Care and the Cowboy Boot: Interspecies Responsibility and the Wobbly Boundaries of Lab Animal Personhood (2023)
Sharp, Lesley Alexandra (Author)
Science, Technology, and Human Values
Volume: 48
Issue: 5
Pages: 1199-1222
Of what relevance is a cowboy boot to understandings of the moral underpinnings of lab animal care, value, and personhood? I trace the movement of chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries, wherein associated forms of care in the latter expose efforts to foster emergent chimpanzee personhood. Staff of one sanctuary view chimps’ former lives as constrained by standardized, impersonal forms of care: as lab subjects, they were confined to small quarters and valued primarily as sources of scientific data. In contrast, sanctuary care entails efforts to individualize animals through quirky, creative strategies that jostle interspecies boundaries. In one instance, a pair of cowboy boots embodies associated challenges and triumphs. I argue that attentiveness to the values assigned to nonhuman ways of being, interspecies encounters, and inanimate things together uncover otherwise hidden efforts to redirect entrenched notions of professional responsibility, compassion, and the morality of care. I ask, if anthropological definitions of personhood are anchored in forms of human sociality, under what conditions can practices, objects, and other creatures rattle, alter, or redirect premises of personhood to incorporate interspecies understandings? How might the wobbly boundaries of sanctuary life loop back to transform, rather than denigrate, the works and lives of laboratory staff?
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Tone Druglitrø;
(2022)
Procedural Care: Licensing Practices in Animal Research
Article
Mette N. Svendsen;
Laura E. Navne;
(2023)
Citizen-Person: The “Me” in the “We” in Danish Precision Medicine
Article
Marianne de Laet;
Annelieke Driessen;
Else Vogel;
(December 2021)
Thinking with attachments: Appreciating a generative analytic
Article
Gail Davies;
Beth Greenhough;
Pru Hobson-West;
Robert G. W. Kirk;
(July 2018)
Science, Culture, and Care in Laboratory Animal Research: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the History and Future of the 3Rs
Article
Tone Druglitrø;
(July 2018)
“Skilled Care” and the Making of Good Science
Article
Ashley Shew;
Keith Johnson;
(2018)
Companion Animals as Technologies in Biomedical Research
Article
Joan H. Fujimura;
(2024)
Ethics and Practice in Communities of Care
Article
Björn Fischer;
Alexander Peine;
Britt Östlund;
(2024)
Doing User Involvement: Shifting Interstices and Coalescing Tensions in Care Technology
Article
Cesarino, Letícia;
Luna, Naara;
(April 2011)
The embryo research debate in Brazil: From the National Congress to the Federal Supreme Court
Article
Samantha Vanderslott;
Alexandra Palmer;
Tonia Thomas;
Beth Greenhough;
Arabella Stuart;
John A. Henry;
Marcus English;
Rebecca de Water Naude;
Maia Patrick-Smith;
Naomi Douglas;
Maria Moore;
Susanne H. Hodgson;
Katherine R. W. Emary;
Andrew J. Pollard;
(2023)
Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects: Exploring the Views of UK COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants on Animal Testing
Article
Clémence Pinel;
Barbara Prainsack;
Christopher McKevitt;
(April 2020)
Caring for data: Value creation in a data-intensive research laboratory
Article
María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra;
(2019)
Of flesh and bone: Emotional and affective ethnography of forensic anthropology practices amidst an armed conflict
Article
Maria Goñi Mazzitelli;
(2021)
Recognizing inequalities, transforming structures: Design and implementation of a care policy at the University of the Republic, Uruguay
Article
Sebastián Rojas-Navarro;
Francisco Moller-Domínguez;
Samanta Alarcón-Arcos;
María-Alejandra Energici;
Nicolás Schöngut-Grollmus;
(2022)
Care during exceptional times: results of the CUIDAR study on the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile
Article
Marlene Tamanini;
(2020)
Assisted reproduction: Brazilian heterosexual couples' testimonies on the care of specialists
Article
Catalina Amigo-Jorquera;
María José Guerrero-González;
Jorgelina Sannazzaro;
Anahí Urquiza-Gómez;
(2019)
Does energy poverty have a female face in Chile?
Article
Benjamin Lipp;
(March 2024)
Robot Drama: Investigating Frictions between Vision and Demonstration in Care Robotics
Book
Saheed Aderinto;
(2022)
Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria
Book
Megan H. Glick;
(2018)
Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood
Article
Marianna Szczygielska;
Agata Kowalewska;
(2023)
Tracing viral trajectories. Epistemic and bodily reservoirs in interspecies health
Be the first to comment!