Response-ability and cultivating cultures of care: Insights from the laboratory animal house
Authors:
Dr Beth Greenhough (University of Oxford) and Dr Emma Roe (University of Southampton)
Abstract:
Laboratory animal science has formed the focus of intense moral concern and regulation within the UK. This paper draws on longitudinal ethnographic research and in-depth interviews undertaken with junior laboratory animal technicians in UK universities between 2013 and 2015, as well as insights from interviews with key stakeholders in laboratory animal welfare.
We consider how within and through the space of the animal house, different notions of care are enacted alongside practices which inflict animal harm and suffering as permitted within the limitations of research protocols. These notions of care range from the pervasive and enduring influence of Russell and Burch’s (1959) 3Rs (reduction, refinement and replacement) for animal welfare, to a growing emphasis on professionalism and standards framed as a ‘culture of care’, to concerns over the emotional labour and burden carried by laboratory animal technicians, to the individual response-abilities (after Haraway 2008) enacted by animal technicians in the course of their day-to-day care work, to the challenges presented by anti-vivisectionist activism.
We argue that these practices of care and responsibility seek to address both animal and human welfare needs within the laboratory animal house in multiple forms (after Mol 2002);
sometimes with interspecies complementarity (where human and animal wellbeing coincide) at other times contradictory (where the goods of animals, humans and scientific practices diverge), and always with implications for how we might conceptualise and practice human and laboratory animal welfare in the future.
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