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

species (e.g., meat or research animals) have been relegated to a category in which they may be unceremoniously and even disrespectfully killed. This is a consequence of the fantasy of human exceptionalism. Without advocating for the undoing of the relationships of ‘use’ (i.e., for meat or for research) in which humans and animals are entailed, and without arguing for the fundamental wrongness of killing (as some feminists, animal rights activists, and vegans do; see also J. Franklin, 2007), Haraway argued that animals should not be made killable—that they should instead be killed with responsibility and respect. Such a demand neither undermines the relations of use nor renders killing undoable; indeed, Haraway argued that species that are currently kept for the express purpose of food would become extinct if killing were disallowed. In this way, she suggested, the relationships of use, and animals themselves, flourish.

I have come at unkillability in my examination of the practices of care that scientists do relationally to (and for) animals in the laboratory. Therein I show that animals are not rendered killable in the sense that they do not live a ‘bare life’. Under Agamben’s original conceptualisation of bare life, as he described it in his Homo Sacer (1998), a human being is given the status of the living dead—it is biologically living but does not have human rights. Lacking these, it cannot be sacrificed, it is necroavailable (to the state), and can be killed without the charge of murder being brought. Many theoreticians of animal rights (including Singer, 1975) have argued that animals that are located within the industrial coordinates of the slaughterhouse or the scientific coordinates of the laboratory can be understood as living a bare life. Although Singer’s veal calf certainly fits this bill, I am not sure that lab rats and mice fit it so snugly. They would fit well if there were no substantive difference between the lives of all of the animals that are lived under conditions of certain death (as battery chickens, veal calves, and laboratory rats and mice all indubitably do). But it is my view that laboratory rodents, though they are certainly subject to death as a condition of their lives in the laboratory, do not live a life in which they are made killable or in which they are wholly reduced to the conditions of bare life.

What I mean to suggest is that there is a substantive difference between intending to kill an animal and treating that animal during its