Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: Learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists

Introduction

Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink their anthropocentric approach and take into account the role of more-than-human agencies. Within geography, actor–network theory has played a key role in drawing attention to animal agency (see for example Whatmore and Thorne, 1998), but some argue that it fails to grapple with the more challenging question of how can we study with animals their experience of participating in more-than-human worlds (Bastian et al., 2017) and how they might have, and more importantly express, a vested interest in changing and developing these. As Henry Buller (2015, see also Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2014) notes, this poses key methodological challenges, not least the need to overcome a tendency to focus on the human side of human–animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In other words, within Euro-American contexts, there is a common tension between understanding animals-as-a-resource for humans and the opposing position of animals-as-independent of human’s meanings and values. One way in which animal geographers, and those in allied fields such as animal studies and multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010), have sought to respond to these challenges is through learning from others whose work necessitates gaining insights into ‘nonhuman experiences of humanized spaces’ (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2014: 2). For example, Van Dooren et al. (2016: 1) enrol ‘scientists, farmers, hunters, indigenous peoples, activists, and artists’ in developing their ethological and ethnographic approach, thereby drawing on a host of both Western and non-Western ontologies to try and expand human modes of relating to animal others. Following Buller’s (2015) assertion that animal welfare practitioners provide one example of how to try and see things from the animal’s point of view, we suggest that laboratory animal technologists (ATs), as those responsible for the day-to-day care, welfare and husbandry of laboratory animals, may also have something to teach animal geographers.

Laboratory animal science is a particularly compelling site to explore questions of animal geographies. Indeed animal research in many ways is premised on the ability of humans to attune to the bodies of animal others, to recognize the shared genetics, physiology and vulnerabilities (engineered or otherwise) that allow both diseases and knowledge of them to cross and challenge species lines (see also Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010) and the potentiality (Friese, 2013) of animal bodies to model human ones. Simultaneously, it is also a site shaped by practices of intensive management and regulation and the legacies of scientific disciplines that promote standardization and objectivity which tend to ‘under-value the local, contingent and practical engagements that make health [and we would add welfare for both human and animal] possible’ (Hinchliffe, 2015: 28). Scientific accounts of laboratory animal research pay little attention to how quotidian practices and questions of animal care and husbandry take place (Friese, 2013). In contrast, this is the starting point for our analysis. Firstly then, this paper argues that studying how ATs perform everyday care and make sense of their relationships with animals offers useful insights into the specific skills, expertise and relationships required in order to study human–animal relations.

Our second key argument is that ATs are keenly aware of the contested moralities which emerge when caring for laboratory animals and can offer an important position from which to understand this. In the second of his recent progress reports on Animal Geographies, Henry Buller (2015: 374) suggests there are ‘two central investigative challenges for the social sciences’, and geography’s, recent engagement with the ‘animal’: what can we know of animals, and what might we do with that knowing?’ We argue these questions are shared by laboratory ATs who (as we explore below) on the one hand support the instrumental relation between science and research animals, but who on the other hand also draw on their ability to ‘know’ or become attuned to the animal in their care, enabling them to tell stories about laboratory animal lives which challenge and resist the animal’s reduction to passive objects exploited for purely instrumental ends. Through studying the experiences of ATs, this paper also responds to the emerging agenda within the social science and humanities of laboratory animal lives, and in particular the need to understand how ‘the emotional, embodied and affective relations between animals and people shape animal research and care practices’ (Davies et al., 2016, unpaginated). Our third key argument is, then, that understanding the ways in which those who work with animals use storytelling to negotiate the paradoxes and contested moralities which characterise their day-to-day practice is a useful method for animal geographers. The stories told by those whom work with animals offer insights into the challenges, complexities and contradictions that shape human–animal relations, a means of acknowledging animal agency and a potentially valuable resource for developing politically and ethically engaged interventions and public engagement.

Below we draw on the experiences of the ATs we interviewed and observed, our own ethnographic experiences, and experiences evidenced in the accounts of others working on laboratory animal lives. We argue for (i) the importance of studying ATs; (ii) the ways in which they navigate the paradox at the heart of laboratory animal husbandry; and (iii) the role of the stories they tell in helping perform this navigation in a way that makes the animals in their care differently and more agentively present. We begin though with an introduction to recent social and cultural perspectives on animal research and to our conceptual and methodological approach.

Animal geography in the laboratory animal house ¹

In focusing on laboratory animal lives we build on a growing body of work concerned with the practice, governance and ethics of animal research. This work has drawn attention to: the historical development of the sites, infrastructures, personnel and models of animal research (Druglitro, 2016; Kirk, 2016); the competing and contested meanings and values (moral, scientific, economic) associated with laboratory animals (Kirk, 2016; Svendsen and Koch, 2013); the ways in which the practice of animal research configures human–animal relations in distinctive ways which demand a reconceptualization of notions of care and ethics (Birke et al., 2007; Davies, 2012; Giraud and Hollin, 2016; Greenhough and Roe, 2011, 2017; Holmberg, 2011); and the implications of recognising animal agency for experimental design and the (co)production of scientific knowledge (Despret, 2004; Friese, 2013).

Like animal geographers more broadly, those seeking to engage with laboratory animal lives have also employed a range of methods, ranging from the more case-study based approaches of philosophers (Despret, 2004; 2013), to archival work charting the social and material construction of laboratory animal infrastructures and personnel (Druglitro, 2016; Kirk, 2016), to ethnographic engagements with the sites, spaces and human and nonhuman agencies engaged in animal research (Birke et al., 2007; Davies, 2012; Friese, 2013; Greenhough and Roe, 2017; Holmberg, 2011; Svendsen and Koch, 2013). What is distinctive about our approach in this paper is that we wish both to offer ethnographically informed insights into how ATs perform everyday care work and negotiate the challenge of paradox of caring for laboratory animals, and also ask what animal geographers might learn from the ways in which ATs use storytelling to narrate and negotiate these practices and challenges.

Between 2013 and 2015 we undertook a two-year research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, which sought to better understand the key role we felt ATs played in putting ethics into practice (see also Greenhough and Roe 2017). Previous studies have tended to focus more on the scientists and researchers who design and carry out experimental work on animals (see for example Friese, 2013; Svendsen and Koch, 2013). We chose instead to focus on the ATs who carry out the day-to-day labour of laboratory animal husbandry. We asked how their performance of laboratory animal care and monitoring tasks was shaped and conditioned by the ethical review processes and welfare protocols which govern UK animal research, as well as the political and economic constraints of private or public sector research and the experimental requirements of ‘good’ science. Yet what we also noticed through the course of our work was the highly skilled way in which ATs formed relationships with the animals in their care; animals who often had unique needs and requirements as a result of breeding and genetic alteration. The relationship between AT(s) and the animal(s) they work with is one performed through both routine and exceptional care practices. ATs are sensitive to animal suffering, physiological signs and vocalisations, and attentive to how stage of life affects behaviour and to positive or negative signs of health. There is much for animal geographers to learn here to inform research practice in animal worlds beyond the animal house, as well as understanding life within.

Our findings are gathered from our experiences of working as ATs for a week in UK university facilities, as well as the time we spent talking (both formally in interviews and informally on tours of animal houses and at conferences) to laboratory animal technicians and other stakeholders about their work, the skills they seek to develop and their relationship with the other animal house inhabitants (cage-washers, cage-dwellers, escapees, the dying, the newborn, the sick, the research scientists, the postgraduate and undergraduate students, the manager, the salesperson, the instructor, the vet, the NACWO, ² the NATCO, ³ the inspector, the pets). Participant observation can provide detailed insights into day-to-day care and monitoring practices (e.g. adding environmental enrichment, killing), which are hard to capture in an interview conversation, and has proved particularly effective in illuminating human–animal relationships in laboratory animal science (e.g. Birke et al., 2007; Friese, 2013; Holmberg, 2011; Svendsen and Koch, 2013). Repeat interviews with seven junior ATs over the course of two years, discussing their experiences of trying to do the right thing and in some cases going along with them in the course of their day-to-day work, allowed us to explore how ATs’ skills, experiences and responses developed over time and build the rapport and trust necessary to tackle challenging encounters of multispecies relating. While we watched the ATs become attuned to the animals they worked with, and vice versa, the ATs and the animal geographers were also becoming attuned to each other.

Our field sites, largely due to questions of access and the small scale of the study, were UK university facilities with whom we had worked previously or had had previous contact. Perhaps not unsurprisingly this is a sensitive area in which to conduct research, and it takes time to build relations with an animal research community for whom the threat of infiltration by animal rights extremists remains a fairly recent memory. We supplemented these intensive studies with interviews with stakeholders from across the animal research industry, including some pilot interviews at private sector facilities. Our range of species too might, to the un-initiated, seem rather narrow for those seeking to offer a multispecies account. Rats and mice account for 72% of the 2.02 million experimental procedures completed in 2015 (Home Office, 2016: 10), so the majority of human–animal relations we both observed and participated in were between humans and rodents. What such statistics fail to capture, however, is the widespread variability within species, and thus specialized care needs varied between the many different strains of mice bred or engineered to model specific human health or disease states. Our small sample of human subjects was also diverse. While the junior technologists we focused on were all relatively young (estimated to be under 30), they comprised both men and women, and had backgrounds ranging from graduate and postgraduate level education in an animal related area (e.g. marine biology, veterinary nursing) to those with no post-16 qualifications. What they did have in common was a love of and ability to attune to nonhuman animals.

It is only through the process of analysing our findings that we turn to characterize this work specifically as animal geography, where it might otherwise have been framed as a simple study of the work of being an AT. We do so here because while the focus of our study was nominally ATs, what we observed, participated in, talked about and ultimately intervened in was a set of relationships between humans and animals in the laboratory animal house. Central to what we uncovered were a whole host of conflicting multispecies relations between humans and nonhuman animals, ranging from those we expected (between ATs and cages filled with mice) to those we did not, including: discussions of pets, past and current; the presence (and absence) of micro-organisms; the traces of other animal encounters (both material and cognitive) we might have carried with us and might carry away; and the ways in which our work led us to ask, and still leads us to ask, uncomfortable questions about relations with other species across all aspects of our personal and professional lives. ⁴ In short, while other styles of doing animal geography exist (see for example Anderson, 1995; Buller, 2004; Lulka, 2008) this fieldwork found us learning from the ATs both how to attune to animals’ lived experiences and how to deal with the moral contestations that arise from attuning to laboratory animal lives.

Attunement

Hodgetts and Lorimer (2014: 2) suggest that methods involving participant observation of human–nonhuman relations and interviews with human subjects lead ‘to a retention of the bias towards human sensings of non-humans’. Given these constraints practitioners of animal studies, multispecies ethnography and animal geographers have spent time cultivating the arts of ‘attunement’ (Despret, 2004), ‘embodied communication’ (Despret, 2013: Greenhough, 2012; Haraway, 2008), ‘noticing’ (Tsing, 2015), ‘attentiveness’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016; Druglitro, 2016), ‘impression’ (Hayward, 2010), ‘symphysis’ (Acampora, 2006; Holmberg, 2011), ‘response-ability' (Greenhough and Roe, 2010; Haraway, 2008) or ‘learning to be affected’ (Lorimer, 2008) by nonhuman others. While not entirely commensurate, each of these wide-ranging terms gestures towards a need to pay attention to the fleshy bodily and emotional susceptibilities, potentialities and vulnerabilities of nonhuman others, engaging with how we learn from another (and they learn from us) through multi-sensual embodied encounters, along with cognitive reflection. In the discussion that follows, we adopt Despret’s (2004) term ‘attunement’ as one specifically developed to capture relations between research animals and those who work with them. Attunement aligns us with broader moves in animal geography towards ‘some emergent knowing of non-humans: their meaning (both materially and semiotically); their “impact” on, or even co-production of, our own practices and spaces; and our practical and ethical interaction with and/or relationship to them’ (Buller, 2015: 379). In this section, we seek to define and nuance a particular understanding of attunement as practiced by ATs, drawing attention to the specific skills, expertise and relationships they have developed towards the animals in their care, and to reflect on the ways in which AT-animal relations and laboratory animal house environments both constrain and enable different kinds of attunement.

Telling laboratory animal stories

Lots of people have stories about one special animal they’ve worked with as well, […]. You talk to, particularly some of the older technicians, they’ll tell you a story about one particular animal and that kind of becomes sort of their way of understanding why they’re doing things like this, it’s interesting. (Interview with Claire, Junior AT, August 2014)

Storytelling refigures relations, multiplying perspectives and capturing forms and moments of encounter which are resistant to more conventional, isolationist and calculative modes of academic writing (Lorimer, 2006a; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). Storytelling is also distinctive from the thick description that characterizes ethnographic accounts. Ethnographic writing is evocative and affective, it ‘takes us there’ (after Lorimer, 2006a), it sets out the nature of relations. Storytelling, by contrast, is reflective and thought-provoking (Van Dooren, 2014). Storytelling asks us why we are there and where we might be otherwise. It is both ‘descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 203). There are of course other stories told about laboratory animals. Some of these are designed to act as cautionary tales, like pigoons, the human–swine hybrids that lurk threateningly in the undergrowth of Margret Atwood’s (2009) post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake. Others however, have more in common with the stories told by ATs, which we explore here for two key reasons: Firstly, because they serve to give laboratory animals a particular identity and often a name as seen in Richard Adam’s (1977) The Plague Dogs, which follows the tale of two dogs – Snitter and Rowf – escaped from a fictional testing facility. Secondly, as exemplified by Karen Joy Fowler’s (2014) We are all completely beside ourselves, they are able to capture some of the ethical anxiety and constant questioning of human–laboratory animal relations that characterises AT’s discourses. Unlike these tales, however, the stories ATs tell are more fact than fiction.

Conclusions

Compared to the ATs we observed and momentarily worked alongside, our entanglements with laboratory animal lives were more fleeting. Our entanglements were also differently invested those shaped by the instrumental goals of research using animals which frame animal bodies as a resource. So whilst, in our role as multispecies ethnographers working towards being multistrain ethnographers, we may observe the methods and even adopt the practices of laboratory ATs, our skills and experience are necessarily different and arguably more limited. Nonetheless, we suggest here that the affective relations and processes of attunement seen in the spaces of animal research might make three key contributions to the study and practice of animal geographies.

Firstly, studying animals requires specific skills, expertise and relationships, evidenced in the ways in which ATs use the MGS as a device for learning how to attune to the lived experiences of the mice in their care. Animal geographers who have limited experience of working alongside, for example, specific strains of mice, will have limited ability to be reliable witnesses of murine suffering, but we can learn to recognise both the skills those who work with animals develop in atttunement and how this then shapes the ways in which they relate to those animals in their care. Such attunements suggest animal geographers need to not only advocate for the recognition of animal agency within the academy, but to understand how such recognition happens in a wide range of (sometimes unexpected) sites, spaces and contexts, sometimes intuitively, often through training or experience. Furthermore, studying how ATs attune to laboratory mice draws our attention to the specificities of human–animal relations, which (in the case of animal research) comprise not only multispecies but multistrain relations. We therefore argue that animal geographers need to explore how humans attune not only to differences between species, but differences between breeds and strains.

Secondly, paying attention to the specific skills, expertise and relationships ATs have developed towards the animals in their care also allows us to reflect on the ways in which AT–animal relations and laboratory animal house environments both constrain and enable different kinds of attunement. At the heart of the role of ATs is the tension between the need to provide care and how this is harnessed by laboratory animal science for utilitarian ends through the endeavour of producing compliant and useful bodies for science. In studying paradoxical human–animal relations where care and attunement become instrumentalised, and in attending to the moral anxiety expressed by animal care takers around their work, we contend animal geographers might find a generative space for enquiry. Furthermore, ethnographic experience within the commercial infrastructures of animal research reveals how these relations and spaces impose limitations not only on animals, but on those who care for them, and indeed those who research such sites and spaces. Close ethnographic scrutiny also offers insights into hidden costs (such as the emotional labour born by ATs) and benefits (the pleasure of working closely with nonhuman others) of both animal technology and animal geography. ⁶ This is a lesson which is particularly foregrounded by the animal research context, but one which perhaps also could be more thoughtfully and reflexively engaged in other animal geography work (farming, pet-breeding and keeping). We argue that moral anxiety might therefore be embraced as a condition as well as a key object of animal geographers’ research.

Thirdly, animal geographers need to pay attention to the stories told by those working with animals in order to better understand the ways in which humans negotiate complex and contested human–animal relations and the wider social and political-economic infrastructures within which they are embedded. ATs story animal lives in ways that bear witness not only to animal suffering, but to animal agency, rendering laboratory animals both lively and grieve-able and hanging on to the speculative desire, if not the immediate possibility, of seeking other ways of living together. Telling stories allows ATs to avoid becoming desensitised to animal lives, staying with the troubling paradox of caring for laboratory animals and refusing to see either themselves or their animals as docile bodies. We find within these narratives a recovery of animal and AT agency and subjecthood, revealing more complex, contradictory and care-full human–nonhuman relations in the laboratory. While storytelling has featured in animal geographies as a methodological approach (Lorimer, 2006a) and mode of writing (Van Dooren, 2014) we argue much greater use could be made of the stories narrated by research participants as a means of evidencing the complex and ongoing negotiation of human–animal relations, and as a means of balancing out the often politically flattening nature of work that focuses on multiplying and cataloguing different sites and modes of human–animal encounter. While previous work has drawn attention to the conceptual significance of acknowledging the suffering, harm and death of nonhumans as a consequence of more-than-human living (see Haraway, 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012; Van Dooren, 2014), and to the significant impacts of political-economic structures on the lives and livelihoods of marginalised animals and humans (Geiger and Horkova, 2015), here we argue for attention to the ways in which human–animal relations are storied by those engaged in them. By sharing these laboratory animal stories, as told by those who live and work alongside them and are most attuned to their welfare, we hope to offer a vehicle through which such relations might begin to be reconceptualised and renegotiated. Our future work will build on the promise of AT stories, drawing on these as a resource to create public engagement platforms for staging (we hope) more nuanced, politically and ethically engaged debates about vivisection which better acknowledge the complexities of the animal research environment.