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

positions, rat and mouse research animals very often occupy ambiguous positions in the laboratory, and they often slip across the apparently firm boundaries that separate apparently irreconcilable domains, including the boundary between the detached Baconian God-scientists¹ of Acampora’s imagination.

I have hinted so far at the ways in which it is critical for scientists who use rats and mice to make insights into the human body to establish relatedness across the human/animal border. The scientists in this study recognised that they shared other registers of relatedness with rodent research animals that did not derive from biological kinship or genetic connections. The scientific researchers reported a variety of interspecies communications and relations between themselves and their research animals, particularly rats. As a result, rats came to be ambiguously located between their place in the laboratory as research animals—live equipment—and as animals which could involve themselves with scientists in interspecies communication. This interspecies communication manifested in the form of communicative exchanges between rodent animal models and the scientists who were working with them. For example, the scientists drew on their abilities to ‘speak fluent rat’. Similarly, the rodents would make themselves understandable to the scientists when they ‘refused’ contact with them, such as when they made their tails unavailable to a scientist’s grasp when she was trying to pick them up in the correct way. They also ‘understood’ what particular approaches on the part of a scientist meant and ‘responded’ to the scientist’s communications, such as when they jumped into buckets because a scientist ‘asked them to’.

In the rodents’ bucket-jumping, tail-refusing responses to people as well as in the ways in which people who are fluent in rodent in the lab ‘ask for’ rats and mice to bucket-jump or interpret what rats mean by refusing their tails to a human who is grasping for them, rats and people appear to be communicative, expressive, understandable, understood, and reponse-able (i.e., able to produce a response). Moreover, this communicative capacity crosses the Great Divide that appears in the laboratory to locate research animals and humans on the opposite sides of an