Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia

Abstract

1 Care, laboratory beagles and affective utopia Abstract:A caring approach to knowledge production has been portrayed as epistemologically radical, ethically vital and as fostering continuous responsibility between researchers and researchsubjects. This article examines these arguments through focusing on the ambivalent role of care within the first large-scale experimental beagle colony, a self-professed 'beagle utopia' at the University of California, Davis, (1951Davis, ( -1986. We argue that care was at the core of the beagle colony; the lived environment was re-shaped in response to animals 'speaking back' to researchers, and 'love' and 'kindness' were important considerations during staff recruitment. Ultimately, however, we show that care-relations were used to manufacture compliancy, preventing the predetermined ends of the experiment from being troubled. Rather than suggesting Davis would have been less ethically troubling, or more epistemologically radical, with 'better' care, however, we suggest the case troubles existing care theory and argue that greater attention needs to be paid to histories, contexts, and exclusions.

Entanglements in Health and Well‐being: Working with Model Organisms in Biomedicine and Bioscience

“…Across the human–animal entanglement scholarship, care has become a central theme (Druglitrø ; Friese ; Giraud and Hollin ; Guerrini ; Holmberg ; Kirk ; Svendsen et al. ).…”

“…). Care for laboratory animals is generally understood in utilitarian terms within medical science, where concern with the well‐being of animals is crucial for producing high quality science (Friese ; Giraud and Hollin ; Kirk ). How nonhuman animals are cared for in laboratory science is thought to matter for biomedical knowledge production and is thus consequential for “representational targets” (e.g., human patients) (Dam and Svendsen ; Davies ).…”

Tangles of Care: Killing Goats to Save Tortoises on the Galápagos Islands

“…Yet PI presents a different scenario: care was instrumental in scaling up the number of dead goats, rather than delivering a good death. Caring for the tortoises’ survival translated and extended into technologies to make goats die: care's ability to reach and respond to, and to gather knowledge about and harness control over, the animal (see Giraud and Hollin ; Wanderer ) was subsumed under a logic of extermination. If care is the practical orientation that “attunes to the mortal bodies” (Mol , 31), PI's care attuned to goats not to attend to their mortality but rather to exalt it, to make it thrive and contagiously proliferate.…”

“…Recent work in animal studies has argued that conservation measures aimed at protecting endangered species are not always as irenic and uncontroversial as we have imagined—they can be ambiguous, coercive, and even violent (Kirksey ; Haraway ). Reflecting on practices for the insemination and breeding of endangered whooping cranes in the United States, Thom van Dooren (, 91) talks about forms of “violent care” whose goal of saving a species from extinction does not entitle us to disregard the ethical concerns these very practices raise (see also van Dooren ; Giraud and Hollin ). This contentiousness of caring for an endangered species is further amplified when, to save a species, conservation advocates plan for the local extermination of another one.…”

A bear’s biography: Hybrid warfare and the more-than-human battlespace

“…Such geographies can recast histories of military engagements to become stories about the networks Although the biography of Wojtek tells the tale of a charismatic creature, an animal like us, Wojtek's biography also reveals relations of care as provided by war to have unsettling less innocent qualities. Giraud and Hollin (2016) explain how care conversely requires relationships which are attentive to needs, but, they also foreclose certain forms of responsibility. In the military, care for animals can provide succour, it can lubricate relations that produce bodies for labour, sacrificial bodies or techno-cultural bodies and it can also shut down questions of the ethical implications of animals in the battlespace.…”