principles to protect animals from harm, starts from the inevitable and particular entanglements of animal and human suffering, as a way of connecting affective capacities across space and time. This is illustrated through the experimental conjunctures of barbering mice. In conclusion, I suggest such speculative bioethical formulations may contribute to renarrating modes of ethical engagement when sociotechnical assemblages are complex, objects and ontological forms are multiple and mutable, data is simultaneously abundant and inadequate, and formal ethical review procedures are incapable of either containing controversy or enabling critique. Birdsong: A CD of various songbird songs downloaded from the internet, played back through a personal CD player and two miniature earphones Shadows: A 15 cm diameter white cardboard disc with leaf shaped holes covered in yellow, blue, pink and white tissue paper, rotating at one revolution/minute This strange catalogue of artefacts goes on for over two pages of the appendix of an academic paper (Nicol et al, 2008) 1 . There are more than twenty objects and other entities listed, gathered into three broad categories: i) edible/large/replaced, ii) shelter/hard/outside, iii) soft/replaced/chewable. It is a compelling and demanding read. In this quixotic mix, the objects have an apparently tenuous connection to each other, but are enumerated with remarkable precision and specificity. The list is reminiscent of the impossible taxonomy of Borges, which opens the preface to The Order of Things (Foucault, 1970). There is the same incongruous juxtaposition found in the categorisation attributed to a certain Chin...

Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia

“…Affect, meanwhile, strengthens care work because the affective relations between research partners create further space to learn what animals are articulating through their behaviour (Dror, 1999;Holmberg, 2008;Davies, 2012). Vinciane Despret describes this as an 'affected perspective' where 'the scientist risks being touched/affected by what matters for the animal he/she observes' (Despret, 2013: 57).…”

“…Caring is fundamentally relational; a mode of engagement wherein responsibility is taken for our engagements and their effects on others (Stiegler, 2010). It is the relational nature of care, moreover, which obliges researchers to respond to the needs of those they work with, be they human patients (Silverman, 2012), primates (Haraway, 1991), rodents (Despret, 2004;Davies, 2012;Davies, 2013), cells (Stengers, 2010;Stengers, 2011) or even atoms (Barad, 2007). 1 What this care 'looks like', however, cannot be reduced to a universal set of principles (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011).…”

“…It is difficult in such instances to create the space Stengers demands to 'ensure the object [of study] has been given every chance to "object" to the theories and assumptions of the scientist' (Candea, 2013: 108). In research with lively subjects, therefore, care is framed as being particularly important in overcoming the problem of obligation, because care-taking practices enable researchers to develop a more nuanced understanding of what research-subjects' needs are and respond to them accordingly (Davies, 2012;Greenhough, & Roe 2011).…”

Science, Culture, and Care in Laboratory Animal Research

“…Secondly, the recognition of stress as a feeling that matters, which may have implications for experimental results (Druglitrø 2017; see also Kirk 2014;Davies 2012b), also has potential impacts on the organization of laboratory animal research more broadly. As laboratory animals increased in "quality"…”

“…These combine earlier work in STS on the material and symbolic transformations of sentient animal bodies into research data (for example, Lynch 1988; Birke et al 2007) with a formulation of interspecies intra-action, affective encounter, and ethical response-ability (see for example, Greenhough and Roe 2010;Holmberg 2011;Davies 2012a;Friese 2013;Dam and Svendsen 2017). They often look at the wider contexts that engender or hinder ethical ways of 3 relating as the growing demands of translational science or increasing positions of scientific precarity place animals and researchers in troublesome relations and positions (Davies 2012b;Johnson 2015;Nelson 2016). Yet, there remain important questions around how far the practices and politics of laboratory animal research, which Haraway's and other work that has followed articulate, connect with other ongoing conversations (particularly within laboratory animal communities) concerning the more bureaucratic aspects of science, culture, and care.…”