Dear workshop participates,
On Thursday I’ll present some materials from my dissertation, which I write at MIT’s
program of History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society.
The dissertation is about the implementation of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876),
and the way law and science constructed animal pain, and the tensions between
those understandings. I stress the role of law in shaping the experimental practice
and the moral relations between experimenters and their animal subjects.
Below is a short abstract of the dissertation. I also attach a condensed version of one
of the chapters, which I’m trying to make into a standalone piece that can be
potentially published in a law review.
Looking forward to hear your comments,
Shira
The Sentient Being: British Regulation of Animal Experimentation in Late 19th
Century
Project Overview
The Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) was fundamental in shaping British moral
obligations towards animals. It was a constitutive moment in the history of animal
experimentation, and the first effort anywhere in the world to impose legal restrictions on
experiments. Drawing on extensive research of Home Office archival materials and
scientific papers, I examine the implementation of the Act in its first three decades,
asking what it reveals about relations among animal bodies, legal knowledge and action,
and scientific practice and theory. Who was authorized, and how, to pronounce upon the
“pain” animals experienced? And what does it tell us about the workings of empathy in
late nineteenth-century British society? I claim that scientific ideas about pain shaped the
way vivisection was legally evaluated, and that law substantially changed the relations of
care in the laboratory.
This approach is a departure from existing literature on the subject in two
significant ways. I historicize pain rather than taking it for granted as a natural category:
While previous historians have asked ‘what was cruelty?’ I demonstrate that a different
question—‘What was pain?’—is fundamental to understanding human-animal relations
in this era. Comprehending pain is a prerequisite to analyzing cruelty, which was defined
by British courts as “unnecessary pain”. Additionally, historians have focused on the
Act’s legislation. I explore the way state administrators translated the rather abstract
requirement of the Act to avoid pain and how its implementation shaped subsequent
scientific practice.
Following science studies scholars I explore the constitutive relationships
between scientific and legal conduct and reasoning. I show that when law entered the
laboratory, it treated the experimental animal primarily as a sentient being, an
understanding based largely on scientific knowledge. The idea of animal pain then took
on a new form. The law changed the premises about what pain is, and how it can be
identified, imposing a new set of demands on experimenters, such as the use of
anesthetics or the killing of suffering animals. Experimenters consequently internalized
these practices as their own enterprise while the laboratory space and the technologies
employed in experiments were redesigned to minimize, manage, and sometimes redirect
animals’ suffering.
Moreover, I argue that this legal intervention was a significant episode in the
continuing narrative of the creation of model animals for experiments. Historians have
shown that by the end of the nineteenth-century, animals lost their spiritual significance
and were present primarily as objects of human manipulation. A material, physical
change in the bodies of experimental creatures accompanied this cultural transformation.
Adding to this analysis the moral dimension, I argue that the law imposed upon
vivisectors a certain kind of empathy – a requirement to identify and respond to pain –
thus establishing new ethical relations with animals. The law thereby joined physiological
research in transforming animals into instruments. At the same time, the law made
animals into a special kind of experimental tool, which drew into the laboratory an
external gaze in the name of moral order and tied together ethics, politics and science.