(Not) Knowing and (Not) Caring About Animal Research

Abstract

Animal research remains a practice marked by controversy and moral dilemma. However, UK science-society dialogues on the issue are increasingly managed via one-way transmissions of information which construct publics as passive and attribute their concerns to a lack of ‘correct’ knowledge. Challenging such assumptions, this paper questions how and why people actively manage their interactions with animal research through entangled practices of knowing and caring. Based on an analysis of writing from the UK Mass Observation Project, this paper explores difficulties and discomforts associated with animal research which can cause strategic withdrawals from engagements with the topic. In doing so, it extends existing concepts of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ (Rayner) and ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey) to develop novel concepts of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘strategic’ care. Finally, in examining desires to respond to animal research, I engage with Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’ to introduce the concepts of ‘responsive caring’ and ‘responsive knowing’

15 Labelling medicines as developed using animals? Opening up the topic of animal research

“…Without this, those who care about an issue yet feel unable to act on the moral and emotional trouble it evokes may feel it necessary to turn away altogether'. 55 Such insights into the potential negative consequences of current modes of communication around animal research emphasise that the pursuit of 'openness' should not be perceived as an end in itself.…”

17 Commentaries on experimenting with openness and engagement

“…People can care and not care, know and not know. 29 Explaining how this happens in practice and what changes the outcome is related to the context of the encounter between humans and animals. Questions raised in the chapters in this section of the book include how the form and context in which the public currently gets to know animal research affects how they respond to laboratory animals, and what questions they want to ask.…”

“…31 There is little attempt to differentiate by gender, status, culture, or experience, and no sensitivity to creating opportunities for people to show how, where, and when animal research matters to them as evaluative beings negotiating ethics and morals. 32 Indeed, one could instead suggest that strategic ambivalence to animal research 33 is normalised through imagining a public who appear to not care enough to investigate, or to find out more, or to seek out the gentle flow of information into the public domain through the internet, laboratory open days, science engagement festivals, or news items. Or a public that does not choose to expose their vulnerable selves to presumed painful truths about animal research.…”