What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the importance of attending to lab personnel’s quotidian and unscripted responses to animals. Animal Ethos exposes the rich—yet poorly understood—moral dimensions of daily lab life, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox responses are evidence of concerted efforts by researchers, animal technicians, veterinarians, and animal activists to transform animal laboratories into moral scientific worlds.
Lesley A. Sharp is the Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and a Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
"Animal Ethos is a much-needed intervention in how we think about the ethics of laboratory animals. Focusing on everyday ethics in labs and animal houses across the US and the UK, Lesley A. Sharp unpacks the ambiguities and paradoxes that arise when caring and killing are entangled. What results is a superb analysis of the intimate relations that emerge between laboratory animals, animal technicians, and research scientists—relations that are all too often left, painfully, silent." —Carrie Friese, Professor of Sociology at London School of Economics and Political Science
“Opening the door to animal laboratories with Lesley A. Sharp, we discover a complex and nuanced landscape of moral thinking and experimentation. This superbly written, analytically sharp, and ethnographically rich book recasts common sense understandings of animals, sacrifice, and welfare. Generous to both laboratory animals and the humans who care for them, Animal Ethos is a lively intervention into central debates in moral anthropology, science studies, and animal welfare studies” —Mette N. Svendsen, Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
“Lesley A. Sharp brings an anthropological approach to ordinary, everyday moral experience as a means of understanding the ethical issues in biomedical laboratory research with animals. Is care of laboratory animals in experiments at all related to care as an ethical category in the way we care, say, for pets? Or for human subjects? What relations of a moral kind do researchers have with their animal subjects in experiments? Balanced, sensitive to ambiguities, and concerned with laboratory life as a moral practice, Sharp opens new ground for anthropological study." —Arthur Kleinman, author of What Really Matters
312 pp.6 x 9Illus: 21 b/w images
9780520299252$34.95|£30.00Paper
Nov 2018