For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good ...

animals are situated in the laboratory context. Speci-al and mammalian qualities of rat and mouse research animals were drawn out by the scientists in this study to indicate and describe both movements across animal-human and animate-inanimate divides and situations in which research animals remained firmly on or returned to one side of a division. The invocation of these terms and the positions they referenced had particular consequences for the research animals, the scientists, and scientific practice.

Although yeasts, worms, and flies are all suitable models for studying the cell cycle (and some developmental processes as well), mice in particular are far superior tools for exploring the complex physiological systems (immune, endocrine, nervous, cardiovascular, skeletal, and other) that mammals share. The category of ‘mammal’ is critical, therefore, in the diminishment of the border that separates animals and humans in the laboratory. As mammals, rats and mice come to be recognised as being much more similar to humans than they are different, and they come to be located as humans’ biological and genetic kin. It is the mammalian membership of rodent research animals, and not their speci-al classifications, that renders rats and mice useful research equipment—in this sense, the category ‘mammal’ is invoked to situate rats and mice in a mammalian hierarchical arrangement relative to humans.

Speci-al classifications are very often invoked in the laboratory to situate rats and mice as fundamentally different from humans—for example, when animals are entered into the laboratory’s sacrificial economy at the end of their research lives, it is ‘only mice’ that are disposed of—and in this, the limits of human-animal, scientist-rodent kinship are revealed. Though rats and mice are sacrificed precisely because they are rats and mice and not humans, speci-al categorisations often emerged in the laboratory context to locate these animals as living animals, not mammalian units of research equipment, with which researchers could develop a mundane register of kinship. Even as the animals were cared for through attendance to their specific speci-al needs, they were equally located as mammals who would feel in their bodies that which humans would feel when it came to assumptions about and assessments of pain.