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the Animal Movements, Moving Animals conference held at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, during 2010. I am particularly grateful to Tora Holmberg and Jacob Bull, who gave detailed and thoughtful feedback on particular elements of my paper. Thank you for being generous with your time and considered in your suggestions.
I also want to make special mention of those people who read drafts of the work to ensure its clarity and its appeal to an audience beyond an anthropological readership. In this regard, I thank Dianne for the excellence of her editing and Don for his patience and honesty. I also want to thank Keaka for sharing with me his impressive knowledge of the presence of rats and mice in materials of popular culture—film, television, and books.
I also offer my sincere thanks to the research scientists who granted me access to their laboratories and allowed me to question them closely about their practices, relationships, and engagements with laboratory animals. I hope the book does justice to the richness of their offerings. Access to the laboratories would not have been possible without the help of Simon Bain, who took an early interest in my research and took it upon himself to connect me with the network of scientists in which he was embedded. I thank him for making my task easier and for smoothing the path into a world I was unfamiliar with and am the richer for having visited.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the rats and mice. I do not speak rat or mouse, as some of my informants did, and so I did not ‘talk’ with them in the ways that many of the research scientists who were interviewed for this book did. Therefore, I cannot thank them for their conversations. But I—as do all humans—owe them a debt of gratitude for standing in for humans, for bearing humans’ pain, and for dying in humans’ stead. The scientists in this study did not take them for granted, and I hope this book reveals the depth of their care for these animals to whom all people owe something.