Dawne McCance - Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction

M y first experience as a graduate student, newly admitted to a master of science program in biochemistry, involved protein synthesis experimentation conducted on rats in a medical science laboratory. Actually, the basement room of the since-condemned and demolished building in which most of this research took place bore little resemblance to the university labs I had imagined or previously encountered. The entire research facility was old and crumbling, the basement area particularly bleak. The animal lab to which my supervisor assigned mea windowless and dimly lighted cellcontained sixty wire mesh cages suspended in rows on a metal frame. A table against one wall held an old, and very dull, guillotinesmaller than a paper cutter, and not nearly as efficient. My assignment as a student researcher was to nurture a new shipment of rats (they arrived soon after I did), that is, to feed them carefully allotted daily portions of a diet formulated to determine the ingredients essential to protein synthesis. I was instructed to weigh the rats daily, and when they achieved the desired mass, to decapitate them, cut open the thorax and remove the liver, and take it to a secondary lab upstairs. There, usually in late afternoon sunlight after my supervisor had left for the day, I would queasily chop the still-warm liver into small pieces, cauterize it in a centrifuge, and do a protein analysis on the results.

In the critical animal studies literature, the rodents favored for laboratory experimentation are not always counted as animals having a strong moral claim. For many, then, my rats would have had lower ontological and moral status than the puppies in the basement lab down the hall from mine, the lab that my student researcher colleagues called their puppy mill. Although I did not give my rats names, such as those Jane Goodall bestowed on her Gombie chimpanzees, one thing I learned in working with them is that, as much as any puppies I have known, and probably much like chimpanzees, each has a personality, temperament, and behavioral features all its own, features I recorded at the time in my journal. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (28), reporting on the work of neurobiologist Jack Panksepp, suggest that rats are social, experience joy, and laugh when tickled. I can assert that they squeal and scream in pain. They also demonstrate intelligencethe sort of intelligence a rat needs to determine how one's own cage might be pried open, and in turn the cages of one's fellow rats. When only five of the animals had been brought to the guillotine, this was the kind of rat intelligence that, somewhat to my relief but much to my supervisor's chagrin, put an end to the protein synthesis experiment: an overnight rebellion of rats releasing rats, and large rats eating small ones. The event brought not only a catastrophic halt to that summer's research, but also, with my decision to forego a career in experimental science, the close of my study of biochemistry. I remember my father's dismay at the news that I was withdrawing from the biochemistry graduate program, and my feeble answer to his question why: If I study and teach philosophy, I won't have to spend my life cutting off heads.

At the time, I was clearly unaware of the nonliteral putting to death, in which, as Jacques Derrida observes, philosophy and other humanist discourses participate to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice (Derrida Eating, 113). Is it fair to say that a sacrificial structure (113) prevails in today's critical animal studies and animal ethics, where one might least expect it to be found? It is a key question with which to open this bookand the question on which the book concludes.