| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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the birds are not so crowded that cannibalism and competitive behaviour will cause deaths in the flock (Burke, 2009). In Australia, clearly not all poultry products that claim to be free-range can be safely assumed to have come from birds that have been raised outside the industrial coordinates that give rise to bare life. Equally clearly, the term ‘free-range’ has value in the marketplace that departs from the value that FREPAA accords to the life of the chicken.2
Here emerge values of free-range that speak to both the life of the bird and the financial gain that is extracted by producers and retailers from appearing to speak to and privilege the valuing of the bird’s life. It appears that it is easier to kill animals when one can be assured that one has recognised their right to live and be according to their natures—chickens, cows, pigs, and rats. Evidently, it is also easier for producers to kill on people’s behalf when the value of life coincides with the monetary value that can be drawn from such a product. In this book, and particularly in chapter 5, I examine the practices of care that I saw appearing in the lab and the values that are given to them. These included the value that was accorded to the good rat or mouse life, the value such a life offers to the practice of ‘good science’ in terms of the validity of data and the reliability of results, and the value that scientists might draw from appearing to be good, responsible killers.
In attending to these values and ways of valuing, calculi emerge. In the practices of caring that persisted in the recognition of mundane kinship, a calculus of caring became evident. Even in the shadow of the calculus of death that persists in the laboratory, wherein mice and rats are valued in hierarchical relation to humans and can be killed to benefit them, rats and mice yet presented to science a cost for their sacrifice—a cost that was recognised and met in the laboratory by the provision of speci-ally specific caring regimes in the relations of mundane kinship.
If human-animal relationships are contingent upon the practices in laboratory labour, the relationships I found therein are those that slip across or underneath the hierarchically arranged human-animal divide that would insist on Baconian scientist operators and entirely subject animals from which the scientists are wholly detached. I think it is more