(Multispecies Encounters) Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitro, Steve Hinchliffe-Humans, Animals and Biopolitics - The More-Than-Human Condition-Routledge (2016)

HUMANS, ANIMALS AND
BIOPOLITICS
Being human is not as simple as it may sound. ‘We’ are not necessarily who we
think we are. Rather, humans are bound together with a host of others, upon
whom we depend for our knowledge, for our sustenance, for companionship and
much besides. Central to that co-existence are the multiple relations that people
have with non-human animals. How have these often iniquitous and fraught
relationships been enacted and shaped in recent history, and how are they
performed and sometimes made uniform in different settings?
This book brings together a range of leading scholars from Science and
Technology Studies (STS), Geography, History and Anthropology, in order to
interrogate, empirically and theoretically, human-animal relations. Chapters are
conceptually grounded, though many of them question theoretical frameworks that
tend to obfuscate rather than illuminate the insights that can be gained from
detailed field or archival work. From enviro-pigs to farmed fish, and from animal
rights to flu-infected birds and nomadic camels, the book reflects the multi-sited
and multi-species ways in which human-animal lives are practised and politicised.
A key question for this book is how might we glimpse alternative ways of being,
or becoming, more-than-human from these experiences?
This book will be required reading for those interested in human-animal
relations, including advanced undergraduate students, postgraduates and researchers
in Geography, STS, Anthropology, Sociology and History. It will be central to any
programme that involves re-thinking the ways in which we live together as, and
become, ‘more-than-human others’.
Kristin Asdal is Professor of Science, Technology and Culture at TIK Centre for
Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.
Tone Druglitrø is Postdoctoral Fellow at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation

and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.
Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography,

University of Exeter, UK.
Multispecies Encounters
Series Editors:
Samantha Hurn, University of Exeter, UK and Chris Wilbert, Anglia Ruskin
University, UK
Multispecies Encounters provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion,

development and dissemination of research focused on encounters between
members of different species. Re-evaluating our human relationships with other-
than-human beings through an interrogation of the ‘myth of human
exceptionalism’ which has structured (and limited) social thought for so long, the
series presents work including multispecies ethnography, animal geographies and
more-than-human approaches to research, in order not only better to understand
the human condition, but also to situate us holistically, as human animals, within
the global ecosystems we share with countless other living beings.
As such, the series expresses a commitment to the importance of giving
balanced consideration to the experiences of all social actors involved in any given
social interaction, with work advancing our theoretical knowledge and
understanding of multispecies encounters and, where possible, exploring analytical
frameworks which include ways or kinds of ‘being’ other than the human.
Published
Anthropology and Cryptozoology: Researching Encounters with

Mysterious Creatures
Edited by Samantha Hurn
Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The more-than-human condition

Edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe
Forthcoming titles in this series
Animals in Place
Jacob Bull and Tora Holmberg
HUMANS, ANIMALS AND
BIOPOLITICS
The more-than-human condition
Edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and

Steve Hinchliffe
First published 2017
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© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve
Hinchliffe; individual chapters, the contributors.
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has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Asdal, Kristin, editor, author. | Druglitrø, Tone, editor, author. |
Hinchliffe, Steve, 1955- editor, author.
Title: Humans, animals and biopolitics : the more than human condition /
edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. |
Series: Multispecies encounters | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015045517 (print) | LCCN 2016004833 (ebook) | ISBN
9781472448651 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781472448682 (pbk. : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781472448668 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472448675 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Political aspects. | Biopolitics. |
Human-animal relationships—Political aspects.
Classification: LCC GF21 .H883 2016 (print) | LCC GF21 (ebook) | DDC
179/.4—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045517
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4865-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4724-4868-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-3155-8763-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield
CONTENTS
List of figures vii

Notes on contributors viii
Preface xi
1 Introduction: the ‘more-than-human’ condition: sentient

creatures and versions of biopolitics 1
Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe
2 The practices of fishy sentience 30

John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien
3 Making pig research biographies: names and numbers 48

Vibeke Pihl
4 Modifying the biopolitical collective: the law as a moral

technology 66
Kristin Asdal and Tone Druglitrø
5 Pastorale: sheep traffic in modern trauma surgery 85

Martina Schlünder
6 The measure of the disease: the pathological animal experiment

in Robert Koch’s medical bacteriology 101
Christoph Gradmann
vi Contents
7 Knowing sentient subjects: humane experimental technique

and the constitution of care and knowledge in laboratory
animal science 119
Robert G.W. Kirk
8 One health, many species: towards a multispecies investigation

of bird flu 136
Natalie Porter
9 Sensory biopolitics: knowing birds and a politics of life 152

Steve Hinchliffe
10 Loving camels, sacrificing sheep, slaughtering gazelles:

human-animal relations in contemporary desert fiction 171
Susan McHugh
Index 189
FIGURES
3.1 Nimbly – a female minipig – standing below a poster containing

her job description at the experimental farm 56
6.1 Koch’s early studies from November 1881 109
6.2 This series of experiments was started in early December 1881 110
6.3 A final example from Koch’s experimental work dating from
1881–82 111
8.1 Thủy, Trí and family vaccinate chickens against Newcastle disease,
Bấc Giang province, northeastern Vietnam, 18 June 2009 146
9.1 Scott’s swan sensorium 162
CONTRIBUTORS
Kristin Asdal is Professor (dr.art) at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and
Culture, University of Oslo. She writes on the politics and performativity of
methods and has published extensively on empirical studies of ‘nature’ in politics and
administration. She is currently managing an ERC Starting Grant on valuation
practices in the bioeconomy. Her recent publications include: ‘Enacting values from
the sea: On innovation devices, value-practices and the co-modification of markets
and bodies in aquaculture’, in Value Practices in the Life Sciences & Medicine (2015),
edited by I. Dussauge, C.-F. Helgesson and F. Lee: Oxford University Press.With co-
author Bård Hobæk she is currently working on the book Parliamentary Practices and
the Nature of Constitutional Power: Assembling the Leviathan (under contract with
Routledge).
Tone Druglitrø holds a PhD in Science and Technology studies. She is currently
employed as a post-doctoral research fellow at TIK Centre for Technology,
Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. She has published on the science and
politics of laboratory animals and animal welfare, the professionalisation of
veterinary medicine and on writing radical laboratory animal histories. She is the
co-editor with Kristian Bjørkdahl of the anthology Animal Housing and Human-
Animal Relations: Practices, Politics and Infrastructures, forthcoming in the new
Routledge animal studies series.
Christoph Gradmann is Professor in History of Medicine at the University of

Oslo. He has published extensively on the history of the study of infectious diseases.
Starting from nineteenth century German medical bacteriology he moved on to
investigate the standardisation of biological medicines in the twentieth century.
Recent work has been on the history of antibiotic resistance. Publications: ‘Re-
inventing infectious disease: Antibiotic resistance and drug development at the
Contributors ix
Bayer Company 1945–1980’, Medical History 60, (2016), in print; ‘Sensitive matters.
The World Health Organization and antibiotic resistance testing, 1945–1975’,
Social History of Medicine 26, 2013, pp. 555–574; with Jonathan Simon (eds)
Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents 1890–1950, Houndsmills
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2010.; and Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical
Bacteriology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press 2009.
Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography in the College of Life and

Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter where he teaches about
monsters, nonhumans and diseases. He is currently working on a book entitled
Pathological Lives. He is hopeless at bird watching, among a number of other things.
Robert G.W. Kirk is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of
Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (UK). His work exam-
ines the role of nonhuman animals in science and medicine. Rob’s contribution to this
volume forms part of a wider study examining how animal welfare became integrated
within the biomedical sciences. By reconstructing the historical formation of new
expertise of laboratory animal care, this work critically contextualises the now-domi-
nant science of animal welfare and its specific form of ethical reasoning within which
moral concerns for, and instrumental uses of, nonhuman animals become inseparable.
John Law is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University. He writes on:
the performativity of methods, nature and culture, human-animal relations and
postcolonial forms of knowledge. He works empirically and ethnographically, and
is currently writing about salmon and aquaculture.
Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of

Oslo. She has published widely on food, marketing, consumption, human-animal
relations and salmon aquaculture. Her book on salmon entitled Becoming Salmon;
Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish was published by the University of
California Press in 2015.
Susan McHugh, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England,
USA, is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minnesota, 2011)
– which was awarded the Michelle Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2012 – as well as Dog (Reaktion, 2004) in the
book series Animal. She co-edited The Handbook of Human-Animal Studies
(Routledge, 2014) with Garry Marvin, and Literary Animals Look, a special issue of
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2013) with Robert McKay. With
McKay and John Miller, she co-edits the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
book series. McHugh serves as Managing Editor of the Humanities for Society &
Animals, and she is a member of the editorial boards of Animalibus, Antennae,
Animal Studies Journal, Environment and History, H-Animal Discussion Network and
Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies.
x Contributors
Vibeke Pihl is a Sociologist, who holds a PhD in Medicine, Culture and Society
from the Center for Medical Science and Technology Studies, University of
Copenhagen. Pihl’s dissertation is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in which she
follows pigs’ transition from agricultural pork production to biomedicine with the
aim of creating future human health. Her particular interests include pigs, feminist
science studies and more broadly human-animal relations.
Natalie Porter is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre

Dame. She has published articles in American Ethnologist, Social Science and Medicine,
BioSocieties, and Public Culture on global health interventions for avian flu. She is
currently completing a book-length ethnography on the global exchange of
materials and information on pandemic disease threats.
Martina Schlünder is a historian of science and medicine at the Max Planck

Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her research focuses on histories of
planning, history of the reproductive sciences and biopolitics in the twentieth
century and on human-animal relationships in biomedicine. She is currently
engaged in interdisciplinary working groups on ‘Scale and Scope’ and on ‘Histories
of Animals at Frankfurt Airport’.
PREFACE
Living in times that are biologically and politically challenging, for human and
nonhuman animals alike, has meant that the ability to put this book together and
to think collectively about human-animals has been a privilege and even
something that we can call timely.
In terms of the fields of science, technology and society, animal studies, feminist
science studies, geography and history there are many people who have been
instrumental in providing the conceptual and empirical tools for creativity. Too
many to mention here, but suitably referenced in what follows, they have provided
core arguments on which we, and the contributors, have drawn.
In more immediate terms, many people and institutions have made this book a
possibility and a pleasure to work on. We would very much like to thank
Christoph Gradmann, Marianne Lien, Kristina Skåden, Linda Madsen and Liv
Emma Thorsen who were all vital in the early stage of working out the encounters
and reasoning driving this book. At Exeter members of the Science, Technology
and Culture research strategy and the Natures, Materiality and Biopolitics research
group in Geography offered support and ideas.
In the later stage of the process we have had immeasurable assistance from Bård
Hobæk and Stig Oppedal as well as our editors, Katy Crossan and Chris Wilbert
and Samantha Hurn. We are proud and excited about being part of the new
Routledge series Multispecies Encounters, which Wilbert and Hurn are editing.
We also must express our gratitude to the TIK Centre and the research programme
KULTRANS, both at the University of Oslo, as well as the ERC-grant “Little
tools” (637760).
Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø, Steve Hinchliffe
Oslo and Exeter
September 2015
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1
INTRODUCTION: THE
‘MORE-THAN-HUMAN’ CONDITION
Sentient creatures and versions of biopolitics
Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe
Humans are not alone – neither in their rich and complex daily lives, nor in the
more rarefied chambers of philosophy or social theory. ‘We’ are dependents, reliant
on a world that somewhat problematically is prefaced with the adjective
‘nonhuman’. We are, as a result, always more than human. Re-membering and re-
constituting ourselves as such also reminds us of one of the first rules of
actor-network theory (Latour, 1987; 1988). There is a tendency to mistake the
attribution of agency, intention and purpose to humans as a signal that humans
achieve these things on their own. Mistaking attribution as cause is to forget that
what are often considered as quintessentially human characteristics are of course
contingent upon a wide cast of helpers, co-travellers and companions of various
shapes, sizes and kinds.
Nonhuman animals have animated some of the discussions that led to this book,
and they form the key foci of the chapters that follow. For some time, of course,
they have been a key and pressing constituency and a source of vibrant political
activity. Too noisy and unruly to always play the part of mute and passive creatures
(‘created’ for ‘us’), but sometimes too quiescent and under-resourced to mobilize
on their own behalf, the conditions of living for nonhuman animals have reminded
many of the injustices and violence of a human-centred worldview and politics.
Two broad movements animate the debate here. First, the reduction of so many
nonhuman lives to what we can call the merest of living conditions, to life at the
biological threshold, is a painful reminder of the consequences of human
triumphalism and exceptionalism. This mere life, we need not remind ourselves,
takes a number of forms: the extremes of human-induced species extinction, where
wild populations are diminished to a barely reproducible number, sit alongside the
inflation of domestic livestock populations in conditions that are barely called
living. Second, and as these mere lives sometimes translate into shared disease, or as
a sense of the common fates attached to a planetary demise starts to take hold, our
2 Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe
shared fragility and precarity remind us of the instability of a clear boundary

between human being and nonhuman being. The human condition is contingent
on nonhuman animal life, and ‘our’ lives are intimately intertwined.
This volume, and our opening chapter, asks, what kind of knowledge practices
could be viable for taking such diverse entanglements into account? We turn, in
particular, to the resources that inhere to what Michel Foucault termed biopolitics,
reviewing both the term and its recent (re)formulations. Our aim is to reclaim
biopolitics as a means to generate a more empirically driven theorization of a
more-than-human politics. We argue that Foucault presents possibilities for a
livelier politics, in which the surprise of human-nonhuman engagements and
entanglements can force us to hesitate and to think again about the obligations we
have to others.
In the following, we suggest that at least two correctives or re-emphases are
required to biopolitics. First, studies of life and the living alert us to the fact that
biopolitics is not only about humans, or their (narrowly conceived) populations. It
is rather about an assemblage of matters of life. Second, there is neither a self-
evident nor a totalizing human power over life, nor an unproblematic politics of life.
Rather, the relation between life and politics needs both theoretical and empirical
specificity. In order to realize these aims, we will also need to engage various
versions of biopolitics and navigate a way through the sizeable literature.
A key issue here is that this politics will always be in formation and hence
unlikely to be pre-formatted by an overarching or totalizing approach to a (single)
politics of life or biopolitics. Drawing sentient creatures into biopolitics is, we hope,
an event or game changer, where the animal moment shifts the old certainties that
relate to thinking life or to doing the biopolitical. It is, as Campbell and Sitze
(2013a, p. 7) put it, a moment of turbulence, giving rise to hesitations, doubts and
uncertainties. This chapter relates therefore to a core objective of the overall book,
which is to draw together empirically focused research on human and nonhuman
animals with the expanding interest in the politics of living. Research should
surprise us and put our ideas and us at risk (Stengers, 2005). So the different
analyses and narratives that each chapter provides may serve to unsettle any pre-
established patterning of people and nonhuman animals. Species meetings and
encounters in this sense retain the propensity to surprise. Another core objective
has been to let the book take the form of an encounter – not only regarding how
species meet (Haraway, 2008), but regarding how different research traditions and
analytical approaches can be convened in order to deal, not to say engage, with such
encounters. (We return to this below when more fully introducing the various
topics and approaches of the chapters.)
Versions of biopolitics and ‘biopolitics collectives’

In this opening chapter we intend to trace the various ways in which the writings
of Michel Foucault are being brought to bear on the issue of human-animal
relations. We are also interested in how other traditions in this area, notably those
Introduction: versions of biopolitics 3
that relate more clearly to post-human and material turns in social theory, exist in
tension with this re-investment in biopolitics, and how these tensions and cross-
fertilizations can be mobilized to open up a different kind of life politics.
One could indeed legitimately ask: why biopolitics and Michel Foucault? Is
there not a certain irony to the fact that a scholar who so famously has interpreted
biopolitics within what is often taken to be a humanist frame, and who addresses
the art of government in relation to the human population and the making of the
(human) subject in particular, becomes the centre of attention when discussing the
more-than-human condition? In these senses, the biopolitical frame, as initially
outlined by Foucault, is certainly in need of a re-specification. Interestingly, as we
will demonstrate, his work is both a target for critique and a source of inspiration
– for scholars who from a post-humanist approach seek to undo the current status
of human exceptionalism as well as to scholars who see in Foucault a series of
openings for an irreductionist approach to politics and human-animal relations. It
will be useful in this sense to ask how Foucault’s work can inspire such different
engagements.
To be clear, we do not see our task as presenting Foucault’s work in detail or
adjudicating on versions of biopolitics. As Campbell and Sitze (2013b, p. 6) note,
we cannot suppose that ‘Foucault’s brief remarks on biopolitics, whether in his little
1976 book [The History of Sexuality, vol. 1] or, especially, in the lectures concurrent
with that book, can be interpreted as though they are consistent, transparent, and
fully worked-through’. Moreover, given the large readership of Michel Foucault
and the interest and concern with biopolitics, there exist quite different, in part
conflicting, ‘versions’ of Foucault.1 Each version enacts the debate on human-
animal relations and the more-than-human condition differently. What we will do
is sketch out some possible and existing arguments. Teasing these out is helpful, we
suggest, both to clarify and to make different positions and ways of working
explicit. This might help to enable encounters between different ways of doing and
engaging with human-animal relations as well as helping to identify tensions
within the field. As we will demonstrate, there is an important and interesting
tension between an approach which relates to Foucault and biopolitics with the
primary objective of teasing out a viable normative position that may underpin a
post-humanism, and an approach which primarily finds in Foucault an analytical
and irreductionist method for, more agnostically, exploring the emergence and
transformation of ‘things’. We can call those, quickly, a normative approach and one
that is perhaps more methodological in orientation. Our task is not to choose
between contrasting positions, nor is it to resolve key tensions, but to generate
openings and resources for understanding and engaging with the more-than-
human condition.
Let it be quite clear though: to even try giving a complete overview, the full
story so to speak, of Michel Foucault and his biopolitical readership would not
only be impossible, but probably also relatively uninteresting. And fortunately
enough, inspiring, insightful and quite recent contributions already exist. In our
terms, they tease out their own version of a Foucault or a biopolitics collective.
Two examples, namely Cary Wolfe (2013) and Thomas Lemke (2011; 2014), will
command our attention here. While Wolfe is engaged in an effort to sort out a
post-humanist version of biopolitics, Lemke is more focused on reading Foucault
alongside subsequent turns to materiality, or the so-called new materialism. As we
will see, in large part these remain as theoretical works, so in addition to these
recent interventions, we will tease out a third version of Foucault as a biopolitical
resource directed at practice-oriented, material-semiotic and empirically grounded
interventions. Moreover, the feminist-inspired science and technology studies and
animal studies, notably the work of and the studies inspired by Donna Haraway and
Isabelle Stengers, are curiously absent from many of the biopolitical reworkings to
date (for an exception see the reader compiled by Campbell and Sitze (2013a),
although even there, the more-than-human and/or nonhuman animal aspects of a
reworked biopolitics are somewhat underplayed). We therefore trace some of the
promise that their interventions make in terms of a re-worked biopolitical animal
studies.
Versions of biopolitics I: The post-humanist collective

In insisting that humans are always ‘more than human’ – that is they are made up
of matters and relations that make them ‘intricate’ with many nonhuman others –
and in then referring to this more-than-human condition, we are clearly working
against the grain of some key pillars of philosophical thought. In this sense the
more-than-human condition can be read as something that is in tension (which is
not the same as in opposition) with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958).
The latter clearly demarcates humans from nonhuman animals according to an
ability to speak. According to Arendt, speech is that which makes ‘man’ a political
being, hence it serves as qualification for membership in the political community
(Arendt, 1958, p. 3; Wolfe, 2013, p. 7). This is in line with how the largely humanist
philosophical critique of positivism more broadly has demarcated the social and
cultural sphere from that of nature and natural science. According to this critique
(of positivism), the most important difference between humans and animals was,
precisely, language (Asdal, 2003; Skjervheim, 1957; 1959). Not only did this
difference exclude nonhumans from the political community, it was also intended
to do other kinds of work: humans ought not be treated like animals, as objects and
passive nature-objects. Rather they had to be treated as subjects and as potential
contributors to a shared community, even where that political community was not
yet in existence. 2
One can of course appreciate Arendt’s predicament and still ask, what happens
if the question is no longer the human condition exclusively or concerned with a
community of humans that can easily, by way of language, be demarcated from that
of nonhumans? How does it matter that the human condition is made conditional,
to a large extent, upon nonhumans? And what happens if we leave such lines of
demarcation, extend our concerns and expand the question to the ‘more-than-
human’ condition? Who, as a result, are to be ‘taken into account’, or, indeed, how
might we find the right terminology or spatial vocabulary for an expanded range
of actors?
The questions above are intimately linked to the problems that Cary Wolfe
(2013) addresses in his version of an ‘extended’ biopolitics committed to moving
past humanism and the un-questioned demarcation lines between humans and the
rest. This post-humanist version of biopolitics is crucially oriented towards a
(philosophical) position, wherein established demarcations are thoroughly
questioned and, importantly, are re-set along other fracture lines. It is a critique of
conventional biopolitics formed around a set of questions confronting us when we
cannot accept, or can no longer accept, ‘the human’ as the one and only focal point
for being in the world. All humanisms, Wolfe writes, share some conception of
freedom that ensures human exceptionality as opposed to and at the expense of
nonhumans. Hence, this unconditional human exceptionalism needs to be
countered or at least interrogated.
Space does not allow us to grant full credit to how Wolfe works himself around
these questions, and also prevents us from detailing how he draws and works upon
other scholars to form the biopolitical collective. However, important for us here
is how such an alternative position is traced from a reading of Foucault’s biopolitics,
in a double sense. First, this is done by addressing how Foucault represents an
alternative to the demarcation lines that neatly but problematically separate humans
from nonhumans in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and others (here Wolfe also
includes Judith Butler). This is crucially related to how Foucault addresses and is
concerned with politics and government of life rather than with human subjects. In
this way, in principle, the collective can potentially be extended to include other
forms of life, beyond the human. Importantly then, it is in this respect that Foucault
becomes an important resource for a biopolitics which questions and works
towards transcending the humanist frame and collective. Foucault’s concern with
how life is inserted into history is one part of this potential. Likewise, his interest
in how governmental tactics and programmes are re-directed towards ‘forces’ and
‘bodies’, rather than a more limited and narrower concern with political subjects,
opens up a space for a more-than-human appreciation of biopolitical actions.
Second, and perhaps somewhat ironically, this is made possible through a
reading of the Foucault, who is primarily concerned with addressing the human and
how human populations are acted upon by way of governmental techniques. This
is a reading of Foucault’s biopolitics that stresses the disciplining of subjects and the
development of what is understood to be essentially repressive techniques. It is, in
effect, a reading of Foucault that draws out and attends to the equation of
biopolitics and biopowers as powers over life, without, we would argue, paying
enough attention to the lively openings, and the irreducibilities, that may be
opened up in this more-than-human world.
There is then, we argue, in this version of biopolitics, an interesting but also
somewhat troublesome or problematic combination of the positive and the
negative. There is the affirmative and, we could say, generous reading of Foucault
when it comes to how his re-workings of social and political theory may serve as
an invitation and resource for opening up the biopolitics collective towards

nonhumans and their intricate relations with human forms of life. But this is
combined with a reading that emphasizes the disciplining and repressive nature of
government over ‘life’. Might there be a more generous reading of government
too? In order to see what is at stake here, it is worth following Wolfe’s biopolitical
collective in a little more detail.
Wolfe, like many others, turns to Foucault’s definition of biopower as a means
to open up an historical shift in rule or governing. Crucial here was Foucault’s first
theorizing of biopolitics in the final part of the first volume of The History of
Sexuality (1978) entitled ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’. This introduced a
key event whereby populations became less subjected to sovereign power and
increasingly governed through ‘norms’. This Foucault called ‘biohistory’, and, as
Campbell and Sitze put it:
Whereas before the advent of biohistory, Western man did not know how
alive he was (just that he was not dead), once the self-evidence of death
withdraws, we witness the emergence of contingent standards for what
qualifies as living. No timeless, transcendent life and death laws determine
the destiny of this species, only changing, immanent measures that allow for
the evaluation of varying degrees and kinds of living.
(Campbell and Sitze, 2013b, p. 10)
Sovereign power is associated with the territorial and direct forms of rule that
involve the ultimate sanction of ‘putting to death’ or ‘letting live’. In contrast,
biopower is less territorial and less direct. It involves the emergence of a ‘power of
regularization, and … consists in making live and letting die’ (Foucault, 2003, p.
247). This is linked to Foucault’s ‘regime of governmentality’ – its techniques of
managing, directing and enhancing the lives of populations via hygiene, population
sciences and other interventions in order ‘to extend and consolidate political
power’ (Wolfe, 2013, p. 22).
In Wolfe’s reading of Foucault, the rise of the regime of governmentality, and its
exercise of biopower, is a response to the threat to power created by the new
irreducible and non-transferable subject, a ‘homo oeconomicus’ or subject of
interests, the emergence of which Foucault (2008, pp. 271–3) traces back to
seventeenth-century Europe. This ‘homo oeconomicus’ is something very different
than the juridical subject and subject of rights, and it is this new subject that
triggers, following Wolfe, biopower – which comes to involve the sciences of
populations with the task to manage or grasp this ‘aleatory element’ (Wolfe, 2013,
p. 23) by a ‘power that is not individualizing, but … massifying … directed not at
man-as-body but man-as-species’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 243).
Wolfe also draws upon Esposito (2008), who explains how this new humanitas
‘increasingly comes to adhere to its own biological material’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 4).
The result is often disturbing. For once ‘it is reduced to its pure vital substance and
for that reason removed from every juridical-political form, the humanity of man
remains necessarily exposed to what both saves and annihilates it’ (Esposito, 2008,
p. 4). It is precisely within this framing, as the distinction between man and animal
stops being a given, that the ‘anthropological machine’ keeps deciding upon and
recomposes the conflict between man and animal. Here, Wolfe introduces key
concepts from Agamben (2004), whose insistence on the continuing role of the
sovereign leads to an anthropological machine which depends on, first and
foremost, a foundational distinction within law between bios (or ‘political form of
life’) and zoe (or ‘bare life’). For Agamben, the very possibility for indistinction
between lives to be saved (bios) and lives to be sacrificed (zoe) becomes a motif of
biopolitics, and through this the re-emergence of the sovereign subject who is
distinct from the bearer of nothing but bare life (homo sacer). As Wolfe (2013, p. 30)
sees it, Agamben’s argument ends up reproducing a peculiar human and political
authenticity as well as a ‘hysterical condemnation and disavowal of embodied life
as something constitutively deficient’.
Wolfe identifies this animosity towards bare life, as well as the lack of historical or
empirical specificity in Agamben’s work, as a key moment in which to explore other
paths to a post-human politics. To do this, Wolfe returns to Foucault and uses
Lazzarato’s contribution (2002) to stress that Foucault refused to see power as
determinate and was clear that subjects, whether human or otherwise, are not simply
subjected to the law. They are, as the title of Wolfe’s book Before the Law suggests,
always both partially subject to the law and also antecedent to it. It is therefore
necessary, Wolfe argues, to distinguish between a declension of biopolitics towards
sovereignty, where bios necessarily trumps zoe, and one in which biopolitics
configures a ‘relation of bodies, forces, technologies and dispositifs’ (Wolfe, 2013, p. 33).
To Wolfe, Foucault’s way of introducing ‘life into history’ – and thus Foucault’s
reorientation of the problem, not least the problem and question of agency and
membership in a political community – comes with the advantage of turning the
issue of freedom and power into a question of degrees and not of kind in relation to
human and nonhuman bodies. The importance of this is of course that this is
precisely what makes a foundational distinction between humans and nonhumans
or between bios and zoe unattainable. Any definition of life or the bios is always and
already formatted, though not determined, by its being made political (or
historical), and thus there can be no a priori reason to sustain an absolute or formal
distinction between forms of life. However, even in this somewhat different
framing, biopolitics for Wolfe seems to continue to be understood as a ‘strategic’
arrangement that coordinates power relations ‘in order to extract a surplus of
power from living beings’ (Lazzarato, quoted in Wolfe, 2013, p. 33). Despite the
insistence that what we need is historical and empirical specificity, Wolfe arguably
gets somewhat trapped in the logic from which he tries to escape. Life becomes so
to speak ‘one’, and this point of departure takes part in producing a line of
reasoning and narrating that ends up lacking precisely the historical and empirical
specificity that he rightly demands. Drawing on Esposito, who in turn draws on
Nietzsche, Wolfe sees a ‘“gallery of horrors” that stretches from the eugenics and
selective breeding [of the nineteenth century] to the Nazi death camps in the
century that would follow’ (Wolfe, 2013, p. 42). In this way, the Holocaust, regimes
of breeding and the industrial-scale slaughtering of animals are drawn as if
seamlessly together.
Moreover, according to Wolfe’s reading of this no-less-depressing paradigmatic
biopolitics, we are forced to conclude that current practices of factory farming, as
well as the logic of the Holocaust and genocide, are not a sideline of modern life,
but rather ‘constitutively political for biopolitics in its modern form’ (Wolfe, 2013, p.
46). Hence, not only are there episodes of atrocity, but such atrocities are also consti-
tutive to this version of biopolitics. Biopolitics in its contemporary form is, if we
follow Wolfe’s reading, simply at its worst ever: ‘[T]he practices of maximizing
control over life and death, of ‘making live’ in Foucault’s words, through eugenics,
artificial insemination, selective breeding, pharmaceutical enhancement,
inoculation and the like are on display in the modern factory farm as perhaps
nowhere else in biopolitical history’ (Wolfe, 2013, p. 46). This declension of
biopolitics from Heidegger and Arendt, with its foundational distinction between
proper and improper life, seems to lead inevitably to concentrated feeding
operations (CAFOs) and mass disassembly lines that are seemingly inherent to
biopolitical modernity.
The point, though, we think is clear. Conventional biopolitics reproduces an
anthropocentric logic which valorizes proper life, ones that are always human, it
seems, but a category nonetheless into which all humans are not welcome. But
more than this, this logic’s lacunae and sense of power over life depart from another
‘more’ Foucauldian understanding of the indeterminacies of historical and
contemporary constellations of living beings, apparatus and so on. To Wolfe, taking
such questions seriously poses direct political challenges and ‘radicalizes biopolitical
thought in ways not possible if we remain within the usual purview of anthro-
pocentrism’ (Wolfe, 2013, p. 52).
Wolfe’s argument, then, is that the contemporary biopolitical regime is one that
doesn’t work: governmentality always fails – and the more your borders fail, the
more you invest in securing them. To Wolfe, this is part of the surplus argument
we referred to earlier on: the ‘producing surplus logic’ constantly also produces its
own externalities or side effects which become impossible to escape. These
arrangements of lives have unintended consequences exactly of the kind that resist
or dissent from the seemingly metaphysical sovereign powers over life. All is not
well on the farm, of course, and it may well be that the problem is the misplaced
affirmation of human agency or the ability to demarcate and arrange life into
categories. Indeed, life seems to continually escape the grids that are placed around
it, and as many have argued, including Hinchliffe et al. (2013) and Shukin (2009) –
and as zoonotic diseases, mobile drug resistant genes and pollutants of all kinds
indicate – the spillovers from this system of arranging life and death are increasingly
apparent.
Hence, there is more to Wolfe than we have earlier acknowledged, or rather
there is a surplus to the ‘logic’ that is constitutive to Wolfe’s analysis that we need
to take seriously, and which Wolfe indeed urges us to take seriously. To Wolfe:
the exponential expansion and routinization of mechanisms and logics that

extend from the Chicago slaughterhouses of the turn of the twentieth
century, through the assembly lines developed by Ford, to the Nazi death
camps and back again, travers[e] what we are now forced to call a newly
expanded community of the living.
(Wolfe, 2013, p. 52)
Even if we might question the sense of inevitable order here, or the reading of the
biopolitics collective as part and parcel of an iron cage, the critical point is that it
is the spillovers that may enable the constitution of a new collective. The
intermingling of lives, some of them inflated to previously unimaginable levels,
sparks new kinds of publics, new kinds of collectives.
In sum, the ‘non-given’ partition between man and animal presents an
opportunity for new kinds of life politics, which focuses on life as lived rather than
a formal division. The question at this point becomes what kind of community and
how to trace its contours, fracture points and differences. Clearly, at least for Wolfe,
we cannot oppose topographies of exclusion with cross-border solidarity or an
undifferentiated mass of life. The latter is something that he accuses Esposito
(2008) of demanding. For Wolfe (2013, p. 56), a neo-vitalist position which insists
on ‘the principle of unlimited equivalence for every single form of life’ is
unattainable, or as he puts it ‘unworkable’, both philosophically and pragmatically
(p. 58). We agree, though Wolfe may be a little too quick here in writing off
Esposito. While uneven and perhaps lacking sufficient specificity in its recourse to
phenomenological notions of flesh, Esposito nevertheless provides clues to the
dynamics of relations that are attentive not only to connections but also to discon-
nections. It is the integral relations of both community and immunity, of being
together and of maintaining identities and differences, which make this work useful
in tracing a politics of associations. Esposito’s work may be inconclusive here, but
it does index a form of living that is attendant to the responsiveness that is required
in order to live and live well.
A turn to ethics and responsibility

Following on from this, in contrast to any sense of life as undifferentiated mass and
the unattainable ethical position it implies, Derridean-inspired writings on
conditional hospitality provide an alternative and possibly more workable basis for
moving on. In this work, responsibility can never be unconditional or full.
Hägglund (2008, p. 94), for example, writes that there is ‘potentially an endless
number of others to consider, and one cannot take any responsibility without
excluding some others in favor of certain others. What makes responsibility
possible is that which at the same time makes it impossible for any responsibility to
be fully responsible’.3 For the very same reasons, an ethics of pure equilibrium
without decision, without discrimination, without selection and perspective, would
be, paradoxically, unethical. In contrast, this is a biopolitical ethics which
acknowledges ‘the other’ but which not only accepts but indeed also insists on the
need to decide, to demarcate, to differentiate, in order to enable responsibility in
the first place. This is also, we should say, not simply a matter of practicalities. There
is also the post-structuralist argument that hospitality can never be unconditional
given that the relation is always haunted by things going wrong or the relation
turning sour. This isn’t openness, then, but a continual and responsive negotiation
of relations and dealing with non-relations (Harrison, 2007).
However, we might ask to what extent this becomes a post-humanist version of
biopolitics – or rather a version of biopolitics in which practices and technologies
of government take the condition of nonhumans more radically and substantially
into account? Hence, a ‘more-than-human ethics’, so to speak. One might also ask
if the biopolitical and post-humanist project falls somewhat apart in the version
that Wolfe has been keen to outline. There seems at least to be a radical and vast
distance between the horrendous anthropological machines which keep extracting
surplus from life, and an ethics that insists on taking nonhumans into account in a
responsible way. Who will transform this logic, this machine which is constitutively
unethical, racist and ‘species-ist’, into this new ethical and responsible direction?
How are nonhumans to be taken into account rather than simply being exploited
and having their life taken?
The version of biopolitics that Wolfe works out, assisted and underpinned of
course by a larger collective of contributors, begs for such a teasing out of tensions
and indeterminacies. At the same time, it seems as if Wolfe himself is at least in part
conscious about them, particularly as he comes to problematize, by way of Bruno
Latour, how such decisions and discriminations may come about. Interestingly, this
version of biopolitics comes to re-invest hope in precisely the law, of being brought
before the law. As Wolfe writes (2013, p. 89, quoting Teubner, 2006), ‘whenever the
law grants rights and duties, whenever it gives “associations between humans and
non-humans a legal voice”, the law opens itself to the ecology of its broader
environment and the changes taking place there’. Hence, a radically new biopolitics
ultimately renders itself dependent on ‘the pragmatic iteration of law’ (Wolfe, 2013,
p. 94) with the implication that, if brought before the law-making machine,
another ethics may come to have widespread effects and consequence. This, at least,
is how we might positively read this version of an affirmative biopolitics that Wolfe
has been searching for.
However, while Wolfe’s reading of Foucault and related texts helps him reach the
position of an affirmative biopolitics, it is not clear how we are to move towards
such an affirmative position: what is Wolfe offering in terms of tools for doing post-
human research for social scientists and humanist scholars? How are social science
and humanist scholars to go about investigating biopolitical collectives? Here
Foucault’s writings may have much more potential than is often conveyed, and in
fact can assist social science and the humanities in generating understanding of who
counts and how biopolitical collectives are formed, held together or disassembled.
We turn now from the use of Foucault and related writings as a means to
generate a post-human, affirmative biopolitical and philosophical position, and
instead focus on contributions that emphasize the methodological potential of

Foucault. The latter, we argue, is foregrounded as Foucault is read in conjunction
with what can be called a more material and less metaphysical approach to life.
Here the work of Thomas Lemke becomes key, but so too is the longer-term
radicalization and operationalization of Foucault in the body of work that has
come to be called actor-network theory.
Versions of biopolitics II: The turn to materiality and the

government of things
As Wolfe’s account starts to suggest, there may be possibilities for a different reading
of Foucault – even within the biopolitical frame. In order to try and search for this
possibility, we suggest moving towards a reading, or a re-reading, of Foucault’s
lectures on governmentality – and how Foucault has been framed in relation to
what is often labelled the ‘material turn’.
One such place to start is the version that is developed by Thomas Lemke
(2014), who has set out on precisely this task of re-reading Foucault in a way that
moves his work beyond its anthropocentric limitations. In doing this, Lemke
argues, we might even arrive at a different understanding of biopolitics. Lemke’s
way into this, however, is by way of other discussions and scholars than the version
and the collective we referred to above. Chiefly this is the recent turn to matter
and materiality, ‘the new materialism’, and then in particular the work of Karen
Barad (2007).
Even if acknowledging that what is often termed ‘the material turn’ is difficult
to categorize as one homogeneous body of work, Lemke (2014, p. 3) argues that
the turn aims at ‘a new understanding of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics,
to be achieved by overcoming anthropocentrism and humanism, the split between
nature and culture, linguistic or discursive idealism, social constructivism, positivism
and naturalism’. Core to this movement is that it extends the concept of agency
and power to nonhumans and thereby also calls into question conventional
understandings of life.
Foucault clearly serves as a source of inspiration for the material turn, not the
least through his insistence on the formative role of bodies, his productive concept
of power and his highlighting of how arrangements and material orders help to
constitute those bodies and powers. Even so, Foucault’s work is often read as social
constructivist. Karen Barad (2007), for example, sees him as a scholar who remains
in ‘the traditional humanist orbit’.
It is precisely such a reading that Lemke sets out to challenge. In order to do this,
however, he combines Barad’s reading with a critical appraisal of Foucault’s work.
Crucial here is Barad’s discomfort with Foucault as she reads him as privileging the
‘social’ and for being unable to understand the ‘complex intra-actions of human and
non-human actors’ (Lemke, 2014, p. 7). Barad suggests that Foucault’s work focuses
solely on the production of human bodies, while taking nonhuman bodies for granted.
Further, in Lemke’s account of Barad (2007), because Foucault takes the boundaries
between nature and culture for granted, he fails to give a sufficient account of the
complex and dynamic relations between meaning and matter (Lemke, 2014, p. 7).
Following Barad, matter, for Foucault, simply serves as a passive resource or raw
material for social power relations. Barad here echoes and critiques not only the
conventional distinctions of biopolitics (see above) but also Rutherford’s (1999)
argument that Foucault failed to see that the operations of biopower consist in the
‘making up of both people and things’ (Rutherford, quoted in Lemke, 2014, p. 5).
Parallel to how Wolfe reads Foucault, the critique is that his notion of biopower is
only concerned with defining ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic
biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy’
(Foucault, 2007, p. 1; cf. Lemke, 2014, p. 7).
One of the core reasons why Foucault can be read in an anthropocentric
manner is that from his middle period on he was more concerned with the human
sciences, such as psychology, statistics, public health and epidemiology, rather than
the natural sciences (see also Bowker and Latour, 1987, for this point). However, as
Lemke points out by referring to Joseph Rouse’s work (1987), Foucault’s analysis
of power could very well also be used to fruitfully explain power effects more
broadly. If we view it as an irreductionist approach to government (Asdal, 2008),
we open up what Philo (2012) calls a more lively Foucault. The place where
Lemke finds this opening for a post-humanist approach is in Foucault’s govern-
mentality lectures and the idea of a ‘government of things’.
It is in the 1978 lecture series at the College de France that Foucault refers to
a ‘curious definition’ of government provided by Guillaume de la Perriere in an
early modern tract on the art of government. Here government is conceived of as
‘the right disposition of things arranged as to lead to a suitable end’ (Foucault, 2007,
p. 96). What is important in this way of framing government is that it detaches
government from sovereignty, which is so intimately linked to territory and the
subjects that inhabit it. Interestingly, within a biopolitical frame and for the
discussion of biopolitics, the government of men, as formulated by de la Perriere,
is about ‘a sort of complex of men and things’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 96). Lemke
includes the full quote:
The things government must be concerned about, de la Perriere says, are

men in their relationships, bonds and complex involvements with things like
wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its
borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. ‘Things’ are men in
their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and
thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationships with things like
accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemic, and death.
(Foucault, 2007, p. 96, quoted in Lemke, 2014)
Lemke emphasizes the relationality that is implied here: the issue is not stable and
fixed entities – humans and things – but their co-constitution in relation. This is
why, Lemke argues, ‘things’ appears in inverted commas: this is not about a given
distinction between subjects and objects. Following Lemke’s reading, it is rather the
arts of government that decide what becomes defined as an object or subject. To
add more weight to this coalition of people and things, Foucault’s concept ‘the
milieu’ is defined as an ‘intersection between a multiplicity of living individuals
working and coexisting with each other in a set of material elements that act on
them and on which they act in turn’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 22).
For Lemke, it is clear that agency in Foucault is not exclusively a property of
humans but rather that ‘agential power originates in relations between humans and
non-human entities’ (Lemke, 2014, p. 10). Moreover, since the boundaries between
humans and things are not clear or given, humans are, possibly, governed as ‘things’.
This is not ‘things’ like the things that the critique of positivism was concerned
with: humans as reified and reduced to passive things or objects among any other
object. Rather, this is about acting upon ‘forces’, a reading that relates to the broad
characterization of biopolitics that we have already outlined, one that, we should
remember, is concerned with an always imperfect grasping of the swash and swirl
of those forces. Lemke has a similar take on Foucault’s attentiveness to things:
[I]t is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the disposition of things,
that is to say, of employing tactics rather than law, or, of as far as possible
employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be
achieved through a certain number of means.
(Foucault, 2007, p. 99)
That is, we are confronted with a complex of entities that can, potentially at least,
unsettle any primary distinction between humans and the rest.
If we follow Lemke, it is not only that the lectures on governmentality can be
read as openings for a less anthropocentric reading of Foucault. They should also
be seen as a way of opening up a different concept of biopolitics altogether. Lemke
sees a shift in Foucault’s thinking, such that it becomes less oriented towards
processes of subjugation and corporeal dressage, or the production of political
communities or zoe, and more towards the problem of bios. This is to say that
Foucault moves beyond technologies of bodily disciplining and the regulation of
the population towards the self-constitution of the individual and collective
subjects (Lemke, 2014, p. 12). In order to contribute to the understanding of what
Foucault was after here, Lemke draws on the ‘government of things’ approach to
cast light on how Foucault addresses the relationship between the physical and the
moral, the natural and the artificial as matters that cannot be reduced to the domain
of the social. Lemke’s argument is that we should not read Foucault as if he takes
nonhuman nature for granted, but is rather interested in how this is articulated
within practices.
In sum, Lemke (2014, p. 13) argues that the ‘idea of a government of things helps
to enact a different understanding of biopolitics that no longer exclusively addresses
“phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species”’. Three issues become key:
first, as we have already noted, the government of things takes into account the
interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and the artificial,
the physical and the moral – and their articulation is mediated by developments
such as technology and dispositif (or the arrangement of matters, rules, language and
so on that allows for power to be exercised). Things and men are then historically
constituted rather than timeless or always necessarily distinct (cf. Agamben, 2004).
Second, the concept of milieu as ‘an element in which a circular link is produced
between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause
from another’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 21) undermines the sense that humans are active
on a passive world. Instead, causes are complex foldings of men and things. Third,
there is the interplay between milieu and a government of things: Foucault (2007,
p. 21) refers to ‘a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and
essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live’.
In this sense, Lemke concludes, life is not a given, but rather dependent on
conditions of existence within and beyond life processes. Hence, in many ways,
while the version of biopolitics that Lemke seeks to tease out shares elements with
those that we have already sketched, a crucial difference is that the ‘machine’, so to
speak, is absent. The result is less of a drive for surplus, and less about disciplining
of bodies. It is rather a matter of different and open-ended ‘arrangements’. This
openness can foment a biopolitics that is enacted somewhat differently. It is a politics
precisely in the sense that there are, indeed, openings for different kinds of
arrangements (see Asdal, 2014).
However, while Lemke’s reading of Foucault points to some parallels with the
new materialism that is associated with Barad and others, there are some crucial
differences. The concept of a government of things may also be understood as a
critical engagement with the ontological underpinnings of the new materialism.
By inquiring into ‘the conditions of the emergence of “life” as a distinctive domain
of practice and thought’ (Lemke, 2014, p. 14), Foucault continually unsettles
materialism (without, it should be said, opposing it to spiritualism or vitalism).
‘Life’, in Foucault’s work, is neither an object that is always already there, nor can
it be reduced simply to an effect of knowledge practices. It is rather a ‘transactional
reality’, that is a dynamic ensemble of matter and meaning (Lemke, 2014, p. 14).
Foucault (1997, p. 315) insists, then, on the historical ontology of life.
This is an important correction, to put it that way, to the turn to materialism,
namely its tendency to assume that there is something like ‘materiality per se’ (see
also Asdal, 2015; Asdal and Ween, 2014). Not only do we have a problem that
matter or materiality tends to be seen as something singular or stable or as an
originary force, but the problem is also that ‘matter’ tends to be grasped as if it can
be separated from interpretations, meaning and discourse (Lemke, 2014, p. 15).
Braun and Whatmore (2010) have addressed the problems that arise from this, and
asked if it might not be better to pay closer attention to the specificity of the relevant
matter – instead of a generic analogy to ‘life’. Lemke suggests that the relational
approach inherent to the government of things might be precisely such a fruitful
way of exploring the material and technical conditions that produce ‘life’, and then
‘life’ dependent on and operating in historical specific conjunctions with other
bodies (Lemke, 2014, p. 15). This, Lemke proposes, is a more viable approach than
an idea of an all-encompassing ‘vitality of matter’ and an original ‘force of things’
as proposed by, for example, Bennett (2004).
Furthermore, Lemke argues that not only does this approach allow for
conceiving of life and matter in terms of an historical ontology, it also presents an
opportunity for a re-problematization of politics, for politics no longer needs to be
conceived of as an exclusively humanist affair. The concept of a government of
things underlines the materiality of politics and makes it possible, Lemke argues, ‘to
enlarge political analysis by including artifacts and objects produced by science and
technology, but also environmental facts and medical issues’ (Lemke, 2014, p. 16; see
also Asdal, 2008). To expand on this possibility, we return to a version of material
politics that was in many senses already located within the historical ontology that
Lemke favours, expanding as we go on the possibilities of material semiotics before
returning to the sentient creatures with which we started.
Versions of biopolitics III: Material semiotics and the government

of words and things
One of the merits of Lemke’s work is to demonstrate how any labelling of Foucault
as a social constructivist is too hasty. This provides an opportunity to draw
Foucault’s work to the more Latourian interest in not simply ‘things’ but the
interrelation of speech acts, language, setups and materials. By drawing the two
together, we will address and argue that they both need to be read within the frame
of a more genuinely material-semiotic approach. In other words, the material turn is
always more than matter, and this has real consequences for how we might re-
formulate a biopolitics in terms of sentient creatures.
In terms of what we have achieved so far, we have used Wolfe and Lemke and
their associated co-authors to open up a space for a methodological and
empirically (and historically as well as geographically) specific approach to
biopolitics. We have jettisoned grand metaphysical claims for law and at the same
time de-centred humans from the stage of action within a material or lively (as
opposed to a neo-vitalist) reading of Foucault and biopolitics. Our task, it seems, is
to open up a set of methods or guidelines for examining the imbrications of men
and things and humans and nonhumans. We are struck indeed by the fact that both
of the biopolitical collectives that we have discussed so far leave us with the
injunction to forego any totalizing account of an ethical position (universal respon-
sibility) as well as any ahistorical account of life. In order to sketch what kinds of
tools might be available to us here, we find that we need to return to actor-network
theory – itself, in some hands at least, a radicalization of Foucault’s initial sense for
a historically and materially constituted social (see for example Law, 1994). Indeed,
Foucault’s elaboration of discourse to include the sayings and doings, as well as the
practices and arrangements that help in the ordering of the social, draw us to actor-
network theory’s material semiotics where meaning is conveyed by socio-material
arrangements as well as speech acts. While for some, Foucauldian-inspired work
requires that human practices remain primary compared to material arrangements

(Schatzki, 2003), actor-network theory as well as science and technology studies
more generally provide a means for drawing practices and orderings together and
remaining agnostic, methodologically and ethically, on who or what shapes the
social (Mol, 2002; Pickering, 1995).
To elaborate, in actor-network theory a key objective was not to make the
human and the nonhuman equivalent, something that seemed to emerge from at
least one version of post-humanism. Rather, it was to question and explore what
it takes to become human and to achieve agency: who or what constitutes an actor
was the question to be explored. Also, rather than to introduce ‘life’ as a shared
denominator, the work that followed introduced a range of different lively entities,
both organic and inorganic, whose effects and liveliness were constituted within
the practices and events that were being studied. From microbes to atherosclerotic
veins, and from invertebrates to markets, liveliness was borne out of a multiplicity
of practices. Clearly this is an effort to take materiality seriously. Nevertheless, it
is worth noting that the inspirations for this approach were just as much theories
about semiotics as theories about materialities. Following the French literary
scholars Greimas and Courtés (1982, p. 5), ‘an actant can be thought of as that
which accomplishes an act … independently of all other determinations’. The
issue is not so much to ascribe agency, even less human agency. The ‘actant’ is
whoever or whatever that takes part in the process, and in any form whatsoever.
The challenge, then, as it can be seen from this semiotic tradition, is not restricted
to ascribing or adding liveliness, but it can also be to provide space for and explore
the significance of the ‘formerly’ passive entities, agents or actors. Hence, we
cannot take ‘liveliness’ or agency for granted. Rather, the task is to take an interest
in the different forms of participation (or indeed, non-participation) in that which
we study, as well as an interest in the instruments or the inscription practices that
allow nature-objects to become more, or less, lively (see, e.g., Asdal and Ween,
2014).
At this juncture it might be worth noting, as we did in relation to Foucault’s
work above, that the point here is not to argue that actor-network theory is really
about writing, in the sense of words and discourse. The point – and this is what
we would like to stress – is rather to overcome this division between matters that
are inscribed and matters that are, so to speak, real-world objects. As with Foucault,
the inscription practices that are core to actor-network theory and laboratory
studies take part in producing objects, and hence realities, in the first place. But the
point is also to underline that the concern is not materiality per se: the issue is
rather words and things combined (or more broadly, inscription practices and things
combined). This drawing of Foucault and actor-network theory together helps in
our terms to tease out a version of biopolitics that is neither exclusively material
nor oriented towards life as such, but rather concerned with how nature-objects
emerge and are being modified in practices and by way of instruments, devices or
technologies (Asdal, 2015). Hence, the version we seek to tease out addresses not
only the government of things, but words and things. The result is that this is a
version of biopolitics that is less concerned with biopolitics as a philosophical

position, and more with biopolitics as a version of empirical philosophy concerned
with method, that is a sensitivity regarding how words and things, or practices and
things, shape and produce objects or allow for liveliness.
Latour’s project is of course central to this quest for method, but it also opens
up something else: the uncertainty that reigns between means and ends. If
biopolitics as conventionally framed has tended to see materials and things as
arranged for human ends, and particularly for an optimized sense of the human,
then actor-network theory has enabled us to unsettle any hard and fast sense of
what are ends and what are means. We read, for example, Latour’s essay ‘To
Modernize or to Ecologize? That Is the Question’ (Latour, 1995) as an effort to re-
interpret what it takes to be human, in a way that returns us to the question of the
government of people and things. ‘[W]hat would a human be without elephants,
plants, lions, cereals, oceans or plankton?’ Latour (1995, p. 260) asks rhetorically,
before answering: ‘A human alone, much more alone than Robinson Crusoe on
his island. Less than a human. Certainly not a human’. He then adds:
The regime of ecology does not at all say that we should shift our allegiance
from the human realm to nature … The regime of ecology simply says that
we do not know what makes the common humanity of human beings and that
yes, maybe, without the elephants of the Amboseli, without the meandering
waters of the Drôme, without the bears of the Pyrenees, without the doves
of the Lot, or without the water table of the Beauce, they would not be
human.
(Latour, 1995, p. 260)
This declaration of ignorance, of not knowing what a (collective) body can do, to
put it in Spinoza’s terms, unsettles the ‘ends’ of biopolitics. We take Latour’s project
(and that of Stengers as well as Serres, from whom he borrows) to be one of
inviting us to respond differently to ‘things’ and to learn that things are rarely
simply means to established ends, but that their relations are open to change.
If we return to Foucault (2007, p. 99), this message is somewhat less clear. He
argues that with the new definition (of government) given by de la Perrière, a new
kind of finality is emerging; government is defined as a right manner of disposing
things so as to lead not to the form of common good, as the jurist’s text would
have said, but to an end that is ‘convenient’ for each of the things that are to be
governed. This, he argues, implies a plurality of specific aims. It is in this way and
in this sense that government becomes a question not of imposing law on men but
of disposing of things; that is of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of
using laws themselves as tactics, to arrange things in such a way that, through a
certain number of means, such-and-such ends may be achieved. As Lentzos and
Rose (2009) note, there is a grasping quality to all this, especially when the ends of
government become associated with balancing freedoms and securities:
This logic does not operate according to the binary of permitted and
forbidden, does not judge a variation as evil in itself, but tries to grasp the
reality of the ‘natural’ phenomena that it addresses, to understand the way in
which various components function together, to manage or regulate that
complex reality towards desired ends.
(Lentzos and Rose, 2009, p. 232)
It could certainly still be argued that a fundamental difference between the two
projects remains: whereas Latour explicitly underlines the uncertainty concerning
means and ends, Foucault (via de la Perrière) and his followers underline the means
by which various ends may be achieved. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the
combination of the two projects opens up for a distinct version of a ‘more-than-
human’ biopolitics. This is a version of biopolitics that is not primarily concerned
with carving out a position regarding who or what forms of life can or cannot be
taken into account; rather, this is a version that takes as its point of departure the
uncertainty regarding the composition of the collective and the relations between
‘things’.
An early mantra of science and technology studies was that things might be
otherwise: that there is nothing determined in technology, economics, history
and so forth that dictates that societies have to be this way or that way. Rather,
in detailing the ways in which socio-materialities (and we would add, more-
than-human apparatus and arrangements) are built, we can trace how meaning
and materialities are generated, repaired and maintained, and in doing so start to
query their continuing constitution. Feminist science studies has perhaps taken
this project further than most, and indeed, we could return here to some of the
earliest re-workings of Foucault in a post-humanist vein carried out by Donna
Haraway (1989a; 1989b). For Haraway, it is the ‘being with’ of immune systems
and more latterly companion species that generates hopeful if always non-
innocent pathways to determining different kinds of self and different kinds of
life politics. This is a style of working which refuses the sacred and profane
divisions of Agamben, or the political community of speakers that animates
Arendt’s humanism. It is an opening, we would suggest, and an invitation to think
and act otherwise. It is a refusal of the implication that the biopolitical inevitably
leads to the ‘intensification of death across populations’ (Campbell and Sitze,
2013b, p. 20). But it is also a refusal that requires intense engagement,
multispecies ethnographies (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010) or detailed study and
above all a revealing of the non-coherence of the social, as John Law would call
it (Law et al., 2014) – it is always being made up of mixtures, divisions and more
or less stable orderings. For us, there is an ontopolitical task at hand to investigate
those orderings and to fold them back in order to open up for debate on how
other possibilities for human-nonhuman animals can be brought into existence.
These are the accounts that ‘may move’.
Issues and chapter outline

The contributions in this book are all practice-oriented, empirically grounded
analyses that variously seek to create a different politics of life and living than we
might find in some of the core biopolitical collectives reviewed above. They form
multidisciplinary responses to the invitations to not only regard ‘things’ as simply
means to established ends, but to regard their relations and ontologies as precarious
and open to change. By doing so they show why it is both useful and necessary to
focus on the particularities of biohistories and biopolitics in order to become aware
of, reflect on and intervene in the politics of life.
Ranging from animals in science and industry to animals in literature and law,
the chapters bring forth worlds and ways of living by means of historical, literary
and ethnographic studies. Some work with a critical point of departure, but all with
a curiosity that results in generous analyses that portray more-than-human politics
as rich, complex, noisy and messy. The empirical specificity in the chapters reveals
how both human and nonhuman animal lives and their relations are constituted,
stabilized or rendered precarious.
Encompassing various disciplines and research traditions, the contributions
mobilize a wide set of theoretical perspectives to understand how nonhuman
animals are ‘made intricate with’ knowledge systems, economies, governing
practices and everyday lives. Hence, while the book stages an encounter between
different historical and contemporary sites and practices in which the politics of
human and nonhuman life are formed, the chapters do so in different ways, and as
such the book forms an encounter between various approaches and traditions in
social science and humanities. Together and individually, we propose, they can be
read as multidisciplinary efforts to developing multispecies, more-than-human and
livelier politics of life. To demonstrate how they can be read as interventions, we
now briefly seek to bring the diverse perspectives into conversation with each
other and around issues that cut across empirical and disciplinary differences. Our
intention is not to suppose a single coherent framework for the chapters, but rather
to emphasize how they attend to more-than-human biopolitics.
Relational anthropomorphism
Animal studies have had a long and ambivalent relationship with anthropo-
morphism (DeMello, 2012; Webster, 2011). Authors in this tradition have often
aimed to understand nonhuman animals in ways that refuse a tendency to
domesticate through an attachment to or representation of human form. The aim
has in this sense been to write histories about ‘real’ animals and not only about
animals as symbols or metaphors (Fudge, 2002). Indeed, the concept of ‘post-
human’ can be read as a critical response to anthropomorphic writing and relating
to animals, suggesting that anthropomorphism is nothing but an undermining of
other-than-human species. However, abandoning anthropomorphism altogether
might not be the solution to the problem of writing animals in humanities and
social science studies. If humans are made in relation to animals, animals are also
constituted in relation to humans, and they are ‘done’ variously in various contexts
and situations. In practice, animals exist and are known through a range of practices
(see Law and Lien, this volume). So what happens if we think of anthropo-
morphism relationally? What happens if we reformulate anthropomorphism to not
to be a form of ‘sentimental’ relating, but rather a critical recognition of the
continuities between humans and nonhuman animals, that is how they come to be-
in-the-world-together?
This is what John Law and Marianne Lien suggest in their chapter on the farmed
Atlantic salmon, in which they sketch out what they call a relational understanding of
anthropomorphism to discuss how fish sentience is produced and enacted in the
instrumental context of the fish farming industry. Sentience has only recently been
politically acknowledged as an attribute of fish and is now included in European
legislation. However, to talk about and act upon fish sentience is dependent on what
Law and Lien refer to as ‘a collage of fishy-relevant practices’. This means that
‘sentience’ is not a given property of the fish, but rather a result of the different ways
in which legal, scientific and industrial practices have come together and performed
‘fishy sentience’. What they in fact do by insisting that fish and humans are always
done in relation is that they reformulate the conception of anthropomorphism from
being a projection of human characteristics placed upon animals to being a
recognition of how anthropomorphism is an integral part of relating to animals. This
means that we need to talk about a mutual becoming of fish and humans. Thus,
instead of discarding anthropomorphism as something that ‘reduces’ animals to
humans, Law and Lien draw attention to the many styles, or modes of anthropomorphism
enacted in various multispecies practices, and how the styles take part in enacting
differences and similarities between humans and fish in various ways.
Anthropomorphism could also be seen as a tool for ordering and a (necessary)
relational tool for developing instrumental relations with animals. A shared
analytical starting point for many of the chapters in this book is that they do not
regard relations of use as affairs in which animals are (only) acted upon as cold,
lifeless technologies. For instance, Vibeke Pihl’s chapter on the making of experi-
mental minipigs demonstrates the mutual dependency of anthropomorphizing and
instrumentalizing animals. Using ethnographic work in a laboratory animal stable
and a medical laboratory and drawing on feminist technoscience, Pihl offers a
multispecies ethnography on obese minipigs used as experimental models for the
surgical interventions in human gastric bypass (GBP) patients. Pihl compares the
work performed by animal technicians at the experimental farm in which the pigs
lived their ‘everyday lives’ and the work performed by scientists to transform the
pigs into numbers in the laboratory. She observes that giving the pigs names was
crucial to the work of the animal technicians at the experimental farm to individ-
ualize them. Giving them names, often of celebrities, helped the animal technicians
to single them out and become ‘attuned to’ the pigs’ different capabilities, sounds,
moods and preferences. Speedy G, for instance, was named so because she was a fast
runner and particularly active by nature. The act of individualizing by naming
enabled better care. At the same time it allowed the technicians to produce data for
research, such as the intake of food and weight measurements, which were emailed
daily to the scientists in the lab. Importantly, Pihl recognizes that the naming was
not so much about emotional attachments to the pigs as it was about distinguishing
and ordering the pigs, and being able to respond to suffering and death. In the lab,
numbers and numbering were what shaped the pig biographies. In contrast to the
naming in the experimental farm, numbering was linked to the issue of emotional
attachment to animals – or rather, emotional detachment. Naming, scientists
argued, blurred the boundary between humans and animals, and thus interfered
negatively to the prescribed task, that is to produce knowledge. Numbers worked
productively in that they produced good and objective data. The numbers also take
part in covering the pigs and the messiness of the pig-human relations at the
experimental farm and the laboratory, for instance in academic publications where
these forms of knowledge production are not represented.
Similar to the way in which Law and Lien show the necessity of a fish multiple
in the accomplishment of the fish farming industry, Pihl’s chapter demonstrates
how the different ways of knowing pigs by practices of naming and numbering were
central to transforming the pigs into translational models for human patients.
Producing pig biographies, both as tools and as biology, was integral to the process
of ‘attuning’ the animals and the humans in gastro bypass-related practices (Despret,
2004). Pihl’s analysis alerts us to the multiplicity of pig knowledges (i.e.,
biographies) and to the issues involved in knowledge production and in
transforming pigs into models for human patients. As such, she places herself in
conversation with feminist scholars who have argued for multiple ontologies in
medical practices (Mol, 2002), and with those who are interested in how
multispecies encounters and responses are often elusive and hard to identify and
hold on to – they are slippery encounters (e.g., Law and Lien, 2013).
Hence, Law and Lien’s chapter and Pihl’s chapter both demonstrate how instru-
mental relations and practices between humans and nonhumans are not always or
straightforwardly about reducing animal life. Making an indisputable link between
instrumentalism and the reduction of life is a reductive act in itself, and as a starting
point for discussion and investigation it does not aid us in understanding how and
why animals are made to suffer in different situations, and how this suffering is to
be approached.
Collective histories
Whereas Law and Lien focus on the farm, Asdal and Druglitrø in their chapter
focus on a radically different site of human-animal encounters, namely law.
Empirically, their contribution to this volume traces how nonhumans have
emerged by way of law as sentient beings with intrinsic value. Hence, animal
sentience is explored as the outcome of a series of law-making practices, and the
analysis demonstrates the ways in which different knowledge practices, such as
physiology and ethology, have played a crucial part in these operations. Asdal and
Druglitrø show how this very question of animal sentience, or the ability to feel
pain, has been a contested and disputed affair in a law-making context. However,
also the sensibilities of humans, their (or our) motives and character, have also very
much been at stake: the moral technology of law is not only about how to include
(or exclude) animals, but also a question of the inclusion (or exclusions) of humans.
As such it is also about versions of ‘humanness’: hence, the very composition of
society has been at stake in law-making techniques.
Inspired by how Michel Foucault studied punishment practices, what he
labelled moral technologies, Asdal and Druglitrø transfer this approach to law and
seek to demonstrate how law does indeed act as a moral technology, one that
expels and includes, but that also works as an art of government that interferes
more indirectly upon bodies. Studying law, they argue, is particularly important if
we are interested in analysing how life is being inserted into history, and it is
indeed an understudied moral technology that takes part in modifying the
biopolitical collective. In arguing this, the chapter places itself in conversation with
other contributions concerned with drawing animal studies and the issue of
biopolitics together.
At the same time as animals have been ascribed rights and sentience, demands
on the performativity of animals have increased dramatically. As Teubner (2006, p.
515) puts it, the animal is burdened with duties. This crucially involves duties to
serve human ends well. The authors explore how different knowledge practices
have played a crucial part in these operations, and how these become intimately
linked up with functionally managing tensions between ‘caring for’ and ‘burdening
with’.
Martina Schlünder’s chapter brings another perspective and empirical example
on how human and nonhuman lives are attuned to one another and the means by
which they are drawn into the same knowledge economies in experimental
medicine. Schlünder takes us to the Swiss Alps and to the emergence of a trauma-
surgery knowledge economy based on sheep. She describes the many translations
that had to be made in order for sheep to become so-called bone sheep in trauma
surgery, that is the sheep were used for testing implants that could ideally be used
to help injured persons with broken bones. To play their part, the sheep had to be
transformed from sheep as a flock to sheep as individuals.
In her text, Schlünder is guided by the questions of ‘what had to be known of
the sheep to make them walk from the pastures to labs and what had to be done
to displace them securely?’. She frames her analysis with the help of Ludvig Fleck’s
(1935) ‘thinking collectives’ and ‘traffic in thinking’. As opposed to many readings
of these concepts, Schlünder argues that the ‘thinking collective’ takes on a
material-semiotic character as Fleck regarded ‘thinking’ as a verb and as a shared
practice of a community. Read in this way, ideas and concepts, practices and
materials, all become part of forming thinking collectives, including the sheep.
Hence, thinking with a ‘thinking collective’ enables Schlünder to develop an
understanding of experimental animals as co-thinkers and members of a collective
that takes on a particular style of thinking. Further, this means that the multiple
ontologies of the sheep were formed by human agency as well as sheep agency, as
the sheep were active participants in the translation work between the animal body
and the human body, as well as transformations from biology to tool.
The dominant role of animals in experimental human medicine is a core
example of how the understanding of human life has been conditioned upon the
nonhuman. The translation of knowledge and procedures developed in animal
bodies to humans in order to enhance the human condition and understand life
processes has been and still is a contested method. For instance, the French
philosopher and physician George Canguilhem questioned the animal experiment
and the practices of making comparisons across species, from animal bodies to
human pathological conditions. Medical bacteriology that was founded on the use
of laboratory animals, he argued, involved a ‘process of reduction of the pathogenic
causes’ (Canguilhem, 1977). Christoph Gradmann’s chapter develops Canguilhem’s
critique of the animal experiment to investigate the history of the experiment in
medical bacteriology, focusing particularly on the work of the bacteriologist
Robert Koch. Gradmann explores if there exists something one could call a
‘medical-bacteriological-style of animal experimental work’. He does this by
describing the experimental setup and the use of animal models in Koch’s work.
Gradmann describes how the experimental setup and the construction of animal
models in bacteriology were highly reductionist of real-life processes, and as such
shows the disputable manners in which the animal experiment comes to serve as
a measure of disease. His chapter reminds us of the contingency of medical science,
a contingency that is also related to how evidence within nineteenth-century
experimental medicine was accumulated by the ambition and practice of
generalizing across as many different species as possible.
Experimental medicine and its extensive use of animals as test objects have been
a concern as much within the sciences as for many actors outside the sciences. In
order to respond to these challenges, so-called humane experimental techniques
were developed by the zoologist William Russell and the microbiologist Rex
Burch in the 1950s (published as The Principles of Humane Techniques in 1959). This
has come to form the basis of the 3 Rs (reduction, refinement and replacement)
which in contemporary science regulates the use of animals. The principles have
become tools for dealing with tensions emerging when using animals for scientific
purposes. The emergence of these techniques is the topic of Robert G.W. Kirk’s
contribution. By asking if biopower as conceptualized by Foucault is indeed
sufficient to understand the place of nonhumans in contemporary biopolitics, Kirk
addresses one of the core questions of this book. Through his investigation of the
new experimental techniques, Kirk offers a relational approach on how the
encounter between the ‘knowing human’ (the knowing subject) and experimental
nonhuman animals within the laboratory becomes a critical site for the production
of the human – or to phrase it with Asdal and Druglitrø in this volume, this is about
producing a specific version of humanness. Also, even though working in a quite
different manner and from a historical perspective, Kirk’s argument is very much
in line with the relational approach of Law and Lien in this volume, as he points
to how developing ‘the humane’ relied on encounters with nonhuman animals.

Interestingly and more specifically, Kirk argues that the moral character of the
human was at stake: the ‘moral character of the knowing human [became] a
condition of his access to truth’. Hence, in the experimental laboratory, Kirk
argues, biopower is dependent on distributive relations between humans and
animals.
Towards a multispecies, livelier, affirmative biopolitics

Epidemics such as Ebola and avian influenza have produced a growing, global
concern about diseases transmitted between animal and human populations
(zoonoses). This has contributed to a wider recognition of the entanglements of
humans, animals and natures in science and in politics. Thus, the distributive relations
between human and nonhuman animal bodies are recognized and made integral to
biopower strategies today – though by what means and to what and whose ends? In
her chapter, Natalie Porter addresses the issue of biopower strategies and the disputed
notion of ‘One World – One Health’, a notion which, at its most basic, calls for
greater integration of medical and veterinary sciences (see Craddock and Hinchliffe,
2015). Porter bases her analysis on ethnographic research with multinational policy-
makers, health workers and poultry producers and on the management of avian
influenza (HPAI) outbreaks in Vietnam in the early 2000s. She seeks to assess the
international politics of global health in order to provide a geopolitical biopolitics.
Importantly, Porter demonstrates the implications of One Health as a global initiative
on political and ethical practices by showing how the strategies of government
provoked tension between authorities and citizens as they drew on different biological
and territorial subjectivities. Further, the tensions between different knowledges (such as
veterinary and human medicine) and different levels of bureaucracy (between official
Vietnamese bird flu policies, local expertise and multinational actors) affected the
efforts to govern the bird flu outbreak in Vietnam. Even though One Health and bird
flu interventions situate humans with their animals and protect both humans and
animals, in practice, Porter writes, ‘avian influenza policies provoke dilemmas
surrounding whose lives and livelihoods are worth protecting in multispecies
biopower – particularly when they are implemented in historically and culturally
specific situations’. As poultry producers maintained their own understandings of
what constituted good human-poultry relationships, and resisted top-down
management, the employment of a global set of biopower strategies to bird flu
management in Vietnam presented a considerable challenge.
With the Vietnam case Porter shows the challenges of assessing whose lives are
worth protecting when employing biopower tactics that cut across species and
livelihoods. Her contribution is an example of the importance of asking not only
how control and knowledge is and has been extended over life, but also to look at
what happens when control fails, to consider practices which defy orders, escape
detection or only loosely hang together. To use Michel Serres’s (2008) schema,
Porter’s argument calls for the making of an ‘observant society’ as opposed to a
‘surveillant society’, with the former sensitive to differences in ways of living. An

observant society is ‘object rich’ and is a concept that can, according to Steve
Hinchliffe’s reading of Serres in his contribution in this book, encourage a livelier
life politics that does not ‘assume mastery or control’. These are strategies that
should depend on a biopolitics that can teach us ‘to be affected and to be affective
in an event-full, differentiating world’, to cite Hinchliffe’s claim for a sensory
biopolitics. Or, as Susan McHugh writes in this volume, they should also depend on
a biopolitics that is affirmative in terms of paying attention to ‘the histories and
material realities of all life’.
By mobilizing the perspectives of Serres on ‘augury’ – the act of interpreting
omens in which birds have played a central part – Hinchliffe calls for a different,
less anthropocentric biopolitics. To demonstrate, he focuses on ‘knowing birds’ and
on the distributive, as well as the changing, ways of understanding bird knowledge.
He emphasizes that other forms of experiencing and relating to living creatures
should be included in knowledge production practices, such as that of the
embodied acts of sensing, and in particular that which is prior to, or conditional
for, speech (harking in this sense back to Arendt, the argument could be that speech
is already and always founded on nonhuman movements). In a similar vein to
Haraway’s (1989a) notions of a decentred body, the ‘self ’ in this account is very
much in the midst of things, and intertwined with others.
This other-than-speech sensibility presents a methodological commitment that
is crucially in line with actor-network theory. However, it might be said to push
the question of agency and network further, as it is more about how ‘things’ affect
and are affected in an eventful world rather than about extending effective
networks and identifying agential strategies. It is about engaging with other’s
sensitivities. In feminist literature, other-than-speech has been integral to
developing perspectives and theories for ‘other-worldly conversations’ (Haraway,
1992). For instance, Eva Hayward (2010) has also shown how non-spoken
responses are central to knowledge production and how they open up a
multisensual communication with nonhumans. Such perspectives are good to think
with as well as to approach the issue and problematics of biopolitics whose ends
and means are more open ended.
Hinchliffe follows ornithologists and bird-watching practices relating to avian
migration and investigates how ornithology shifted with the arrival of highly
pathogenic avian influenza. With the arrival of HPAI, migrating birds changed
from being a source of delight to a potential danger. Ornithology, as Hinchliffe
describes it, is based on observing birds, and as such it is dependent on the abilities
to mobilize other-than-speech senses and is characterized by hospitality. However,
with the HPAI/H5N1 as an immediate threat, ornithological practices at least
potentially changed from hospitality towards hostility, as the survey was made
integral to that of recording avian migration, or more precisely, avian pathogens.
The implication of this account and the use of Serres’s normative account of
good knowledge suggest that we should see nonhuman animals as active partic-
ipants in knowledge and political communities; knowing birds involves a
more-than-human condition for speech that depends on the act of sensing.

Hinchliffe’s chapter extends the understanding of how knowledge about lives and
otherness is made, and how this depends on ways of knowing that are very much
embodied and corporeal, ways that are integral to a livelier biopolitics and that take
part in forming an observant society.
Susan McHugh’s chapter also engages with the limits to a biopolitics that
concerns itself with only specific ways of co-existence and living. She argues that
literary fiction provides critical sites for experimenting with, reflecting on and
representing histories of lost lives. By analysing the desert fictions by the Libyan
novelist Ibrahim al-Koni, McHugh demonstrates how literature makes it possible
to represent animals and humans ‘on their own deeply enmeshed terms’, and as
such is a rich site for thinking differently about relations and realities as it uses other
tools for investigation and narration; literature presents an opportunity for what she
refers to as ‘creative modelling’.
Al-Koni’s fiction does exactly this, as he performs ‘critical manipulations of
aesthetic form’. For McHugh, he narrates the inhabiting by Tuareg tribespeople of
the Saharan desert in a way that is inseparable to the grazing animals upon which
they depend, and always involves a history of systematic persecution. By making
family stories the lens for the cultural and natural conditions of genocide, al-Koni
presents camels as ‘companions’ of humans, with a common fate and a shared desire
for the desert life. With the help of al-Koni’s fiction, McHugh makes a link to
current extinction events that have in part resulted from the disappearance of
hunting regulation after the Arab Spring. Here, McHugh points out, ‘the need for
creative modelling that situates modern historical horrors amid ancient and
ongoing struggles to assert the validity and vigour of lives that continue to be
shared on the brink of nonexistence’. She relates this concern to recent discussions
in biopolitical theory, such as Esposito (2008) and his reading of Deleuze and his
concept of ‘impersonal singularity’. McHugh argues that the concept, which
implies that beings are always already enmeshed with their environment and with
others, has the potential to better narrate and explore the ‘intercorporeality of
mixed species populations’. This involves an approach that is both hopeful for and
expects a norm of life that does not ‘limit life to the confines of an individual subject
or body’ (Campbell, 2008, p. xxxviii).
The ‘creative modelling’ that McHugh calls for, is, hopefully, also something
which may apply to this volume as a whole. Taken together, it aims to demonstrate
how the humanities and the social sciences provide rich tools for the re-iteration
of the will, not to re-define biopolitics, but to use excursions into human-animal
worlds to make accounts that may move and create possibilities for thinking and
doing politics of life again.
Notes
1 When we argue that there are many versions of Foucault, this is not only to say that
his work can be interpreted differently depending on which part of his scholarship one
attends to, but it is also to say that his work takes part in a series of different collectives
that have taken and re-worked Foucault in different directions. Hence, we need to
attend to the question of biopolitics relationally; the version that is enacted depends
crucially upon the other texts and projects with which it has developed or evolved.
Rather than speaking about ‘Michel Foucault’ it is better in this sense to talk about
‘biopolitics collectives’.
2 It is worth noting that in the Holocaust, some humans were treated as ‘lower than
animals’. At the same time, some nonhuman animal species were given new and
elevated status. But that aside, the injunction to act for the human condition after the
horrors of genocide and in the face of a large number of refugees or stateless persons
in the immediate post-war period should be clear.
3 Wolfe (2013, p. 86) quotes Hägglund, who is elaborating a point from Derrida.
Hägglund (2008, pp. 94–5) continues: ‘Responsibility, then, is always more or less
discriminating, and infinite responsibility is but another name for the necessity of
discrimination’.
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2
THE PRACTICES OF FISHY SENTIENCE
John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien
Fluid sentience
Do Fish Feel Pain? This is the title of a recent popular book by animal scientist
Victoria Braithwaite (2010). The publication of this book is a sign of the times.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago the answer to this question would have depended
on whom you asked: animal welfare activists and perhaps some fishers might have
said yes. But the topic of fishy pain would not have been important for the majority
of biologists or indeed consumers. But now it is different. Though warm-blooded
companion species have been sentient for decades, the capacity to feel pain has
recently spread to include fish (Damsgård, et al., 2006; Huntingford, et al., 2006;
Lund, et al., 2007; Braithwaite, et al., 2013). European legislation is quite clear about
this too: fish are sentient beings. We will consider both the law and biology below,
but our focus is on practices, and especially on the lively practices in which farmed
fish, sentient or otherwise, come into being in tanks and pens. Thus we approach
sentience not as a property of fish (or people) as such, but as a relational quality that
emerges within heterogeneous assemblages of all kinds.
Our chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork around salmon farms in West
Norway between 2009 and 2012. But we start with a brief story. It is about
learning to kill fish – and by implication about fish and pain. The memory belongs
to Marianne and comes from her monograph, Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the
Domestication of a Fish:
I am in a small boat early in the morning, with my dad and my older brother.
We are at Hardangervidda, a mountain plateau in southern Norway, where
on summer holiday a nuclear family from an Oslo suburb briefly returns to
the subsistence practices of its imagined ancestral past. A week at these
remote lakes is a week of trout fishing, less for fun than for food. Our cabin
The practices of fishy sentience 31
is twenty kilometers from the nearest road, so we need to carry in everything

we need for the whole week. Fishing takes up a great part of the days. Drift
nets are left in the lake overnight in order to ensure a steady supply of trout.
Every morning we fetch in the nets, and while my father pulls them up, and
my brother steers the boat, my job is to remove the fish from the messy heap
of nets and fish at the bottom of the boat, then place them in a bucket. A
few are dead, but most of them are not, and I am careful not to hurt them
as I gently disentangle the fine nylon netting from behind their fins and
jawbones. Their teeth are tiny and sharp. When the job is done, I enjoy
looking after them, so I scoop up water from outside the boat, just enough
to cover their half-dead bodies.
This goes on for a few days, until one day when my dad intervenes. With
few words, he lets me know that my concern serves the fish better if I put
an end to their suffering. He shows me how to hold each fish, head facing
forward, my thumb against its neck, and how much strength I need to hit it
just right against the inside of the boat. I learn to notice the tension, like a
sudden cramp, that tells me that I hit it right. I feel the moment of death in
the palm of my hand. And I learn, somewhat reluctantly at the age of ten,
that killing and caring can be done in a single quick movement.
(Lien, 2015, pp. 132–3)
This story catches much of what we wish to explore. First, let us start with the
obvious. Growing, living, sensing and dying are embodied, located and thoroughly
material. This goes for raising children and fishing in the mountains, and for
trawling and fish farming too. All are practical. So while it’s important to know the
philosophical arguments – these have their own equally practical effects – our
approach as ethnographers is to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty. Such is
our point of departure: if we are to understand sentience or feeling then we need
to make the journey to practices. We need to respond to the fact that we are
dealing with stuff, where stuff includes bodies, hands, nets, fins, air, water and
buckets.
This means, second, that we’re dealing with a world that is all about relations.
Boats, gunnels, thwarts, outboard motors, fathers, children, gloves and gestures – the
practices are all about what goes with what, with how it goes and how it should go.
The relations have their own choreography: 1 how to pick up a fish, how to hold
it, how to bang the back of its head against the gunnel just so, to kill it quickly and
(hopefully) more or less painlessly.2 The choreographies we have just described
enact caring and killing simultaneously, in practice. But how?
This brings us to a third issue. The small interaction between Marianne and her
father illustrates the way in which practices also shift. Before, Marianne is being
kind by covering the half-dead fish with water. By the time her father has
instructed her on the adult view of fishy suffering and how this is best limited, she
has learned that she needs to be kind by killing quickly. The story is interesting in
many ways, not least because both options carry ethical weight even though they
32 John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien
enact this in significantly different ways. To use Donna Haraway’s (2008, p. 84)
felicitous phrase, the story describes two versions of non-mimetic suffering,3 or non-
mimetic caring: one desperately preserving life, the other administering death in an
instant. The result is a significant moment of teaching/learning, an irreversible shift
in Marianne’s practice, but not in her inclination to care.
And here is a fourth point. The continuity is as significant as the shift. The practices
changed but not the sentiment. Nobody in that boat, except the trout itself, knew
how it feels to be disentangled from a net and thrown into a bucket. Marianne’s
father was not an animal rights’ activist. (Confronted with the question of whether
fish can feel pain, it is likely that he would have replied that he had no idea.) But
his teaching was an intervention in relation to Marianne’s practice. Nested within
the skill-based choreographies of small hands banging the heads of trout against a
gunnel are more subtle relations of intergenerational as well as interspecies
sentience: his validation of her intention, her response to non-mimetic pain.
So, do fish feel pain – in killing, as in the above story, or anywhere else? The
question was never raised on the family boat. Practical action was called for, and it
was embodied, located and material. The lesson was not about the nature of trout,
or fish in the abstract, but about more-than-human relations, about being in a
world with fish, or perhaps about living well in the mountains in summer. It was
about knowing whatever there is, boats, marshes or fish, through embodied and
situated practices. In short, we can imagine fish outside practices. We can write about
fish as abstractions. This happens in all sorts of literary contexts. But in practice
(there is no other good way of saying this) we only know about fish within practices.
So whenever we ask the question, ‘What is a fish?’, or more specifically, ‘Do fish
feel pain?’, we have no choice but to respond by drawing on a collage of fishy-related
practices.
Marianne knows trout, for example, as a sudden sensation in the palm of her
hand, but also as an appealing smell from the frying pan on a propane burner. John
knows salmon in part as pain in his arthritic thumb when he goes to pick them up
dead but fully grown on the fish farm (Law and Lien, 2013). And often enough
such practices intersect. You may know fish: by looking at them as they swim in
chalk streams; by seeing them in aquaria or on the fishmonger’s slab or on the
dinner table; by tasting them; by talking about where they may be found in rock
pools; by going fishing; by cleaning them, cutting their heads off and cooking them;
by catching them in kids’ fishing nets and keeping them in jam jars (which is what
John did as a child); by seeing pictures of them; by reading about them in
encyclopaedias or nature books; by going diving to watch them in coral reefs; by
handling them on a fish farm; by reading regulations about how they should be
handled; by making philosophical or welfare-related links between ethical theories
and fishy sensibilities; by looking at scientific papers; or by doing research on them
and writing those scientific papers. In other words, if we know what a fish is, and
mostly we do, our knowledge emerges from a collage of fishy-relevant practices
and relations. We’re working with a patchwork of places and moments that have
brought us and fish together. This leads us to the following non-obvious
conclusion. Fish are whatever those practices that implicate us and fish together make
them – and us – to be. This means that whilst we may think in theory that fish are
‘essentially’ this way or that, in practice they subsist within a multitude of human-
fish practices. And though we tend to grace ourselves with transcendental powers
– we tend to assume that we really know what fish are – in fact we’re in much the
same position as the ten-year-old Marianne. Indeed, whatever we tell about fish is
not only situated in those practices, but is also an effect of our particular inquiry
and its focus on sentience.4 That said, we are not therefore saying that anything
goes, or that fish (or people) are infinitely malleable. Creating practices, including
fishy-human practices and the fish, humans and sentiences that go with these, is
tough and indeed practical work and cannot be dreamed into being.5
The assemblages of practices that we operate within, or that operate in us, are
precarious, their entities emergent and often uncertain or under-defined. It
behoves us then, if we want to understand fishy sentience, to attend carefully to the
collage of fishy-human practices and to ask what fish are being made to be (in relation
to us), how this is being done and how they differ between practices. And it is this that
we attend to in what follows as we briefly explore legal, scientific and fish farm
practices and their intersections. Our argument is that fishy sentiences have been
on the move for several decades and that fish now feel pain in practices where this
was not previously the case. We conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of the
anthropomorphism of fishy-human practices.
Fish sentience in legal practice

If we look at the law in Europe, fish – salmon included – have become legal
animals in the very recent past. This is most obvious in the context of welfare. For
example, paragraph two of the Norwegian Animal Welfare Act states that the act
covers ‘matters affecting the welfare of or respect for mammals, birds, reptiles,
amphibians, fish, decapods, squid and honey bees’ (Lovdata, 2009, our translation).
There’s no distinction, then, between mammals and fish. All are ‘animals’ and
worthy of welfare and respect. Norwegian law parallels changes across the European
Union. The Council of Europe Standing Committee for the Protection of Animals
kept for Farming Purposes passed new recommendations for farmed fish that came
into force in 2006 (Standing Committee of the European Convention for the
Protection of Animals kept for Farming Purposes (T-AP), 2005). Article 14 of these
regulations stipulates that handling ‘shall be carried out with a minimum of stress
and disturbance’. Article 5 insists that emergency killing ‘shall be done humanely’.
The 2009 European Union Council Regulations on the slaughter of farm animals
are cautious about fish-related killing practices (they were waiting for more
research on stunning), but in principle this legislation likewise makes no distinction
between fish and other farmed animals. All were (and are) ‘animals’, with the
regulation specifying that ‘[a]nimals shall be spared any avoidable pain, distress or
suffering during their killing and related operations’ (EU Regulation 1099/2009,
Article 3.1).
Earlier EU legislation was picked up in the 2006 Norwegian regulations on

slaughtering, which provide that fish should be killed quickly (Article 10) and
stunned and perhaps sedated before being slaughtered (Articles 13 and 14).
‘Stunning’, Article 14 continued, ‘shall be effected by a suitable method that does
not cause fish to suffer significant stress or pain’. This meant that suffocation by
CO2 became illegal (Lovdata, 2006). Though this legislation came into effect only
slowly – retrofitting slaughterhouses went on in Norway until 2012 – proper
training was also rendered mandatory in Norway for those working in slaughter-
houses (Lovdata, 2006, Article 11) and on fish farms,6 and similar changes were
implemented in the European Union (Standing Committee of the European
Convention for the Protection of Animals kept for Farming Purposes (T-AP),
2005, Article 3.2). So here’s the first headline: there has been change over a decade or
more in a series of legal practices in Europe. If salmon are now legally animals and
they weren’t before, then in practice they have become something different. But
what about fish farming? Now we turn to ethnography, and first the slaugh-
terhouse.
1. Choreographies of death
What we now tell draws on our ethnography in Sjølaks AS, and comes from a
salmon farm in West Norway. Here is an excerpt from John’s 2010 field notes:
We’re on the farm, and it’s a beautiful afternoon as the well boat arrives. We
watch as it sucks up the salmon. This really doesn’t take long. Then we go
on board and sleep, more or less, as it sails for twelve hours overnight, with
its cargo of live salmon – 1200 tonnes, nearly 300,000 salmon – in its two
tanks. You can see them from the bridge on television monitors.
In the early morning the boat moors at the slaughterhouse. Again,
everything is quick. Pipes on the jetty are married to the pipes on the boat
and the pumps start. Salmon are sucked out of the tanks in the boat down
the pipe along the jetty and into the slaughterhouse. Inside the building, still
inside the pipe, they are pumped high up to the second floor. Here they spew
out in a gush of water into a stainless steel chute and then they slide, flapping,
down into a hopper. All of this is, in part, a material expression of welfare
legislation: pipes, pipe couplings, oxygen and pH levels – welfare is
embedded in all of these. But as they slither down the stainless steel chute
this is the moment when the new Norwegian legislation starts to take
machinic form: the hopper is going to deliver the salmon into a stainless steel
device that will stun them electrically.
Lift the lid of this device – it’s like a tank, a coffin if you prefer, two metres
long and about a metre wide – and you can see how electrical cables connect
to a series of loose metal tongues. As they slide into the machine the salmon
are flapping on the metal conveyer belt that is pulling them into its interior.
In a second or two it is going to slide them under those tongues. Current is
going to pass from tongue to salmon to conveyer belt. The salmon will be
shocked. The shock will not be enough to kill, but enough to stun. If
everything is working as it should, the salmon that emerges from the other
side of the machine will still be alive, but not sentient. Certainly, as we watch,
the fish emerging are no longer flapping. Presumably, this is the hope and the
expectation, they aren’t sensing anything either. And then it’s just a short
slide down another stainless steel chute to the table where they will be
slaughtered. A quick cut with a very sharp knife to the major blood vessel in
the gills and in a few seconds – before they have time to come round again
– they have bled to death.
This is legislation materialized. It is also a practice that enacts salmon as a being that
feels pain, distress or suffering; one that no longer tolerates death by CO2
suffocation precisely because this leads to pain, distress and suffering. It enacts
salmon, in other words, as a sentient being. So fish are being done in this practice.
But so too are people.
2. Imagining suffering on the farm

Marianne attends a mandatory two-day training workshop organized by the firm
and run by a veterinarian and a senior production manager. The course is new,
having been introduced the previous year. The following is based on Marianne’s
field notes:
Twenty-odd employees, young and old, junior and senior, are gathered in the
attic, spacious and airy, in the headquarters building, a sharp contrast to the
wet and chilly environment where most participants normally work. The
course takes two full days. On the first day there are lectures on animal rights,
ethics, philosophy, cultural differences in human-animal relations, the five
freedoms, fish biology, physiology, and the salmon’s so-called ‘natural needs’
as well as the Norwegian legal regulatory framework. The lectures are
accompanied by PowerPoint presentations distributed as printed hand-outs,
with a section for our own notes. We are in a learning mode, drink lots of
tea or coffee, and nibble small pieces of chocolate wrapped in brightly
coloured cellophane to stay focused. Breaks are welcome.
On the second day we are divided in two groups, one on smolt
production, and the other on the grow-out sites [the farms out in the fiord
where salmon grow to be four or five kilos]. The focus is on daily routines.
On the screen we see photos from our work sites. The lectures attend to
vaccination, syringes, water temperatures, oxygen levels, surveillance systems,
pipes, transporting salmon and much more. There are questions and
discussion. Then, after lunch, we are divided into groups. This time we are
enacted as the experts and our assignment is spelled out on the final
PowerPoint: ‘Go through the complete production cycle at your work-site,
and identify welfare issues, improvement potential and – relate it to the

current fish welfare regulations. Present a plan for improvements, or justify
why it is good enough as it is’.
Marianne’s group talks about a range of issues. They talk about plumbing – about
making sure that pipes carrying fish from one tank to another don’t narrow where
they are coupled together.7 Marianne notes to herself that she hasn’t read anything
about pipe joints in the legislation, but the group participants recognize the
situation and seem to agree that this is not a good thing. If pipes narrow, the salmon
may get blocked and probably get stressed. Nobody knows this. The economic
implications are likely to be minimal. But it doesn’t look right.
Uneven pipes were always there. Occasional blockages too. But we never heard
anyone talking about this until the workshop – a social space explicitly dedicated
to relating practicalities of salmon farming to animal suffering. This is a
teaching/learning event with a set curriculum, but it also generates a social arena
for collectively enacting fish as sentient beings that might suffer, and calls for a
response.
This, then, is legislation in practice. It enacts salmon as sentient beings, but it
enacts people as sentient too. Through the practices of language and talk, disparate
and highly individual collages of fishy-related practices become shared, or socially
acknowledged moments of salmon suffering. Sentience, then, is done relationally, it
is collective, and – as in Marianne’s family boat – it is embodied, located, material, but
also, sometimes, socially and discursively constituted.
Sentient fish in scientific practice

So this is partly a story of change. In human-salmon legal practices in Europe, fish
have been made sentient, though twenty years ago they weren’t. Our argument is
that in practice salmon are being done differently, indeed as sentient beings in the
law and on the farm. Even so, it’s tempting to say that this is all very well, but can’t
they really feel? Or aren’t they really sentient?
We will address this topic indirectly by looking at some of the science contro-
versies and treating these as practices too.8 Among those who insist that fish cannot
feel pain is James D. Rose, emeritus professor of Zoology and Physiology at the
University of Wyoming, and author of a widely-cited paper on ‘The
Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes’ (Rose, 2002). Anthropomorphism, he suggests,
seriously undermines our understanding of other species, adding that ‘awareness of
pain in humans depends on specific regions of the cerebral cortex. Fishes lack these
brain regions and thus lack the neural requirements necessary for pain experience’
(Rose, 2002, p. 2).
Rose is taking us to the realm of neuroanatomy. This is a set of practices which
do fish – and people too – as structures with three-dimensional anatomical
attributes which link to propensities or capacities including sentience or its
absence. In this version of reality, there are crucial ways in which fish brains are
both similar to and different from those of people (or mammals). Feelings of pain
(in humans) depend on the neocortex. Fishes do not have a well-developed
neocortex. Though they are capable of many things, including associative learning,
chemosensory abilities, nociceptive reception and nociceptive reactions,9 it follows
that ‘[c]onscious experience of fear, similar to pain, is … a neurological impossi-
bility for fishes’ (Rose, 2002, p. 2).
Rose engages with human neuroanatomy nearly as much as with that of fish.
Evolutionary biology is the link, and comparison is the method – though none of
this necessarily impacts directly on fish welfare. One UK broadsheet, The Daily
Telegraph, headed its report on Rose’s heroic survey under the headline ‘Anglers are
finally off the hook: fish feel no pain’ (Syal, 2003). The second part of this title may
have been literally correct, but also missed most of the point because Rose (2002,
p. 2) insisted that ‘[f]ishes display robust but nonconscious, neuroendocrine, and
physiological stress responses to noxious stimuli. Potentially injurious stress
responses, as opposed to pain or emotional distress, are the proper matter of
concern in considerations about the welfare of fishes’.
That fish experience both acute and chronic physiological stress is common
ground for all working in the patchwork of fish science. Signs of such stress include
reduced appetite, slower growth, muscle wasting, immune system suppression and
reduced reproductive success (Huntingford, et al., 2006, p. 348). Huntingford and her
colleagues (including one of our collaborators, Sunil Kadri) think it is likely that fish
feel can pain and include the following in their list of stress-inducing circumstances:
predators; conspecifics; the availability of food; body condition; long-distance
migration; parasites; diseases; and adverse environmental conditions. All these are
common experiences of salmon ‘in the wild’. 10 The argument is that some stress is
desirable in evolutionary terms11 but that chronic stress is generally not. Applied to
fish welfare in the context of aquaculture, it becomes a matter of whether stress is
human-induced (Huntingford, et al., 2006, p. 349). Overall, ‘good welfare means that
the fish is in good health, with its biological system functioning properly and not
being forced to respond beyond its capacity’ (Arlinghaus, et al., 2007, p. 59).
That is the stress-based argument. But the idea that fish don’t experience pain
is less popular than it was. In many recent science practices, fish may not feel, but
they count as sentient beings. Again the argument grows out of a patchwork of
practices that is simultaneously empirical, methodological and philosophical.
Felicity Huntingford and her colleagues (2006, p. 340) write on the basis of
experiment that ‘adult fish probably do experience some of the adverse states that
humans associate with pain and emotional distress, even if they do not have the
capacity for self-awareness necessary for conscious suffering in the full human
sense’. 12
And here’s the argument again, this time in a review whose list of authors
includes another of our collaborators, Cecilie Mejdell:
[I]t has been argued that sophisticated cognitive and behavioural processes
add to the likelihood of the conscious experience of suffering … Fish show
complex behaviours indicative of advanced cognitive skills.

(Lund, et al., 2007, p. 113, references deleted)
Driving a wedge between hard-wired and therefore automatic reactions to

nociceptive reflexes to noxious stimuli on the one hand and learned responses on
the other, the authors cite experiments that show that some fish have ‘well-
developed spatial memory and social intelligence, advanced cognitive maps,
memory and learning, [and] indications of episodic memory’ (Lund, et al., 2007,
p. 113).
For such authors, fish have or at least may have ‘the capacity of having sensations
such as pain and pleasure’ (Lund, et al, 2007, p. 111). Here, then, the fishy practices
of physiology, neurobiology and behavioural science line up with EU and
Norwegian legislation. But how are the arguments from the experimental practices
being patched together? What is the basis of this alternative collage? The overall
answer is that rather than enacting dissimilarities, it works by generating similarities
between fish and ‘higher animals’ such as mammals and birds. Neuroanatomy and
phylogenetics are not being questioned. But while anatomy and time are held
stable, this does not mean that destiny is similarly fixed. Instead the collage works
by discovering and patching together behavioural similarities between anatomically
different species. Fish are shown to be capable of doing many of the things done
by mammals or birds by alternative means. 13
So the logic at work here is functional, physiological and behavioural, rather than
anatomical-cum-physiological. The search is for functional rather than anatomical
parallels with mammals. At the same time it is also in part evolutionary. The
assumption is that species face environmental problems, and that they survive by
evolving sufficiently functional ways of handling those problems in a process
called convergent mental evolution. Here macro neuro-architecture (Braithwaite,
et al., 2013, p. 11) becomes less important than the critics of fish sensibility might
like to think:
An understanding of animal emotion and cognition therefore does not come

from a top-down approach based on simple similarities in neuro-anatomy
and behavior … but rather from a bottom-up approach, based on
phylogenetic relationships and models of behavior in which emotion and
cognition play a role both for human and non-human animals.
(Braithwaite, et al., 2013, p. 11)
To summarize, the collage patching up fish as sentient beings notes the

sentience/anatomy disanalogies with birds and mammals, but observes that fish
behave like mammals in what might be painful circumstances, respond similarly to
analgesics, and learn to avoid situations that have caused pain or at least nociception
in the past (Lund, et al., 2007, p. 113). If fish can learn to avoid painful situations,
then for these authors the conclusion is obvious: they are capable of experiencing
pain in the first place.
There are thus two camps in science. On the one hand, there is (to say it
quickly) a ‘non-pain’ reality being collaged out of physiological, neuroanatomical
and evolutionary-relevant practices. This is how Rose and others such as
Arlinghaus (Arlinghaus, et al., 2007) do fish – though this does not necessarily have
direct implications for welfare. And on the other hand, there’s a reality collage that
patches together physiological, behavioural and evolutionary practices in a mode
that attends more to function and behaviour than to anatomy. In this second world,
fish become sentient beings. And by now many – probably the majority – of the
scientists who work with fish indeed enact the latter as lively, learning, exceedingly
clever and thoroughly sentient.
Choreographies of care: Practising sentience in the production

halls
So fish have come a long way in many legislative, scientific and welfare-relevant
farming practices. No longer instinctive, ‘drudging and dim-witted’ (Laland, et al.,
2003), they are now able to learn, and they can act in anticipation of change. We
might conclude, provisionally, that fish have, finally, become sentient beings. And
this conclusion is not altogether wrong.
But then again, it is not quite that simple either. As tempting as it is to tell a
smooth story, we need to slow down and recall that fish are whatever they are, in
practices that are embodied, located and material. So what we have said about
legislation is valid for Norway and to some extent in the European Union, but not
in the United States, where animal welfare legislation (still) makes a clear distinction
between fish and (other) animals. In the United States the ‘fish don’t feel pain’ camp
has far greater traction on the fish farms than in Europe. In addition, we have not
even touched on the practices in which legislation is made. 14 The latter is beyond of
the scope of this chapter, but counts as its own intricate choreography of discursive
propositions, citation practices, hearings, production of experts and of scientific
statements, as well as public and political deliberation. Here, human bodies,
discursive practices, media and socio-political alliances play their part in ways that
make legal outcomes much more than simple responses to scientific ‘findings’. And
in any case, fishy sentience does not depend on the law. Marianne and her father
enacted trout sentience long before scientists began to enact fish pain. And sentience
was – and is – being practised on the fish farms too, independently of any legislation.
Here we draw again on Marianne’s field notes. She is talking about the moment
when tiny fish – no longer than a fingernail – start feeding:
Yesterday, we spent the entire day emptying trays of Astroturf filled with tiny,
lively fry into 25 two-meter diameter cylindrical tanks. The newly hatched
salmon have made a big move. We look down into swarms of fry, moving
around at the bottom of the tank like shadows, or like bees, says Olav, the
operations manager. We stay and watch for a while. He is clearly fascinated
just to see them, and so are we. Our movement scares them. I lift my hand,
or my shadow shifts, and a green opening emerges in the middle of the black,
dense swarm: their movements seem coordinated like an orchestrated
choreography, as they swiftly move away.
We tiptoe around the tanks with rubber boots, speak softly, and use a
dimmer on the light switch. The fry gather on the bottom of each tank,
crowding together for protection, or so we are told. The wide, fluid expanse
of their new surroundings is overwhelming, and they are scared. But being
crowded together means that they might be deprived of oxygen, so they
need to become more courageous and start moving about.
About 0.2 grams each, they can no longer feed on their yolk sac, and from
now on they will need to eat commercial fish feed – in the first instance in
the form of fine dust. If everything goes well, they will soon begin putting
on weight. But will they eat at all? This is a time of anxiety.
I pick up the dust-like feed between my fingers and sprinkle it over the
tank, like salt. ‘Careful, not too much!’ It is my mentor, Tone. 90% of the fish
are still on the bottom, but as we feed, a few start to come up, inquisitive,
some remarkably fast, going after one tiny sprinkle of dust after another,
while the rest are still squirming together on the bottom. In the beginning,
I keep watching intently to see if any of the feed disappears before I move
on to the next tank. It can take several minutes. But after a few tanks I realize
that this won’t do, and decide on a number: 3 pinches for each. I sprinkle the
feed over the entire surface, and briefly notice how the pattern of fry differs
in shape from one tank to the next, before I move on efficiently.
But Tone does it differently. I often come up to her when she slowly and
very attentively works with one of the tanks, and I realize then that she is
really paying attention. She is using the soft high-pitched voice that women
often use with very small babies when speaking ‘over their heads’: full of care,
concern and wonder, responsive and ready to verbalize and interpret any sign
from the little ones. In this case, the little ones may ‘come up’ (‘koma opp’),
they may ’eat’ (‘eta’), and these seemingly trivial fish movements become
verbalized and significant as if they fill her with excitement and awe. She
shares these moments with me whenever I show interest, and we stand
together for a bit, more intimate than we really are, both in familiar terrain.
This is not a maternity ward, and neither are we close friends. What I
notice is simply this: first, that in this practice there is a kind of human-to-
animal ‘bonding’ going on, or perhaps rather a relation-in-the-making,
however temporary, in which there are elements of care, attachment and
affect on the human side, and who knows what is going on down below …
Secondly, I want to note that the practice is gendered. 15
Voices, bodies, movements, gendering and quiet awe. Removed, now, from the
concerns of legislation and pain, again we see that practices of fishy sentience are
located, material and embodied, and sometimes verbalized too. Enactments of care?
There is no doubt about it. Anthropomorphism? Plenty of that too. Like Rose,
Huntingford and everyone else, Tone responds to the fish by drawing on a collage
of practices. In her case it is practices of care, some of which are fish-related, and
some that are not. Perhaps it is because she allows herself to let such practices drift
affectively within a more-than-human realm (or between tiny babies and tiny fish)
that her care becomes effective?
Most of the time on the farm it is not like this: the fish are simply fed. As they
grow bigger and move to pens in the middle of the West Norway fjord, it is
virtually impossible to actually see them in the way Tone does here. Out on the
fjord, practices enact different versions of relationality. But even there, as we have
described elsewhere, the attentiveness remains the same: achieved especially
through frequent rounds of ‘checking the feeding’ (sjekke foringa), which is the
vernacular term for looking to see how they are doing (Lien and Law, 2011).
Conclusion
Sentience, or its absence, emerges in relational practices that shape and join people
and fish together, and in this chapter we have explored some of those practices. Fish
have no doubt been enacted as sentient in many practices including salmon
farming, but over the last ten or fifteen years they have also become sentient in
many contexts in science and law, and this in turn has had a knock-on effect on
farming. This story is still unfolding. This is our first point of conclusion.
Our second concluding point is that while the findings of science deserve
respect (to repeat our earlier warning, it is not the case that anything goes, scientif-
ically), it will not do to take such findings as final or revealed truth about fish.
There are two main reasons for this. First, science itself is a set of practices. Our
brief account of the controversies about fishy sentience has not explored their
laboratory materialities, but it is clear that different animal behavioural experi-
mental arrangements afford different kinds of animal (and human) possibilities.16
Indeed, there have been controversies in animal behaviour science and ethology
about this for decades.17 Different kinds of fish-and-people thus emerge from
different versions of the collage of science – and new versions of these can be
anticipated. The second reason not to treat science as a gold standard is the signif-
icance of other and non-scientific practices. We’ve seen, for instance, how Tone
enacts the tiny fish as sentient in a particular way, and we could multiply stories of
sentience from the farm, not to mention from Sámi practices, or those of
recreational angling where fish may be enacted as smart, wily, indeed as sentient
(Bear and Eden, 2011; Ween and Colombi, 2013). The bottom line is that fish are
done as sentient in many locations, that only some of these are ‘scientific’, and that
there is no reason not to take all relevant practices (including those of science)
seriously.18
Our third point follows from this. If there are many versions of fishy sentience
and non-sentience, then this opens a space for enacting alternative fish-human
relations (Mol, 2002). Specifically in the slack, play or tension between different
practices, it becomes possible to imagine a fishy-human ontological politics (Mol,
1999). So there may be assemblages that do things better and in which fish do not
suffer. But what might this mean in practice? Any answer will be contingent and
provisional. The tensions of industrialized agriculture are self-evident (Buller,
2013). Alternatively, the story of change that we have described – the creation of
sentient fish in science and law and their translation to the farm and beyond – is
also encouraging. But then, an additional question: how might changes unfold well
within the practices of science? One answer is that, at least in terms of welfare, the
general direction of travel seems right. But the question also suggests the need to
think about anthropomorphism, about how fish are modelled (or not) on the
human.
In the study of animals, anthropomorphism19 is generally deemed undesirable
(though John Webster, 2011, makes a powerful case to the contrary). Kay Milton
(2005), for example, points out that it is misleading in several ways. First, it is based
on assumptions made by the analyst about non-human animals for which there is
often little evidence. Second, it assumes that ‘humanness’ is the primary point of
reference. Third, it implies that people understand things by attributing character-
istics to them, while Milton, on the contrary, follows Ingold and suggests that we
understand things by perceiving characteristics in them (Milton, 2005, pp. 255–6). In
the context of fish science, Arlinghaus, et al. (2007, p. 59) tell us that scientific facts
are better than anthropomorphic perspectives, and Rose (2002, p. 2) bluntly insists
that ‘[a]nthropomorphic thinking undermines our understanding of other species’,
whilst those who insist that fish may feel pain similarly reject anthropomorphism
(Huntingford, et al., 2007, p. 279). Clearly then, what counts as anthropomorphism
is a moveable feast for scientists. But what happens if, as the term itself implies, we
think of anthropomorphism relationally? What happens if we press on the idea that
fish-and-people are always done together. The implication is that there is a strong
sense in which all human-fish relations are anthropomorphic, though perhaps
‘anthropomorphism’ is not quite the right word. But if we stick with it for the
moment, the issue becomes not so much anthropomorphism itself – this cannot be
avoided – but rather how it might best be done. In other words, it becomes
important to think about what we might think of as modes of (non)anthropomorphism.
The stories that we have told reveal at least three of these at work, though there
are certainly others.
The first we might call anthropomorphic subjectivism. This is the imputation to fish
of cognitive or affective characteristics customarily attributed to people. Marianne’s
untutored attempt to care for half-dead trout and her father’s intervention count as
examples. But if Huntingford, et al. (2006, p. 340) write that ‘adult fish probably do
experience some of the adverse states that humans associate with pain and
emotional distress’, though there is much going on, this also reproduces and enacts
a version of anthropomorphic subjectivism. To note this is not to raise an
objection. Even those most opposed to anthropomorphism concede that it may
represent a useful source of analogy and hypothesis (Wynne, 2004, p. 606), and both
John Webster’s reverse anthropomorphism and Donna Haraway’s non-mimetic
suffering perhaps count as other modes of subjectivist anthropomorphism
(Haraway, 2008; Webster, 2011). In short there is no doubt a place for this in the
practices of science as a resource or a tool. The issue is where and how it is done,
and to what effect.
The second is anthropomorphic teleology. Most of the science work compares and
contrasts fish by using attributes that are also human. In practice, human attributes
are enacted as a (variable) yardstick for fishy cognitive and affective competences
(as in the quotation above from Huntingford, et al., 2007); physiological, hormonal
and behavioural changes; and the neuroanatomical similarities and differences
preferred by authors such as Rose. Note that unlike anthropomorphism in its
subjectivist version, teleological anthropomorphism generates fishy deficiency. In this
mode of ordering, it is the humans (or particular kinds of humans) that have
reached the pinnacle of development. Teleological anthropomorphism thus works
to discover that however clever fish may be, they are not as smart, sentient or
affective as people. Against this, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that if the
measure was fish-centred, the sentience yardstick might look different too. How do
salmon find their way back to their rivers of origin? Current science tells us that
they use esturine chemical cues, electromagnetic compass bearings, electro-
magnetic maps and perhaps wave direction and interference patterns, all working
at different levels of scale (Lohmann, et al., 2008). Though there are complexities
(the measures again are human), here it is the humans that are failing rather than
the salmon.
Finally, there is what we might think of as objectivist (non)anthropomorphism. Here,
and paradoxically, fish are unlike people. Denied the possibility of interacting with
people, they are turned into objects and treated as qualitatively different. Vinciane
Despret (2008, p. 127) notes that human bodies disappear from behavioural
experiments, contending that ‘the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses
that interrogate it, by the narratives that guide these apparatuses’. Or, to be sure,
incapable. Animals do not get a chance to talk, because subjectivity and intersub-
jectivity are reserved for humans. In a version of the God trick, behavioural
experiments are (non)anthropomorphically objectivist because they work by
turning animals into objects fit for asymmetrical observation by apparatuses that
render human beings invisible. In this regime, fish may indeed become lively,
sentient and affective (such are the virtues of teleological anthropomorphism), but
there is a necessary divide between human and animal. Inter-species intersubjec-
tivity is impossible. Fish are not simply deficient, but they are essentially unlike
people.
Our overall conclusion is that (non)anthropomorphism is inescapable. When
fish are done, and in whatever manner, humans are being done too. But this works
in different ways, and none are necessarily obnoxious or desirable in and of
themselves. It is better to think of them as resources within the collage of science,
different modes for making similarity and difference between people and fish, or
different styles of enacting what it is to be fishy on the one hand and human on
the other. The general lesson for science practitioners is obvious. It is to attend to
how they are using (non)anthropomorphism rather than treating it as a sin that
simply has to be avoided. But a more specific thought suggests itself. This is that it
would be interesting to move from objectivist (non)anthropomorphism in the
collage of fishy-human science practices. Debates about interspecies intersubjec-
tivity have raged for decades in the context of mammals and especially of primates.
Applied to fish, this sounds implausible, but who knows? Perhaps Tone and her
small fry are pointing the way to new forms of fishy sentience.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymized ‘Sjølaks AS’ for their kind agreement to let us
locate our study within the firm, and for its additional generous practical support.
We would like to thank all those who work for Sjølaks (they too are anonymized)
for their warm welcome, help and willingness to let us watch them at work. In
many cases their kindness has vastly exceeded any reasonable expectation or need.
We are grateful to Kristin Asdal, Børge Damsgård, Sunil Kadri, Cecilie Mejdell,
Annemarie Mol, Vicky Singleton, Heather Swanson, Anna Tsing and Gro Ween
for continuing discussion, and to the referees who read an earlier version of this
chapter. The project ‘Newcomers to the Farm’ was funded by the Research
Council of Norway (project number 183352/S30), with additional research leave
and financial support from Lancaster University, the Open University and the
University of Oslo, and we are grateful to all.
Notes
1 On ontological choreographies, see Thompson (2007).
2 This method of killing fish is an embodied skill that Marianne has and John does not.
Fortunately for John, this is also a skill that isn’t much needed on the fish farm. There
is death aplenty, but it comes in other forms.
3 Haraway (2008, p. 84) observes, ‘To share suffering non-mimetically is not to take the
place of the animal victim, but to seek to understand what the animal is going through,
in what is already an unequal relationship, and then perhaps to make it better’.
4 As is obvious, an alternative inquiry would report and enact human-fish practices – and
fishy attributes – differently.
5 For this argument in a different empirical context, see Law (2009).
6 The act states the following (Lovdata, 2008, Article 6): ‘Operations managers on
aquaculture and fish farmers shall have welfare expertise … There should also be
sufficient personnel with the necessary expertise in relation to their duties and respon-
sibilities to safeguard their welfare. Competence shall also include knowledge of
operating mode and the fish behavioural and physiological needs … Necessary qualifi-
cations relevant to each subsection shall be documented through practical and
theoretical training’.
7 Apart from one or two new employees, it’s likely that most of those in the room know
a lot of this already: they have, so to speak, been practising it, in many cases for years. But
now, with the focus on welfare, everything looks a little different. And there are
discussions about the way things are done at the different farms – for it turns out that
there are variations in practice (see also Lien, 2015).
8 The materiality of some of these practices is detailed in Braithwaite (2010) and
Damsgård, et al. (2006). For wider accounts of science and animal sentience, see Fraser
(2009) and Veissier and Miele (2014).
9 According to Rose (2002, p. 8), ‘the degree to which most aspects of neurobehavioral
function [in fish] are controlled by the brainstem and spinal cord is extreme’. His
argument draws on the evolutionary specificity of fishes and mammals, and that large
cerebral hemispheres evolved long after the ancient branch-like evolutionary
separations in which teleosts (fish with backbones, such as salmonids) diverged from the
predecessors of mammals, about 400 million years ago.
10 See, for instance, Huntingford, et al. (2006, pp. 346–7). In the context of angling, there
are scientific studies of stress induced by hooking, playing and landing, handling, and
subsequent confinement and release. In aquaculture there are analogous studies of
transport, handling, netting, confinement, crowding, densities, enforced social contact,
poor water quality, lighting, food deprivation, disease treatment, slaughter and contact
with seals and other predators (Huntingford, et al., 2006, pp. 354–7).
11 Dawkins (1998, pp. 305, 307) notes that animal welfare is in need of ‘a dose of
Darwinian medicine’ since ‘[s]ome defenses (such as pain and fear) are “unpleasant by
design”’.
12 See also Braithwaite and Huntingford (2004).
13 According to Braithwaite (2010, p. 100), ‘[f]ish as a taxon have found solutions to
almost all the problems that supposedly led to the evolution of a large neocortex and
cognitive skills in primates’.
14 But see Asdal (2008).
15 For another version of these field notes, see Lien (2015, pp. 112–3).
16 See Damsgård, et al. (2006) and Braithwaite (2010).
17 For different versions, with different lessons drawn, see Haraway (1989), Despret (2008;
2013), Fraser (2009) and Veissier and Miele (2014).
18 For this argument made in the quite different context of dementia, see Moser (2008).
19 While ‘anthropomorphism’ takes many different forms, it commonly refers to a
conceptual tool for analysing how human animals understand non-human animals
(Milton, 2005, p. 255).
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3
MAKING PIG RESEARCH
BIOGRAPHIES
Names and numbers
Vibeke Pihl
Walking through the stables at the farm, plastic sheets with names like
Speedy G, Buddha and George Twoface immediately evoke my curiosity. I
ask about the names. ‘It was a coincidence,’ Lise says, ‘but also, I feel like I
know them.’ A sow is named Wonder after Stevie Wonder, as Lise believes her
stumbling walk to be a sign of bad eyesight. Two lookalike pigs are named
Thomson and Thompson [from characters in Tintin]. Sausage is named so as
‘you cannot tell the difference between her head and arse’. Another pig is
named Ariel, as she lost her tail like the mermaid Ariel in a Disney movie.
Individual characteristics are also mentioned – Pumba is a rebel, and Sausage
is prone to hysteria.
(Edited excerpt from field notes, the farm, 11 October 2010)
In the protocol, she – a pig – is known by number 32. Entering the stables
at the faculty, scientists look for a number on the backs of the pigs to identify
their surgical candidate. Now, she lies anaesthetized on the surgery table,
covered in green plastic and with machines attached to different parts of her
body. Dressed like a human patient, she is no longer Speedy G – the fastest
runner – but referred to as ‘it’ or ‘the pig’. Surgeons and scientists gaze at a
screen with images of an alien landscape. ‘What are we looking at?’ ‘Is this
the right place for a cut?’ With an endoscopic camera, we immerse ourselves
in an abdomen next to her spiralling gut and dense stomach. I am struck by
how images of otherwise invisible organs appear along with numbers found
in her body by machines measuring her pulse and levels of CO2 in her blood.
(Edited excerpt from field notes, life science faculty, 29 October 2010)
The above excerpts take us into a fieldwork in which obese Göttingen minipig
sows were transformed into models of human gastric bypass (GBP) patients.1
Making pig research biographies 49
Considered ‘worn down’ by their previous labour as test subjects in trials of

pharmaceuticals to be used in treatment of human obesity and type 2 diabetes, the
sows became spare material for use in a project examining the effects of gastric
bypass surgery. The ultimate aim of the project was to enable the manufacture of
a pill against human obesity. To become GBP models, minipigs would undertake a
series of travels between a life science faculty and an experimental farm in which
different kinds of labour were performed. Following pigs through their travels, I
was struck by the co-existence of different ways of knowing pigs as individual
personalities at the experimental farm and as the materials of physiological models
at the life science faculty. A striking contrast was how pigs at the farm were related
to as named subjects in contrast to the practice at the faculty, where minipigs were
referred to by impersonal names or the number sprayed on their backs. There was
no apparent conflict or tension between scientists referring to an obese minipig as
‘the patient’ or ‘39’ at the life science faculty and animal technicians and veterinary
students using names such as Speedy G, Sausage or Houdini at the experimental
farm. In many cases, pigs’ individual names would not find their way to the life
science faculty even though Lise – a student employed as a ‘pig walker’ at the farm
– sends the pigs off with travel papers in the form of a journal marked with their
individual name, number and a description of important incidents. At the faculty,
pigs would undergo a surgical transformation. In case of a successful surgery, pigs
would return to the farm to have their weight loss recorded for six to eight months
after which they would be killed at the faculty and transformed into tissue with
which scientists could further clarify the physiological effects of the treatment.
In the following, I argue that names and numbers, despite being related to
different ways of knowing pigs, are entangled in the practices to transform pigs into
models of human patients. More specifically, I argue that both ways of knowing
minipigs go into making a pig research biography. By the term ‘pig research
biography’, I refer to how the use of names and numbers involves a continuity, given
that pigs’ past as named subjects plays a central role in enabling present experiments
in which numbers extracted from pigs’ tissue provide a means to a healthier human
future. The argument is based on my observations of the practices that result in the
individual names finding their way to pigs and how numbers become extracted
from pigs’ abdomens to enable physiological comparison with human patients.
As an approach, a pig research biography builds upon Marcus’ (1995) multi-sited
fieldwork as a means to capture the flows of pigs, people, capital and knowledge
across sites in the contemporary era. A pig research biography is an analytical focus
that foregrounds connections between the various kinds of labour involved in
establishing pigs as models of human patients. By paying attention to the variety of
practices that pigs undergo across sites and by examining connections between
their effects, pig research biographies provide a means to argue for the mutual
requirement of seemingly incoherent kinds of labour and ways of knowing pigs.
The approach is also inspired by biographical writing as a method of composing
connections between different parts of an individual life.Yet in this case the biogra-
phical writing aims at unfolding how different ways of knowing form connections
50 Vibeke Pihl
in experimental research with pigs. More specifically, by following pigs’ travels

through sites we gain insights into the practices that pigs hold intimate knowledge
of and that most of the people involved in the project know little of. I situate pig
research biography within the broader field of multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and
Helmreich, 2010), characterized by its attention to the intimate connections
between species’ lives and flourishing. The aim of writing pigs’ research biographies
is to show how human and pig lives are inseparable, but also to bring forward how
different values become attached to pig and human in experimental biomedical
research (Svendsen and Koch, 2013).
As I investigate the relations between names and numbers with the aim of
understanding how scientists, animal technicians and veterinary students employed
as ‘pig walkers’ come to know pigs through their respective labour practices, I
highlight the consequences of a division of labour for ways of knowing and
responding to pigs. Following Haraway’s (2008) reminder of how canine models
do not arrive as ready-made at the lab, I look at the variety of work performed to
transform pigs into models at the farm and the faculty. Moreover, I unfold the
mutual dependence between the scientists’ labour to know pigs as numbers and
models of human patients and veterinary students’ and technicians’ labour to know
pigs as names and individual personalities at the farm. Finally, I discuss how the
responses that accompany the use of names and numbers shape outcomes of
experiments and the quality of lives involved in experiments.
Names and numbers in experimental encounters

Names and numbers have been explained as contrasting ways of engaging with
animals in experimental science. Time spent with animals and the character of the
labour have been said to play a role for the choice to name or number experi-
mental animals (Shapiro, 2002). Previous studies have emphasized the distance
offered by numbers, and how technicians are more likely to name animals that
participate in longer experiments (Shapiro, 2002). Other examples include Phillips,
who argued that the act of naming animals after known humans by the staff at an
experimental lab pointed to jokes shared in human-to-human relations instead of
signifying a relation with an animal (Phillips, 1994). Alternatively, Arluke (1988), in
a study involving named pigs, found that names fostered an emotional engagement
with individual experimental animals and thereby prevented technicians from
hurting and killing such pigs. Thereby, names and numbers reflected irreconcilable
relations with animals as laboratory objects or martyred pets. In relation to
scientific data, the use of personal names has been argued to involve a specific
relation at odds with the placelessness of labs demanding numbers to convey
standardized ways of knowing animals (Birke et al., 2007). What recurs in these
accounts is that distance is required and either actively sought or experienced as
necessary in experiments with more-than-human species, in particular if
experiments involve suffering. In this, names and numbers have been understood
as different ways of handling relations with experimental animals.
A central method in biomedical experiments with animals refers to

measurements that become data used for statistical calculations and comparison
with human patients. Numbers and impersonal names have been said to include
distant relations, egalitarian measures and that which is required to make a research
population (Porter, 1995). Manuals for laboratories describe numbering systems,
including bodily modifications such as tattooing and ear tagging, as devices for
keeping track of a large research population. Moreover, numbers are associated
with objectivity in standardized experiments, demanding particular engagements
such as neutrality and repetition of procedures. Thereby, numbers refer to a
particular knowledge production in which the reference to animals as numbers aid
in their transformation into reliable sources of data. What appears is that how
animals are referred to in labs cannot be separated from the specific kind of
knowledge pursued. Names and numbers thus find their way along the dualisms
used to characterize natural science such as objective versus subjective engagement,
distance versus proximity and scientific data versus care (Daston, 2005). However,
names and numbers are often entangled in science in which naming a species
enables monitoring a population through counting its members. As such, the
different ways of knowing associated with names and numbers do not exclude one
another. The continuity that runs across different ways of knowing informs my
analytical interest in names and numbers and their uses in relation to the transfor-
mation of obese minipigs into models of patients. What is at stake is sorting out
how different ways of knowing pigs become entangled in making a research animal
biography and how the varying meanings of pigs as names and numbers form
mutual requirements. More specifically, how does biographical knowledge
associated with names enable the requirements of biomedical experiments and
their aim to produce valid numbers about a population?
By unfolding the practices that accompany the various ways of relating to pigs,
I insist on the continuity between separated sites and disparate meanings in making
a pig research biography. Drawing on Haraway (2008), the encounters between
minipigs and people involved in creating healthier human futures fall under the
heading of the value-added encounter in which species are brought together to create
exchange value. However, what happens in encounters extends beyond exchange
value and has to do with the value of becoming with one another – encounter value,
as how species are bound to one another in mutual shaping (Haraway, 2008). The
meanings do not pre-exist an encounter, but unfold through continual inter- and
intra-action between species (Haraway, 2008, with reference to Barad, 2008). Or
phrased differently by Mol (2002), knowledge emerges through doing or practice,
which requires attention to how things are done. In short, it matters how names
and numbers become enacted, as the particular enactments shape experiments and
responses to pigs. From practices emerge ways of knowing that enable different
kinds of responses and response-abilities. However, as argued by Candea (2010,
2013), the approach of scientists who study animals in the pursuit of objective
knowledge about animals’ behaviour cannot be reduced to detached relations or to
a lacking recognition of animals as other than automatons. Instead, relations
52 Vibeke Pihl
between animals and humans as well as human-to-human relations include

measures of both attachment and detachment. On a general note, Candea (2010,
2013) argues that a normative dimension is invested in the oppositions between
engagement and detachment in human-animal literature, where engagement
signals positive relations and detachedness cold responses. Candea’s recognition of
detachment and attachment as co-existing in relations are central to the aim of
foregrounding practices as continuous efforts.
Focusing on the encounters at the experimental farm and the life science
faculty, I take a closer look at the mutual shaping of pigs and people that
accompany names and numbers in encounters and their consequences for
knowledge about and responses to pigs.
Encounters at the experimental farm

Spider webs hang from the ceiling. The place is alive with smells: pigs, straw and
poop. All this is accompanied by popular songs from a radio along with the cries,
calls and grunts from pigs. Three pigs are running loose in the stables, as they are
out for their daily walk. Two of the pigs aim for the path, going through the stable
in a fast gallop and stopping at the end to poop and rub their backs against a
mattress of straw standing against the wall. As I accompany the lab technician Pia
and the student and ‘pig walker’ Lise through the routines at the stables, I notice
sheets of paper with names like Speedy G, Wonder, Houdini and Chewbacca
hanging in front of the individual pig spaces. Lise greets the pigs ‘Hello, girly
girlies!’ in a cuddly voice as they stride past her. Being used to hearing scientists
refer to Göttingen minipigs as ‘the pig’ or through the two-digit number sprayed
on a pig’s back at the faculty, I notice the difference in encounters. Pigs at the farm
hold individual names, and Lise describes the moods of individual pigs to Pia,
noting that Sausage is overly ‘grumpy’ these days. What looks like a lot of pigs to
me looks to Lise like a lot of individual pigs, defined by what I come to think of
as pig personalities. For Lise, in other words, pigs have names, defining character-
istics and moods. Speedy G is known for her fast running. Houdini, Lise realized,
is excellent at opening locks. Wonder is named after Stevie Wonder because of her
bad eyesight, while Chewbacca is named for her distinct grunts, which sound like
the Chewbacca character in Star Wars. Having had sustained encounters with
individual pigs at the stable, Lise knows which pigs can go for walks together
without starting a fight, who is likely ‘to bully’ whom, whether pigs like or dislike
you entering their space, and which pigs are likely to be what she considers
‘stubborn’ or ‘hysterical’. In her stories of pigs, I find myself drawn into a world in
which pigs emerge as individuals to be known and in which pigs are lively
company to have fun, disagree and work with. At the same time, I know that
species labour and relations of use are the centre of these encounters, as the pigs
and people are brought together through the Danish pharmaceutical company
Novo Nordisk’s goal of producing new treatments for type 2 diabetes and obesity
in human patients.
Using names from popular culture offers an immediate way of conveying

meaning about an individual pig through the shared cultural meaning attached to
names such as Buddha or Speedy G. Names thereby imply a transformation of pigs
from their membership of a species – the way I mostly know pigs – into unique
individuals. By describing the moods of individual pigs – such as Sausage being
‘prone to hysteria’ on most days, Pumba behaving like a ‘rebel’ or Mrs Potts being
likely ‘to start fights’ – Lise suggests that the individual pigs be understood in terms
of their larger biographies. The biographies tell a story about an individual pig
situated within a social collective of humans and pigs holding different kinds of
relations, some characterized by intense dislikes and conflicts, others as friendly
exchanges. As such, the stables resemble a small community characterized by close
relations between individual humans and pigs. Lise and Betina, an animal
technician, both report that the names improve internal communications about the
pigs. As Betina remarks, ‘numbers make pigs into an unrecognizable mass’, and as
she notes, a number does not help her identify a particular pig when she wants to
share information. Instead, a name enables what Betina calls the possibility of
‘hanging something’ on the pig, in the sense of attaching additional meaning that
allows her to quickly remember a specific pig, its characteristic behaviour and
preferences. Of course, on the sheets of paper with names, numbers are written
next to the name along with information of ownership, notices of restricted
feeding or observations of well-being, which indicate that numbers are not
dispensed with at the farm. Numbers convey information about the pigs in their
membership in a particular product, called Göttingen minipigs®, which is sold by
Ellegaard, a Danish company that breeds pigs for lab research. Their individual
numbers are subsequently used to store information in the databases of Novo
Nordisk. Yet as I turn to examining the labour that takes place in the encounters
at the stables, I realize that the naming of pigs is crucial for understanding how Lise
and others working at the stables come to respond to pigs.
Care of pigs intertwines with production of data in Lise’s labour, as she writes
down the intake of food and measurements of weight emailed daily to scientists
and lab technicians at Novo Nordisk. Moreover, she observes responses to drug
trials, such as unsteady walking implying dizziness, throwing up being a sign of
nausea, and reluctance to leave a space, which she interprets as a sign of tiredness
and records by writing ‘tired, tired girly piggies’ in the red book on the counter.
In encounters such as the catheter rinse, the walk to the pigs’ enclosures, weight
collection and injection of drugs, Lise and Betina notice whether the pigs move as
usual or change their eating habits. As such, sustained daily encounters enable a
biographical way of knowing pigs. Through a biographical approach to knowing,
Lise can discern that Vims should be excluded from a drug trial since her throwing
up is not just a side effect. Knowing their individual moods, likes and dislikes, Lise
is enabled to take individual differences and preferences into account. As such,
naming and the biographical knowledge that it allows becomes an important
means of providing good care for the pigs. Moreover, this way of knowing becomes
a means to evaluate the responses of individual pigs, to discern deviations and
54 Vibeke Pihl
determine their meaning for individual pigs, all of which is central for producing
good data. Using her name-based biographical knowledge, Lise will notify
scientists at Novo Nordisk of her observations about how individual pigs are
responding to the drug trials, as numbers on their own do not offer adequate
information about the effects of a drug. Thereby, names and the biographical
knowledge that names are part of have an important role in securing knowledge
about drugs on trial and discerning the meaning of individual pigs’ responses.
Providing pigs with care also takes on a much broader scope in scientific
knowledge production. Apart from Novo Nordisk being able to brand itself as a
company having a high standard of welfare for its lab animals, the care labour
enables the company to provide valuable information about the effects of drugs
that is essential for Novo Nordisk to establish its reputation for producing high-
quality products. As such, the knowledge associated with names enables the
transformation of the pigs into materials associated with a market based on
exchange values. This brings us back to Haraway’s comments about encounter
value, as Lise’s way of knowing pigs provides insight into how all is not a matter of
use or exchange at the farm, but how biographical knowledge nevertheless plays a
part in furthering exchange and use.
Attuning to differences: Naming as a domestication practice

As Haraway (2008) explained, labour is required in order to transform bodies into
knowledge and use it to make marketable products. In the case of knowledge, the
processes are mostly invisible in the actual product, whether it is a pharmaceutical
drug or a scientific paper. To understand how biographical knowledge emerges and
how it affects experiments and pigs’ lives, it is necessary to focus on a phenomenon
that is called attunement (Despret, 2004).
Mutual attunement refers to encounters between different species, which
through a joint interest in each other enable new meanings and identities
(Despret, 2004). As such, bodies and their interests, emotions and affects are
foregrounded in meetings between species, with learning to be affected being the key
to knowing (Despret, 2004). Despret describes how the ethologist Konrad Lorenz,
by adopting the behaviour of a mother goose, enters into a mother goose-gosling
relation (Despret, 2004). From his extensive engagement, which included the
gosling sticking worms into his mouth and following him around, Lorenz was
allowed to articulate new meanings about geese parenting behaviour. Likewise,
Lise is able to attune herself to the differences and the individual responses of pigs
through her labour of bodily immersion into sustained encounters with pigs. As
such, the labour enables Lise’s attunement to the pigs’ different movements,
capabilities, sounds, moods and preferences, as she learns to be affected by pigs as
individuals requiring different kinds of care. In turn, this attunement enables pigs
to propose her an identity as skilled in providing good care, which allows for a
transformation of pigs into competent experimental research subjects. With
reference to Despret (2004), I think of this as a domestication practice allowing pigs
and humans to become skilled at working with one another. As such, domesti-
cation refers to a practice of mutual attunement between species, from which new
meanings and identities emerge. In the following, I take a closer look at the kind
of domestication practices that unfold at the stables and their consequences for
pigs’ research biographies.
Describing the pigs as ‘wild’ upon their arrival from Ellegaard, Lise works to
attune pigs to the routines at the farm. The wildness of the pigs from Ellegaard has
to do with their unfamiliarity with the labour as experimental subjects. Being able
to take up the proposal of an identity requires trust to be built through various
exchanges of mutual interests and expectations. In the first weeks, no touching will
do, as this scares pigs. Instead, Lise guides pigs to their enclosures or to the scales
by keeping a distance while steering them in the right direction. By attuning to
the reactions of the pigs and adapting her labour to responses, such as an immediate
suspicion of touch, a proposal of new meanings takes place. Gradually, the pigs
come to know the stables and routines understanding what happens when one’s
door is opened, when to leave or return to one’s space, or when to accompany Lise
and Betina to the scale or outside enclosure. Also, this engagement enables Lise to
tell what matters to the various pigs and in which way they differ in their interests.
What the encounter proposes is that sustained contact between humans and pigs
can enable a mutual trust through which both species are learning to be affected.
Like Lorenz – who was able to respond to a gosling as a parent, which in turn also
transformed his response-ability – Lise is able to respond appropriately to
individual pigs by becoming knowledgeable about their individual ways. Moreover,
the labour also serves to prepare pigs for experiments at other sites through their
willingness to trust unfamiliar humans.
Naming is, of course, an important aspect in these practices. When Lise and
Betina name pigs individually, a mutual domestication occurs. As I have already
stated, the use of names enables the identification of pigs as individuals. Also, the
names imply a biographical form of knowledge, illustrated in the descriptions of
pigs and their individual displays of sourness, happiness and rebelliousness. In this
case, I point to how the use of names serves as a domesticating practice that,
through engaging with pigs as unique individuals, also aids the bodily attunement
of Lise and Betina to the pigs’ individual differences. Thereby, the use of names
implies taking an interest in individual bodies, their dispositions, affects and in
sorting out a relation to a particular body, whether it is love, conflict or something
else which involves a simultaneous transformation of Lise and Betina, as names
help them attune to pigs as individuals and biographies. We thus return to the
meaning of Haraway’s (2008) term ‘encounter value’, which refers to a form of
value produced in meetings between species labouring together as meetings form
knots that provide insights into our mutual dependence and ongoing shaping.
Encounter value also accompanies a form of engagement that allows the use of
bodies.
56 Vibeke Pihl
FIGURE 3.1 Nimbly – a female minipig – standing below a poster containing her job
description at the experimental farm
Source: Photo by Vibeke Pihl
Practising attached detachedness

Domestication processes at the farm do not involve only mutual interests. As pigs
become models of human patients, engagement runs alongside of detachment
(Candea, 2010). In the biographies formed between pigs and people, Lise and
Betina must abstain from a certain kind of emotional engagement with pigs.
While we are washing individual spaces, I ask Betina about the use of names,
and she re-states how names work as a practicality. Saying Speedy G is easier than
‘pig 92-032 in space 18 on the right side’. Betina continues to describe how ‘names
are a big discussion’ and how, in particular ‘the zoo world is against naming as it
personifies animals’ and how ‘you are not supposed to bond with animals in that
way’. She underlines that she has no problems distinguishing between pigs and
humans: ‘I am not going to say to the pig [changing her voice into a soft tone],
‘Oh, little Oscar, do you need to have your diaper changed?’, [her voice changes
back] just because it has a name’ (field notes 5 November 2010). In her description,
Betina refers to the contested status of naming animals in zoos. By that, she points
to the transformative effect of naming practices and the argued anthropomor-
phizing effect of names through their projection of human-to-human ways of
relating and knowing onto other species (cf. Latour, 2002). But in Betina’s
description, personal names do not imply human personification, and nor do they
make for a problematic way of caring for pigs. The problem of how ‘to bond with
animals’ comes to the fore in Betina’s invocation of personal names as related to an
adult assisting a child with changing a diaper. That the task she mentioned can be
found in a parent-child relation based on unconditional love and care is notable,
especially since, with her statement, Betina highlights the differences between an
adult caring for a child and the labour at the farm. Thereby, the relation to named
pigs again highlights the practical efficiency of names and less of an emotional
engagement.
Using ethnographic fieldwork, Candea argues that practices of attachment and
detachment do not pose as polar opposites (Candea, 2010). Rather, they
accompany each other in human-to-human and human-animal relations. As his
example, Candea describes how observers of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert
engaged in practices of detachment as they were taught not to touch meerkats,
since this was understood to interfere with the meerkat’s natural sociality (Candea,
2010). For meerkats, their sociality is said to be symptomatic of detachment,
whereas for observers, maintaining a distance served to ensure the best kind of data.
However, observers took various measures to prevent meerkats from road accidents,
signalling their ongoing engagement. The aim for observers was to tread a balance
between engagement (becoming a meerkat) and detachment (lack of insight)
rather than the transformation inherent in domestication. In this, detachment refers
to a particular form of engagement, a cultivated practice that is different from
standing back to observe animals (Candea, 2010).
The intertwining of attachment and detachment is useful to discuss with respect
to encounters that accompany the forming of pigs’ research biographies, since the
labour at the farm depends on practices of both attachment and detachment. In her
account of names, Betina denies comparison between her work and parenting, and
she does so because of the purpose, which requires pigs to become models in
experiments. To ensure the purpose, engagement is important, as it allows data; yet
detachment is equally central to maintain emotional distance to pigs. Thereby,
responses to minipigs become enabled by measures of engagement and
detachment, with the names pointing to a practice of a different kind from Lorenz’s
engagement with more-than-human species.
As such, Betina relates to named pigs in a different way than the emotional
58 Vibeke Pihl
attachment of technicians to an individual pig in Arluke’s (1988) study, where the

use of names is tied to personal relations indicating an irreplaceable relation with
a lab pig becoming a martyred pet. According to Betina, knowing animals at the
farm depends on recognition of death and suffering as necessary elements of the
labour. This turns us to the how pigs’ biographies unfold in relations with human
biographies characterized by contemporary cultural values such as the ethos of hope
(Rose, 2007), understood as the imperative to prolong and enhance every
individual human life. The realization of human biographies depends on an
enrolment and labour of pigs to become promises of hope (Pihl, 2014). As such,
the attachment to prolong human life depends on a simultaneous detachment and
extraction of life from pigs like Houdini, Speedy G and Wonder. To sustain a trade
in hopes, pigs in experiments are provided with a research biography, which differs
in important respects from human biographies because suffering and death
constitute specific aims. Also, a successful pig research biography depends
ultimately on pigs becoming trustworthy data. Even though data is intimately
connected with caring practices, a measure of detachment is equally present in the
labour to transform pigs into research subjects engaged in furthering human lives.
Learning to engage with pigs as numbers in science

At the life science faculty, minipig sows enter a different part of their research
biography, which involves a surgical transformation undertaking by surgeons and
scientists mimicking the procedures used in the human clinic to ensure the
relevance of pigs’ becoming GBP models. In most cases, scientists have their first
meetings with pigs on the day of the surgery. Another essential component is the
reference to pigs as numbers in encounters with scientists. When I ask Thomas, a
senior at the faculty, why scientists seem to prefer numbers, Thomas explains me
how the use of personal names is troublesome in various respects. He tells me
about a previous experiment where pigs were named after scientists in the group,
and how this affected the killing of pigs at the end of the experiment. He notes,
referring to his own name, that ‘we would have to go and kill Thomas’, and how
he thought that felt silly, and so instead they began to give pigs numbers. I ask him
why it felt silly:
Thomas: I don’t know. Perhaps it was the barrier between pig and human
that was broken down when you start using human names,
although it’s arbitrary. It does not hold any significance or how
should I put it, it is not necessary to give them names. You can
suffice with numbers and then keep a little more distanced, I
think. I feel that’s better than personifying them. We named them
after ourselves, and that was dangerous because then someone was
named Thomas and another Per and such [laughing], then it’s
actually too close, so it’s better with numbers.
Vibeke: Did you decide that this became too close?
Thomas: No, it’s more of a curiosity, but it is an example of how I think

that you as a scientist should be observing reality instead of trying
to become a part of it, if you understand what I mean.
(Interview with Thomas, May 2011)
For Thomas, giving the pigs personal names is undesirable because it blurs a
boundary between pigs and humans, which he thinks is necessary for two reasons.
There is the trouble of killing a living organism considered person-like, and second,
it leads to bad science. With his comment he also points out how the use of
personal names transforms the relation between pigs and scientists into a personal
engagement interfering with the production of science based on a divide between
scientists and research subjects. The scientist’s task is that of observing and
representing research subjects, and as such is supposed to stand outside of the
experiment. To enable this kind of knowledge, Thomas prefers to identify pigs by
the numbers sprayed on their backs or ear tags instead of their personal names,
which fail to establish the requisite distance. In his story, naming a pig after himself
or a close colleague causes emotional discomfort and provokes an inability to sort
out his relation to the pigs. This brings us back to questions about responses and
response-abilities in encounters between species.
According to Haraway (2008), when animals are transformed into matter that is
close enough to become a model or nourishing food, the work to establish these
products often does not warrant sufficient responses. Species labouring in labs is
not the problem as such; rather, ‘it is the always pressing question of nonsym-
metrical suffering and death’ (Haraway, 2008, p. 77). This statement is tied to a
discussion of how animals in experiments are responded to, and the degree to
which they obtain a face that compels a response. In a similar way, Thomas’s
discussion of his experience of naming and numbering brings us to problems of
what constitutes appropriate responses and response-abilities in experiments with
pigs. The use of numbers and names highlights different scales and symmetries
between pigs and humans with names collapsing a distance. As a response, Thomas
decides to abstain from the use of personal names to avoid giving pigs faces of an
uncanny kind. Numbers, by contrast, provide Thomas with reassurance since
numbers relate to the production of data in experiments and promise a required
emotional distance.
If we follow Candea (2013), Thomas’s experience is an example of how
scientists occupy varying ontological standpoints in their practices while
suspending beliefs about pigs’ capability to share more than physiological
similarities with humans. In the previous experiments, the use of names
accompanied a personified way of knowing pigs. Even though, Thomas recognizes
different ways of knowing pigs, he points to how biomedical science requires
commitment to a certain ontological standpoint. When Thomas decides to abstain
from names, the reason is that the practice interferes with pigs’ transformation into
data. In the work of biomedical scientists, numbers serve two related purposes. First
of all, numbers are used to turn pigs into an experimental population consisting of
60 Vibeke Pihl
standardized and interchangeable units. Second, numbers work to secure the

objectivity of scientists through the detachment they offer to individual pigs. These
practices lead to trustworthy data of pigs’ physiological responses to the surgery. As
grounds for articulation, numbers bring specific requirements for the use of bodies
in encounters with pigs. Practising appropriate detachment entails a transformation
of both pigs and scientists to enable information in the form of effects – numbers
– to emerge. Like pigs being turned into members of a standardized population,
scientists work to detach themselves from individual preferences, interests and
affects. The standardization of pigs depends on eliminating information that could
influence the behaviour of scientists – such as the biographical knowledge of
Houdini’s skill with locks or the fast running of Speedy G. As such, the forming of
pigs’ research biographies entails a mutual shaping of scientists and pigs that, in
order to become trustworthy producers of numbers, are required to perform their
bodies in particular ways. As in Despret’s (2004) example of the horse Hans, 2
Thomas recognizes the ability of the body and its affects and interests to transform
scientific experiments without the consciousness of scientists. Also, he points to the
transformative effects of names, as the ontological standpoint becomes less clear
when pigs are named after scientists. However, bodies have to perform in a
particular mode, namely observation. To secure a clear vision, a separation is
enacted between the observing scientists and the pigs being observed. A particular
view is required, as scientists zoom in on particular organs and intercellular
communication and away from individual characteristics of pig bodies. Using
numbers while referring to specific pigs reflects a similar approach to one’s own
possible bodies, as Thomas recognizes the various capabilities of his body, although
he abstains from taking specificities into account. This practice secures the ability
of numbers to travel beyond actual encounters between pigs and scientists, as the
specific arranging of bodies becomes a way to determine general associations
between a surgical treatment and physiological effects. However, it is interesting
that actual encounters form the basis for knowledge production and that specific
attunement to pigs poses the grounds for articulations of knowledge (Despret,
2013). In this encounter, particular ways of arranging bodies are very much
required and at stake. Adhering to these arrangements comes across as an
opposition to the biographical way of knowing, as the approach relies on
detachment with the aim for pigs to become standardized and interchangeable
members of a population stripped of individual characteristics. Yet the encounter
with scientists emphasizes how the experiment draws on the past biographies of
pigs as a prerequisite for new meanings becoming attached to pigs’ research
biographies to ensure their transformation into reliable models. Thereby,
continuity emerges between pigs’ past as named subjects at the farm and their
present transformation into reliable sources of biomedical data for future human
value. Yet the continuity is not brought forward in Thomas’s account, as he points
out his reasons for sticking to numbers, which highlight the effects of a division of
labour between scientists and technicians and sites for responses to pigs.
Numbers at work
In the following, I unfold how scientists’ preference for numbers depends on a
mutual shaping of pigs and scientists in biomedical experiments. In October 2010,
Speedy G – pig no. 92 932 – was to become a GBP pig model, as she was
considered ‘worn down’ from labouring in drug trials. Two weeks prior to her
surgery, Speedy G travels to the faculty. On the day of the surgery, she has her first
encounter with most of the scientists, as well as the surgeons. Speedy G willingly
leaves her space and walks out of the door towards the surgery facilities. Scientists
express admiration of her dedicated way of moving towards the surgery facilities,
as Speedy G trots along the street almost all on her own. Having laboured as a
subject in drug trials for several years, Speedy G has become skilled in working
with humans, and so she is willing to accompany unfamiliar humans to an
unknown place. Scientists do not notice her cooperative mode as enabled through
sustained encounters with Lise and Betina, as they express surprise of her dedicated
way of moving. With her travel to the faculty, Speedy G – the fastest runner at the
farm – is now referred to as ‘it’ or ‘32’. As such, the move away from the farm
implies that she enters into encounters that unfold on different conditions.
At the surgical room, Speedy G becomes dressed up as a human patient, as she
is covered in green plastic. She is then anaesthetized and has a series of machines
and monitoring devices attached to her body. When considered ready for surgery,
surgeons approach the ‘patient’ – the name they use for her – and start to burn
holes in Speedy G’s belly, causing a smell of burnt skin to flow around the room.
In the surgical encounter, the machines attached to different parts of her body
measure levels of oxygen in the blood, and her pulse and heart rate, displayed in
red and green numbers, are accompanied by beeping sounds. The extensive use of
measurements becomes a means to enable her transformation into a successful pig
model through the appropriate care and to determine the similarity of physio-
logical responses in pigs and human patients. By referring to Speedy G as a
‘patient’, scientists and surgeons place her in a relation to the clinic. Mimicking
procedures of the clinic in the experiment, scientists prepare for their knowledge
derived from a pig body to travel into the domains of the human clinic. Yet to
enable knowledge of relevance for the clinic, scientists must establish a communi-
cation with her body through the use of particular mediums such as numbers –
measurements – and images zooming in on organs. This involves establishing a
particular focus on her abdomen accessed by an endoscopic camera producing
images discussed through their comparability with human patients. The preference
for measurements – or numbers – in biomedical science has to do with how
numbers enable biological processes to travel between species, as numbers are
comparable because of their ability to be separated from an individual organism,
species and specific context (Rose, 2007).
Yet this is not the only reason why scientists prefer numbers. A related aspect of
numbers refers to how the outcome of experiments is measured in relation to
conditions for publishing. Thomas explains to me that at this point, because of the
62 Vibeke Pihl
limited success with the surgery, scientists will only be able to write a ‘technical
publication’, which ‘gives very little’ in the prevailing ranking of scientific journals.
Publishing knowledge of how to complete GBP surgery in obese minipigs will be
rated as a case description. Although such case descriptions may be valuable to
interested scientists, as they provide new knowledge of anatomical differences, they
fail to meet the demand for numbers determining the effects of the surgery – the
condition for publishing in high-ranking journals. A case description emphasizes
the connection to a particular place – the life science faculty– and a specific
encounter between scientists and Göttingen minipigs. Case descriptions thereby
also fail to provide the numbers that determine the effects of surgery-enabling
knowledge that a clinic may find useful.
At this point, I take up Candea’s (2010) proposal about how engagement and
detachment in human-animal relations can benefit from a symmetrical attention to
human-to-human relations. Thinking with a symmetrical approach, scientists
working to extract numbers from pigs are simultaneously becoming numbered
themselves. For life scientists pursuing a career in academia, authoring and
publishing papers in high-ranking journals is a required task. Publishing peer-
reviewed articles in journals ranked according to their impact factor is a current
way of evaluating science in Denmark. The distribution of public research funding
takes into consideration how much researchers publish and, and in particular, how
often their work is cited. As such, producing numbers is tied to another concern,
namely numbers as funds that are available for projects, which is reflected in
Thomas’s concern about whether the outcome will be rewarded. 3 The labour of
scientists to turn pigs into numbers is thereby intimately concerned with
conditions for maintaining a position within science. As such, scientists have to
tread a balance between science that may be rewarding but not rewarded, requiring
decisions on which projects to engage with and detach from. This reflects how
pigs’ research biographies are mutually dependent on the conditions that shape
scientists’ research biographies.
Noticing the difference

Another consequence of numbers has to with the responses that appear in a post-
surgical encounter. Andreas, a junior scientist, evaluates Speedy G’s recovery
through use of diagnostic tools such as blood samples, thermometer and a
stethoscope, noting down observations in a folder placed on a trolley. Kasper, an
animal technician, walks by and remarks how much ‘the pig’ seems changed after
the surgery: ‘It was always very quick to get on its feet when I came to the stable,
and now it mostly seems to sleep’. Speedy G does seem less inclined to movement
after the surgery – her defining criterion and the reason for her name at the farm.
Andreas replies that it takes time to recover from six hours of surgery, and that there
is no reason to be worried. The post-surgical encounter highlights the effects of
the division of labour between scientists and technicians for different ways of
knowing pigs.
Being attuned to Speedy G as an individual ‘quick to get on his feet’, Kasper

responds by being struck by the difference in her behaviour. This reaction is quite
different from that of Andreas, who responds to her behaviour as a general charac-
teristic of pigs and human patients. When Speedy G is related to a GBP patient
population or Göttingen minipigs in general, her inclination to rest or sleep ‘is not
a reason to worry’, as it is normal for an obese minipig, and also, pigs like human
patients require time to recover. But this is not the way that animal technicians
know her usual behaviour. When Speedy G returns to the farm, this noticeable
change leads Lise and Betina to insist that she is suffering and has to be ‘killed’. In
comparison with her previous biography, nothing in Speedy G’s present behaviour
resonates with her defining characteristics, such as the eagerness to race other pigs
and keep her head high. The present behaviour is that of a pig that never lifts its
head or leaves its space willingly. The change goes unnoticed by scientists who
unwillingly consent to her killing, with the dissection showing a severe surgical
complication. Thereby, the post-surgical encounter highlights how different
responses follow from the ways of engaging with pigs. Moreover, the travels of
Speedy G point to how numbers and general observations of physiology cannot
stand on their own.
Pig research biographies: Trotting across divides

By following pigs’ travels, we are able to trace how the labour at different sites
enables different ways of knowing pigs that are central to making pig research
biographies. Although the separation between sites and people makes it difficult to
grasp the continuity involved in the efforts, I argue that by following pigs we are
able to trot across divides. A pig research biography is part of unfolding how pigs
and people become mutually transformed through their involvement in the labour
to establish future human health. The variety of labour that pigs undergo at sites
form a continuous effort, as the naming practices allows pigs’ transformation into
competent research subjects willing to trust scientists in search of numbers.
Similarly, we can grasp how the practices related to the use of names and numbers
unfold across boundaries with neither names nor numbers being achieved on the
basis of scientific objectivity or subjective engagement. Also, names and numbers
refer to different ways of knowing pigs that form mutual requirements. By paying
attention to naming, it appears that knowing minipigs as named subjects does not
detract from scientific data. Rather, naming accompanies a biographical knowledge
that generously adds to the production of data. Also, names do not result in an
ability to deal with pigs’ suffering, as the practices of naming are equally about the
efficiency of names in comparison to numbers. Both ways of knowing include
measures of engagement and detachment that reflect an entangled relation between
scientific data and care.
In this respect, numbers are not about lack of engagement, but instead about
how particular kinds of engagements and detachments are required to ensure
related purposes. Numbers secure the transformation of pigs into reliable models,
64 Vibeke Pihl
thus enabling pigs’ further travels into the clinics and scientific journals – an
essential part of a pig research biography. Measurements serve as transition points
for pigs’ travels into human clinics, as their comparability with numbers extracted
from human patients is the prerequisite for pigs’ value as knowledge in translational
biomedicine. Counting publications and the need of scientists to detach themselves
from names to ensure valid numbers emphasizes how responses and response-
abilities encompass not only pigs but also the future careers of scientists. Yet the
legitimacy of numbers is supported by the relations that accompany names, which
highlights the mutual existence of different ways of knowing pigs in experimental
science.
The aim of writing pigs’ research biographies is to foreground the continuity
between the seemingly incoherent kinds of knowledge practices that relate to
names and numbers. By following pigs and people across sites while attending to
how biographical knowledge and physiological measurements are mutually
involved in experimental outcomes, we may learn to improve the conditions that
shape encounters.
Notes
1 This contribution is based on an ethnographic fieldwork which took place from March
2010 through July 2011. During this period, I followed the travels of pigs involved in
an experiment to establish an obese pig model for clarifying the effects of gastric bypass
surgery. In this piece, the focus will be on observations and interviews with a variety
of people from a life science faculty and an experimental farm in Denmark.
2 By using his visual and kinaesthetic senses, Hans was able to correctly answer
mathematical questions by using communication and cues that humans had not even
known they provided (Despret, 2004).
3 Moreover, this economy of naming and numbering depends on not sharing authorship
with pigs, ‘pig walkers’, animal technicians, lab technicians and the various adminis-
trative staff that enable this work but do not count as authors to be named.
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4
MODIFYING THE BIOPOLITICAL
COLLECTIVE
The law as a moral technology
Kristin Asdal and Tone Druglitrø
In arguing for choosing the prison as his site of study, Michel Foucault explained
that what he had wanted was to reactivate what he called the project of ‘a
genealogy of morals’. This genealogy, Foucault argued, was about tracing the lines
of transformation of what he suggested to name ‘moral technologies’. Foucault’s
main question, then, was, how does one punish? In so doing, he was pursuing the
same method as he had been doing earlier for the question of madness: rather than
asking what madness is, he wanted to ask how divisions operated, such as between
mental illness and normal behaviour. Moreover, he was interested in how different
forms of knowledge took part in such operations (see Foucault, 1991).
This chapter is inspired by Foucault’s way of working. His method, or his way
of talking about and doing method in his early studies, is fruitful and promising, we
suggest, in analysing the notion and practices that have come to be known as
‘biopolitics’ (e.g., Foucault, 1978, 2008). This is particularly so when it comes to
the discussion that is crucial to this book, namely how the biopolitical collective,
which used to be thought of and analysed as a rather human affair, can and indeed
needs to be extended to include relations with nonhumans (see the Introduction
to this volume). However, rather than studying concrete practices of punishment,
this chapter is concerned with the making of law (e.g., Latour, 2010). We approach
law as a moral technology and ask how law has acted upon and taken part in
modifying the biopolitical collective.
Approaching law as a technology, or an art of government, may seem a bit
surprising (but see Skålevåg, 2009) – and especially so when applied to the issue of
biopolitics and the question of how animal studies and the problematics of
biopolitics may meet. Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and biopolitics have
been regarded as a rich resource to animal studies in part because of their focus on
technologies of government that work upon individual bodies and the population
by other and more indirect tactics and means than law (see Foucault, 2007). This is
Modifying the biopolitical collective 67
related to how Foucault made possible a move away from the issue of who counted
as subjects of law to a concern with ‘life’ and how life was being inserted into
history (Lazzarato, 2002; Wolfe, 2013). In contrast to the Western tradition of
grasping the political subject as a subject of law, Foucault’s work is approached
instead as a resource that allows for a new ontology that ‘begins with the body and
its potential’ (Lazzarato, 2002, p. 100, cited in Wolfe, 2013, p. 33). The political
subject is toned down in order to give greater weight to ‘forces’ and ‘bodies’.
Nevertheless, and as we will argue in this chapter, law is a particularly important
site to study if we are interested in analysing how life is being inserted into history,
and it is indeed an understudied technology that works upon bodies and the
biopolitical collective. In arguing this, the chapter places itself in conversation with
other contributions concerned with drawing animal studies and the issue of
biopolitics together. Cary Wolfe (2013), for instance, in his already influential
contribution Before the Law, extends the biopolitical frame to an expanded
community of the living. Important to his analysis is how, within this extended
biopolitical frame, atrocities to life are seen as constitutive to biopolitics, featuring
what Wolfe (2013, p. 52) calls:
the exponential expansion and routinization of mechanisms and logics that

extend from the Chicago slaughterhouses of the turn of the twentieth
century, through the assembly lines developed by Ford, to the Nazi death
camps and back again, traversing what we are now forced to call a newly
expanded community of the living.
Hence, the biopolitical collective, reframed as an expanded community of the

living, draws together, as if seamlessly, radically different events and sites at very
different times in history. In this move, we argue, the potential for a more thorough
empirical, differentiating and historicizing approach remains underdeveloped – that
is despite the important ways in which Wolfe draws the law into the frame, and
despite the convincing argument that what we need is indeed to develop an ethics
that is pragmatic and that differentiates.
Our contribution starts where Wolfe ends and suggests that in order to trace
elements of a pragmatic and differentiating ethics, precisely the law and its struggle
to work out versions of justice in practice can be an interesting place to explore.
In doing this, our objective is not to come up with the legitimate philosophical or
ethical position. Rather, we trace how the law emerges from concrete situations
and scientific as well as public debates. We suggest approaching law as in itself a
moral technology that does work, including by indirect means – by acting, for
instance, upon the moral capacity, the sense of responsibility and judgement of
others. In the pragmatic tradition from Dewey (1939), we call this valuation work.
Such valuation work takes part, we argue, in modifying and working upon the
biopolitical collective.
Human relations to animals are governed by international and national
legislation. In 2006 the European Union formed an animal welfare strategy that
68 Kristin Asdal and Tone Druglitrø
seeks to harmonize legislation on animal protection across nations. The so-called

‘official European position’, as it is conceptualized in the European Commission’s
(2012) strategy for animal welfare, is that animals are sentient beings with intrinsic
value and that measures need to be taken to raise the level of animal welfare across
European countries. In this way animals are recognized as beings with value in and
of themselves, beyond their use-relations, so to speak, with humans. Simultaneously,
as the European Union is a political and economic union, its strategy places the
concern for animal welfare within an economic framework in which animal
welfare is intertwined with human use in science, industry and culture in intricate
and extensive ways. 1
Precisely this question of animal sentience has been a contested and disputed
affair in a law-making context. But as this chapter will show, the sensibilities of
humans and their (or our) motives and character have also very much been at stake:
the moral technology of law is not only about how to include (or exclude) animals,
and hence a question of how to categorize and work upon animals, but also a
question of the inclusion (or exclusions) of humans. Thus, it is also a question of
versions of ‘humanness’. That is to say that the very composition of society has
been at stake in law-making techniques that have aimed at protecting the animal
from mistreatment or securing its welfare. What we need to remind ourselves of,
then, is that human-animal relations are also very much also a human affair.
In the tradition from Austin (1962) we have learned that words are sometimes also
speech acts – that is they do not only represent reality but are sometimes also actions
that work upon that reality. In her book on how legal speech acts, Marianne Constable
(2014) points out that Austin gave priority to spoken language rather than the writ-
ten and urges us to pay more attention to the written word and how it acts. Law texts
are particular kinds of texts in which formulations and wording are indeed crucial
(e.g., Constable, 2014) and that they in their wording take part in composing the
collective in quite distinct and sometimes radically different and conflicting ways
(Asdal, 2012a). Following up on this, this chapter addresses how different concepts and
wordings in law, such as ‘intrinsic value’, ‘treating well’ or ‘unnecessary suffering’, are
not only words but also ways of modifying biopolitical collectives.
Drawing on the Norwegian example, and hence how animals have been
inserted into the legal framework of the nation-state, this chapter will analyse how
the law operates as a moral technology that works upon the biopolitical collective
by rewording, differentiating and expelling. Starting from the mid-nineteenth
century, we address how this question of whether the animal can in fact be
reckoned as a subject of law, ‘a persona’ in its own right, was precisely one of the
issues that emerged around how and to which extent the animal could potentially
be protected by the law, and on which grounds.
Animals as sentient beings or subjects of law

In 1862 Christian Boeck, a professor of physiology and veterinary medicine, was
asked to testify as a scientific expert in a court case in which a person was being
prosecuted for a possible act of animal mistreatment. In the end, however, the
professor refused to act as an expert because he believed that science could not
decide on the issue: the differences between the species when it came to the
question of pain and how it was experienced were too large. Hence, science could
not give any definite answer to the question about pain. The professor reasoned
that there was a substantial difference between humans and animals: for instance,
he thought it reasonable to believe that during surgery humans would suffer more
than a dog. This was simply because humans were in capacity of consciousness
and thus able to understand the possible ramifications of the procedure (Asdal,
2012b). This was a way of reasoning that was quite similar to what we can
recognize from René Descartes (1637). But the reasoning was also different: the
problem was not so much that animals did not, in principle, have the capacity to
feel pain, but that science could not answer if and the extent to which this was
the case.
The concrete background for bringing the professor in as an expert in the first
place was a changing penal code. Earlier practice had established animal
mistreatment as a criminal act on the grounds that such mistreatment implied a
violation of property rights. The new penal code of 1842 pursued a different
approach and explicitly established the mistreatment of domestic animals (kreaturer,
‘creatures’) as in itself a criminal act. A juridical treatise from 22 years later points
to the tensions emerging by inserting the animal into law in what was read as an
individualized and personalized way: the problem was that the violation became
linked up with ‘the animal itself ’. To do this was problematic, it was argued, as this
implied a ‘violated persona’, even as ‘no one in full earnest would ascribe animals
a persona, or in any way whatsoever consider them subjects of law’ (Anon., 1864;
see also Asdal, 2012b).
Hence, this points to two radically different, indeed opposing, ways in which the
animal could be made part of the collective: as an individual and possible subject of
law, versus being an object, that is a thing that is someone’s property. Moreover, in
quite concrete ways this exemplifies the general point that studies of law have
made, namely how persons and things are not only regulated, but also produced by
techniques of law (Pottage, 2004). Obviously, in doing this, the law acts as a moral
technology – or in other words, it acts as a valuation technology that takes part in
differentiating between species.
A proposition for a new penal code debated in the Norwegian Parliament
towards the end of the nineteenth century, the penal code of 1902, operated in a
different way. First, all animals were in principle included and encompassed by the
law. Moreover, the animal was enacted in an individualized way, but also as a living
creature with the capacity to feel pain. As the proposed section (382) read:
Whoever … should be guilty of gross or malignant mistreatment of animals,

or whoever aids or abets such an act, will be punished by fine or impris-
onment up to six – 6 – months. This decision does not hinder the King, or
someone to whom the King has bestowed authority, from allowing
appointed persons in designated places to conduct painful experiments on

animals for scientific purposes.
(Ministry of Justice, 1899; see also Asdal, 2012a)2
Hence, the issue was no longer simply a question of mistreatment, but also a
question of sentience, in the sense of the individual capacity to experience or feel
pain. The medical laboratory was included and defined as a site in society in which
such painful treatment of animals was being performed. In other words, the
medical laboratory was defined (in principle) as a site for mistreatment of animals.
But simultaneously, the laboratory was granted a possible exemption from the law,
a possibility that was intimately linked to the purpose of this conduct and the
authority the medical experts carried. In the name of science, painful experiments
could be granted permission to be performed at designated places and by
appointed persons (see Asdal, 2008).
The medical community protested vigorously against this section of the penal
code, fearing it would imply an end to experimental medicine as one had come to
know and practice it. Experiments on animals, or ‘vivisection’ as the practice was
often called in the public debate, had nothing to do with mistreatment, it was
argued. In Parliament this became intimately tied up with and supported by a
utilitarian ethics that took part in building the argument that experiments on
animals were conducted in order to be able to alleviate pain and improve human
health, and hence that they were serving a higher purpose and human ends (Asdal,
2008). As such, the law also came to take part in constructing a moral hierarchy in
which sentient animals could be made to serve ‘higher’ (i.e., human) ends. The
medical laboratory, then, was granted exemption from the general ban on animal
mistreatment, given that it acted as an instrument for such higher ends. Hence, the
law acted as a moral technology allowing animals to be subjected to pain if the
ends, as well as the persons in charge, were valued as ‘good’, or sufficiently good. This
new sentient being, placed within a moral hierarchy, seems to have replaced the
animal as a possible ‘persona’, and hence subject of law.
Paradoxically, the new sentient being – the discrete individual animal with the
capacity to feel pain – must in part be seen as an outcome of the very practices that
were now so heavily contested, namely that of employing animals as test objects
and models for humans in order to trace the location of the sensation of pain as a
definite site within the individual animal body. In contrast to the physiology
represented by Boeck a few decades earlier, the discipline had turned towards
answering the unresolved question of pain by employing animals in order to
empirically identify the site within the living organism where sensitivity was
thought to be situated (see, e.g., Gross, 1979; see also Rey, 1995).
Animal sensitivity versus the sensibility of humans

The very fact that physiology and experimental medicine worked on animals
helped to draw animals closer to humans; they were employed as means, but
paradoxically one could say this was precisely because they were deemed to be
sufficiently similar to humans. Experimental physiology enabled the individual,
sentient animal also in other ways: first, as already noted, by defining the problem
of pain as a physiological phenomenon and empirically demonstrating and scientif-
ically grounding the sensory roots of animals within the discrete animal body; and
second, by proceeding in exactly the way one did, by inflicting what was concep-
tualized as ‘pain’ on individual animal bodies (Asdal, 2012a).
As it was reported by animal activists in the aftermath of the debating over the
new penal code, one knew ‘for certain’ that vivisections were performed by one of
the professors at the Royal Frederick University in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo),
and that students reported of horrific ‘screams of pain’ (Asdal, 2012b). Importantly,
however, the individualized, sentient animal with the at least theoretical right to be
protected from pain was not the only way in which the new law enacted the
animal and the collective in which animals as well as humans were part. The overall
chapter that included section 382 defined the problem of animal mistreatment
radically differently, namely as a decency issue. This was more in line with how the
older penal code had categorized the animal and its relations to human society.
The title of the chapter in question was ‘Offences against Decency’. Examples
of other such ‘public offences’ included ‘gambling’, ‘public indecency’ and
‘immorality’. Hence, the problem was no longer related to ‘pain’ but to ‘offence’.
Moreover, framed as a decency issue, the problem was not whether the individual
animal was feeling pain. To the contrary, the issue had nothing to do whatsoever
with the animal as such or with tracing pain within the individual animal body.
The problem was the offence, that is the effect the treatment or mistreatment of
animals might have upon the public, upon humans. Thus, whereas the actual section
of the act was enacting an animal with the right (in principle) to be protected from
pain, the chapter in which it was embedded enacted society as that which had to
be protected and defended (Asdal, 2012a; Ministry of Justice, 1899).
Taken together, the penal code acted as a moral technology in a series of
different, indeed in part conflicting, ways: by realizing the animal as a sentient being
with the individual right (in principle) to protection from pain; by establishing a
moral hierarchy in which animals could legitimately be sacrificed if that served
higher human ends; and by acting as a means for securing and preserving decency
and protecting society from immorality.
Animals as sentient and domesticated beings: From

mistreatment to good treatment
In 1935 the legal situation shifted. Now animals were to be granted protection, not
as part of the criminal code, but as part of a separate law on animal protection. The
new Animal Protection Act enacted the animal not as an object, a property
belonging to humans, but also not so much as an individual sentient being; rather,
the animal was enacted as part of human culture in another way, as living beings
that had been domesticated by society. Hence, this was a rather different approach to
make animals integral to the biopolitical collective. This again put a particular
responsibility on humans to treat animals well. As the law committee tasked with
formulating the new law stated and explained, it was a human responsibility to care
for animals that had been domesticated and had thus been made dependent on
humans for food and shelter. The well-being of animals was a human responsibility
because they had come to belong to and had been made integral to society and
human ends.
From stating the animal issue as a problem of possible mistreatment from which
animals had to be protected, the issue was redefined as a moral or ethical obligation
to treat animals well. Thus, the animal issue was transformed from being concerned
with mistreatment to good treatment. Or as it was stated, this was about ‘positive
obligations to treat [animals] well’. In this way the law was set out to operate as a
more active and intervening moral technology, from simply ensuring non-
mistreatment to actively working upon the animal condition and securing that it
was domesticated well. This implied that the law was formulated in legal terms as
a ‘positive obligation’ – hence the law was enacted as a moral technology that was
to act upon the human duty and responsibility to treat animals with consideration (Njaa,
1940, pp. 13–14). Animals were, it was said, to be treated well, so that they were
not exposed to ‘unnecessary suffering’ (Njaa, 1940, pp. 13–14).
The same positive obligation was emphasized in section 2 of the Animal
Protection Act, where, quite concretely, the human responsibility to animals was
linked to providing sufficient feed and care. Consequently, this implied a particular
responsibility on those who handled animals in different contexts and
environments. Any person who was handling animals – be it a farmer, animal care-
taker, scientist or whoever – was made responsible for providing sound living space
and food so that the animal would not starve and so that it would be able to find
proper shelter (sect. 2). Quite concretely, this was taken to mean that:
the living space of the animal must be spacious enough for the animal to
stand upright or lie down in a natural way … The animal must be fed in a
sound manner. One must therefore not use feed that is directly harmful or
that is not suitable for the specific animal, or feed that is impossible to digest
or that experience shows is poisonous to the animal.
(Njaa, 1940, pp. 26–7)
Another contrast, then, to the penal code of 1902 was that the animal was to be
taken care of with a basis in their difference: different animals had different needs,
as well as different demands when it came to living space. Still, a few general
criteria had to be fulfilled in order to secure good treatment. Their living space had
to be warm and draught-free and preferably have windows so that light would be
let in. This was also a means for easing the supervision of the animals (Njaa, 1940,
pp. 27–8). In contrast to the physiology of the mid-nineteenth century – which
acknowledged that animals were indeed radically different creatures, but that one
did not know what these differences were – the Animal Protection Act accepted
that there were such differences, and decided that these had to be taken into
account in order to secure the animals’ well-being.
Wolfe (2013) discusses the problem that arises if all animals are deemed to have
equal value. However, this is not only an abstract philosophical issue, but an issue
animal protection law has faced quite concretely and tried to handle. The law
committee behind the 1935 act, for instance, addressed this very problem. The
committee was having doubts about whether it was indeed ‘logical and in principle
correct’ to include all animals, for instance ‘the different vermin species humans
want to exterminate and ruthlessly fight’ (Njaa, 1940, p. 14). They concluded that
the positive obligation in the main section ‘should make sure that one does not go
further than the ends require, that one should not act brutally or viciously’. In that
case (i.e., if one went further than the ends required), the suffering inflicted on the
animal would be unnecessary, and one was subject to punishment (Njaa, 1940, p.
14). Hence, the Animal Protection Act as a moral technology operated in a very
specific manner: animals were, or had already been, made integral to the
biopolitical collective, and consequently this put a responsibility on humans.
However, animals had been made integral to the collective, been domesticated,
precisely in order to serve human ends. Hence, the law was to secure a moral
hierarchy which differentiated between good and necessary human ends and a
necessary degree of animal suffering. Achieving this, however, was only possible
with a basis in the moral judgement – a discretionary assessment by humans – in
each individual case and in concrete situations. Hence, the issue was not so much
one of coercion and directly enforcing law. Rather, it was also very much an art of
indirect government where the law was to act as a technology that worked upon
others and their moral judgements and actions in concrete settings and situations.
Including animals and expelling groups of humans from the

biopolitical collective
By situating the animal in its living space and ascribing humans a particular respon-
sibility towards its well-being, an interesting tension is emerging. Animals are made
integral to a distinct animal collective in which they have the right to be taken care
of with a basis in their own ‘animality’ or species distinctness. At the same time, the
animal spaces that are being addressed are largely human constructs, outcomes of
practices of domestication that have made animals integral to human culture and
human ends. The ‘responsibility’ towards animals enacted by the Animal Protection
Act had to be practised within this tension.
Two different cases of animal mistreatment took part in linking the animal issue
to specific spaces and to specific people. One of the cases concerned the slaughter
of animals for food. This was a core concern to the animal protection organization
Foreningen til Dyrenes Beskyttelse, which we refer to as the Norwegian Society
for the Protection of Animals (NSPA). The NSPA had tried to make the Ministry
of Justice include the problematics of slaughter already in the draft for the new
penal code of 1902. In the end it was not included, but the issue was subsequently
addressed in three lengthy parliamentary debates in the years 1927–29. The result
was a separate act on slaughter effective from 1929 (this and the following section
of the debate on slaughtering is based on Snildal, 2014). The NSPA wanted the
establishment of public slaughterhouses overseen by veterinarians. On the basis of
this expertise, the slaughter of animals was to be performed so that animal pain was
minimized with the help of anaesthesia, and so that disease control and hygienic
standards were improved. Integral to the argument was a strong criticism of Jewish
slaughter methods, also known as shechita. Central to shechita is that they do not
use anaesthesia as part of the slaughter. The killing is performed by one swift
movement with a sharp knife that is meant to cut through blood vessels and nerves
of the animal’s throat in a manner that is painless and serves as a quick death.
Avoiding the infliction of pain on the animal is an important part of this method
of slaughter. Contesting this, the NSPA argued for a total ban of shechita on the
grounds that these slaughter methods were ‘inhumane’.
The NSPA’s claim was that the general lack of humane sensibilities of, as it was
called, ‘these groups of people’ demonstrated a ‘brutality and satisfaction in
watching animals bleed and being tortured’ – which went against, it was stated, the
form of humanism that was exercised by people that could be placed under the
labels ‘Norwegians’, ‘North Europeans’ and/or ‘Christians’. Even though they
objected to what what was considered to be anti-Semitic sentiments, the veterinary
authorities backed the organization in their promotion of so-called ‘humane
slaughter’ (Snildal, 2014, pp. 92–3).
Thus, the Slaughter Act that was decided upon in 1929 banned kosher-related
slaughtering (Snildal, 2014, pp. 86–7). The law decided that the killing of animals
for food was to be conducted in public slaughterhouses, in which state-controlled
killing, so to speak, could be performed. Locating the slaughter of animals to a
specific place, performed by distinct groups of people, that is veterinarians rather
than religious authorities, was meant to ensure sound hygienic conditions as well
as ‘humane killing’. The slaughterhouse, then, was staged as a secular and rational
way of managing and killing animals, as opposed to the religious nature of kosher
(Snildal, 2014, pp. 86–7).
Another case that took part in linking animals to specific spaces as well as to
specific humans was the problem of what we could call ‘travelling animals’ and
charlatans: to what extent were vagabonds to be allowed to own or have animals
in their custody? And who was to be given the authority to take sick animals into
their custody and care? These issues were given significant space in the revisions of
the 1935 act that were proposed in 1948 (Law Committee, 1948) and came into
force in 1951. As it was explicated, the problem was mainly linked to vagabonds
owning horses, referred to as ‘gypsy horses’ (taterhester), but it was also raised in
relation to other animals such as dogs and cattle.
In the Proposition of 1948 suggesting revisions to the 1935 act, it was argued that
the vagabond lifestyle was not consistent with a modern society and that it exposed
humans and animals to suffering that was ‘a disgrace to society’. ‘Even though
vagabonds can show sympathy for their animals, it does not do much good if they
do not have a stable to place their horse in during a storm’, it was reasoned (Law
Committee, 1948, p. 13). Further, the proposition suggested that only veterinarians
should have the authority to euthanize animals and treat sick animals. Thus,
veterinary jurisdiction was deemed necessary in order to improve surveillance so as
to avoid that contagious diseases in livestock were overlooked and escaped the public
gaze (Law Committee, 1948, p. 5). Hence, again, as with the laboratory experiments
in the 1902 act, good care was linked to specific groups of people, that is experts with
medical training. The Norwegian Veterinary Association pointed to the challenge of
controlling animals (and humans) that were not located at designated places. The
result was that the 1951 revisions of the Animal Protection Act banned vagabonds
(omstreifere) from keeping animals, specified as horses, oxen and dogs.
The revisions to the 1935 act thus acted as a moral technology that normalized
some forms of human-animal relations and excluded or made other forms of
relations deviant or inhumane. The good treatment of animals became conditioned
on the exclusion of certain groups of people and of certain ways of living. Proper
practice was to have animals tied to designated locales and sites, that is sites where
animals were part of what was deemed a proper living space. These spaces were to
provide more than simply food and shelter. They took part in enacting a modern
and rational society in which the good treatment of animals was to be combined
with the domestication of animals designated for the realization of human ends and
goods, such as food.
The environment sensitive animal: Caring for the animal’s

biology
In 1974 a new Animal Protection Act came into force. The main section of the
new law, section 3, states that ‘animals should be treated well and consideration
must be taken to the animal’s instincts and natural needs, so that it will not be exposed
to unnecessary suffering’ (Animal Protection Act, 1974, emphasis added). The first
part, that ‘animals should be treated well’, was identical to the formulation in the
main section of the 1935 act. But the second part of the section, which states that
‘consideration must be taken to the animal’s instincts and natural needs’, added
something new, as it quite specifically aimed at accounting for the animals’ biology.
This was based on ethological knowledge concerned with the scientific study of
animal behaviour (originally the study of animals in their natural environments),
but also a wider public criticism, including expert critique, of food-producing
practices.
The law committee responsible for developing the new draft act worked from
a range of different sources ranging from scientific publications to publications by
animal protection organizations concerned with how the new production systems
placed unreasonable demands on animal biology. Veterinary experts were part of
the critical public, as many veterinarians were members of animal protection
organizations and worked to mediate between animal protection concerns and
concerns of the industry (Asdal and Druglitrø, 2014).
While the 1935 act had identified the starving of animals and lack of proper
shelter as the main challenges to animal protection, a series of other and new key
challenges were now being identified: problems of ‘over-feeding, efficiency, stricter
hygiene and a suppression of animal instincts’ (Law Committee, 1968, p. 30). The
proposition stated that the livestock industry had ‘developed in a manner that the
legislators could not even have imagined’, and that demands for rationalization had
led to ‘production systems that from an animal protection point of view put
unreasonable strain on the life functions of animals’. Examples that were cited
included ‘the “factory production” of eggs and chickens (broilers) and of pigs’ (Law
Committee, 1968, p. 28).
Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines, which was published in 1964 and
translated into Norwegian in 1965, was particularly influential in conceptualizing
ethical concerns linked to the new production systems, as the formulations of the
act demonstrated. The book had been translated into Norwegian by veterinarian
Inger-Johanne Jebsen Haave and was widely discussed and reviewed in Norwegian
newspapers and animal advocacy bulletins (see Dyrenes Venn, 1966). In Animal
Machines, Harrison based her arguments on ethological knowledge in order to
explain how animal life unfolded, or failed to unfold, in different production
systems. Haave was herself engaged in promoting ethological approaches in the
handling of animals at the new production sites. She was particularly concerned
with what she judged to be serious animal welfare challenges in the broiler
industry and the use of battery cages. The battery cage involved rows and columns
of identical cages for keeping egg-laying hens, and exemplified a fundamentally
new way of housing animals for food production. A particular aspect of the battery
cage was how it placed more demand on the animals in terms of performance, and
according to Haave overlooked the biological and psychological needs of animals.
Drawing upon the work of ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Nico Tindbergen,
Haave argued for the importance of paying attention to the relationship between
senses and action and the role of the environment in stimulating animal instincts.
For Haave, the environment in which animals lived had not only physical effects
on animal biology but also psychological ones, and these were interlinked: when
animals acted, Haave wrote, it was the result of stimulations from how they sensed
their environment. This meant that the absence of for instance the possibilities for
movement could lead to a degenerated animal, not only because of the physical
limitations to movement, but also because of the psychological limitations for
sensing. A degenerated animal was a bad animal. It was thus important to
understand animals on their own terms. To ensure the ‘well-being’ (velvære) of
animals, animal instincts had to be stimulated (Haave, 1966a, p. 14).
Further, Haave (1966b, p. 12) pointed out how the new production systems
failed, not only because they were detrimental to animal biology, but also because
factory farming ‘undermined the traditional form of agriculture and animal
husbandry in Norway’. Factory farming presented a ‘cultural break’ with traditional
husbandry as it distanced humans from animals in a way that led to a mechanical
relationship, that is a desensitization of humans and a degradation of animals
(Haave, 1974, p. 10). Animals were of their environments, so that attention had to
be directed at observing and understanding animal sensation and action to adjust
the ‘world we are building for them’. For Haave (1974, p. 10), mobilizing ethology
in the context of industrial farming involved taking the point of view of the animal.
Bad versus good animals

While Haave was concerned with the living conditions of animals in food
production and with how the new production systems ignored the biological needs
of animals and hence produced bad animals, biomedical science argued for how
new technologies for animal production could produce good animals. In laboratory
animal science, which was formed as a veterinary discipline supporting human
medicine in the early 1960s, housing arrangements and skilled care practices were
regarded as crucial in order to meet the new demands for quality animals in
science. In a somewhat different way than Haave, laboratory animal science focused
on how ethology could provide a practical framework for managing and caring for
animals in ways that ensured healthy, working animals. Proper housing
arrangements, such as the adjustment of room temperatures, lighting, sound
adjustments and feed, were deemed necessary to ensure the health of the animal
(Erichsen, 1964, p. 55). However, rather than taking the animal’s point of view as
the basic point of departure, as Haave’s version of ethology suggested, laboratory
animal science were concerned with constructing animals that could fit the new
production systems. In this context, health was to a large extent defined in terms
of the lack of disease (Druglitrø, 2012). 3 Hence, both Haave and the scientists
engaged in the development of laboratory animal science called for a reinforced
attention to animal bodies, and how their health and performance were affected by
novel production systems. The crucial difference however, was that ethology as
presented by Haave was to take the animal as a point of departure for developing
improved practices and structures, whereas laboratory animal science was also
concerned with configuring animal bodies in a way that optimized them as tools
for human health.
The 1974 act introduced a range of restrictions and bans based on ethological
knowledge. Section 5 on ‘breeding’, for instance, states that the biology (or
hereditary qualities) of animals should not be altered if it made the animal unfit to
express ‘normal behaviour’ or if the changes provoked ‘common ethical reactions’.
Interestingly, then, the law as a moral technology was a relational affair; the law
made the ethical concerns of the public integral to how it was to operate and judge.
This relates interestingly to the 1902 act that had public decency, hence the
sensibility of humans, as one of its core concerns when caring for the animal. At
the same time, ethological knowledge about the relationship between animal
instincts and natural needs – that is the animal as a biological being – was mobilized
as the basis for what was deemed illegal acts against animals.
The adaptive animal: Domestication as the history of improved

animal performance
While the new law banned specified practices on ethological and ethical grounds,
in the very same section (sect. 13) it allowed for battery cages and other forms of
industrial production, such as the continuation of the fur-farming industry. As the
extreme versions of factory farming (as described in the literature and by animal
protection groups and by some veterinarians) were not found in Norway, the Law
Committee (1968, p. 32) regarded the literature mainly as a precaution regarding
‘the dangers following from uncritically implementing housing structures that
were solely motivated by economical values’. ‘Pure’ economic values were thus
established in opposition to animal well-being and care. Hence, producing surplus
from life (see Lazzarato, 2002; Cooper, 2008) was deemed immoral if surplus was
the only and sole motive.
But how in practice to solve the ethical problem of employing animals for
human purposes in a domesticated context, if animals were simultaneously seen to
have natural needs? Interestingly, ethology itself was employed as a means to solve
this problem, by pointing out the evolutionary adaptability and flexibility of
animals. In Haave’s (1966b, p. 9) estimation, animals were ‘plastic’ and had the
‘ability to gradually adjust to conditions’. In similar ways, the Law Committee
(1968, p. 30) stated that ‘the animal’s performance is significantly higher today than
previously’.
While drafting the act, the committee explicitly discussed how production
systems could be regarded as a natural development in the human use of animals
and how animals had biologically adapted to new contexts. It was claimed, then,
that animals living with humans in a domesticated context were different from their
predecessors. This was only natural as animals were driven by instincts and
behaviour that were inherited and appropriated over generations and that in this
respect were integral to the environments in which they lived. The performance
of animals became the result of the mutual history of humans and animals through
activities of breeding and husbandry. In conclusion, then, the production systems
were not necessarily that unnatural after all. Hence, in this way the history of
evolution became in itself a form of moral technology that took part in
naturalizing the employment of animals, and in new environments. Demanding
more from animals was therefore not necessarily an ethical problem, but a result of
a long and natural history of evolution and domestication.
The committee also pointed to the uncertainty linked to actually knowing how
the new production systems affected animal biology. There was only limited
knowledge about animal psychology and the degrees to which individual animals
needed free activity and unrestrained expression of instincts in different practices.
The Law Committee therefore concluded that:
as long as we do not know how the deprivation of freedom affects the

animal, the Ministry believes that the task of the Animal Protection Act is to
make sure that the animals live their lives in line with their natural needs, as
far as it is practically and economically possible.
(Ministry of Agriculture, 1974, p. 7)
The uncertainty of the individual animal’s experience of their situation thus

allowed production sites or machines such as the battery cage, the fur-farming
industry and animal experimentation to continue to be a legal activity. Rather than
restricting these practices, the new act focused on proper housing arrangements
and the skills of the care personnel. It also drew veterinary expertise closer to the
management of animal well-being and the stimulation of economic productivity.
By employing a notion of ‘care’ (referring to the control and maintenance of
animals and animal living space), the law acted as a moral technology that was to
ensure animal well-being by more indirectly acting upon human bodies, animal
bodies and their shared domesticated environments.
Moreover, in using the binary couples of necessary suffering versus unnecessary
suffering, where the former was deemed legal and the latter illegal, the law sought
to handle in a functional way (see Wolfe, 2013) what was in reality, it was argued,
‘incommensurable values’ (Gjesdal, 1985, p. 239). The veterinarian Finn Gjesdal
(1985, p. 239), who was the head of the Law Committee, identified these values as
‘emotional, ethical, moral and religious on one side, and economic and instru-
mental values, that is profit, [on the other]’. To in practice enable the balancing act
between these in principle incommensurable values, it was important, it was
argued, to decide upon quite specified directives which simultaneously handed the
responsibility over to the relevant ministries in question (Gjesdal, 1985, p. 237).
Hence, this speaks to how the law, very concretely, is a means for managing justice
in a functional way (see discussion in Wolfe, 2013, p. 81). In the 1974 act, this
implied a de-centring of the concrete valuation work that was to be done, as the
task was delegated to experts and committees in closer involvement with the
relevant animal practice
The responsibility for all issues concerning animal experimentation was placed
under the administration of the Veterinary Directorate at the Ministry of
Agriculture. Animal experimentation was to be managed by way of a separate
directive, the Directive on Biological Experiments on Animals (Ministry of
Agriculture, 1977), in addition to the sixth chapter of the law, composed of three
sections that together regulated the use of animals in experiments for education
and science. 4 The directive was drafted by veterinarians and medical researchers
who were already involved in laboratory animal science and experimental
medicine. The Law Committee (1968, p. 46) regarded the issue of control and
inspection of animal experimentation as being outside of their competence and
expertise, hence the delegation to other experts.
Internal guidelines to establish good standards for laboratory animal housing
and care had been under development in the science community since the early
1950s. Standard guidelines for production, management, care and use were
considered crucial to the progress of medicine and for the further expansion of the
laboratory animal industry. Guidelines, the scientists argued, would take part in
ensuring a required level of quality as well as take part in harmonizing laboratory
practices. Vaccine production, such as the work on the polio vaccine, had proved
to be dependent on the exchange of knowledge, animals, kidneys and serum across
laboratories located in different regions as well as nations. These structural changes
were the results of the rise in the use of animals in public health medicine and
toxicological testing of industrial products in the 1960s, which had by far become
the biggest consumers of laboratory animals in Norway.
The National Institute of Public Health, administered by the Directorate of
Health and the Ministry of Social Affairs, claimed that the new practices, in which
laboratory animals were included on a systematic basis, meant that there was a need
to reformulate what animal experimentation was. First of all, previous legislation
had specified surgical interventions in the animal. However, as the Institute pointed
out, most experiments did not take the form of surgical interventions, but involved
injections of vaccines, or the draining of blood for serum production – practices
that were at the core of public health work. The procedures could inflict ‘transient
pain’ or discomfort for the animals, however: ‘A range of experiments are
conducted in a manner that gives reason to strongly doubt if they are “painful”
even though they affect the animal seriously, yes even in some cases entail that the
animal loses its life’ (Ministry of Agriculture, 1974, p. 18).
According to the scientists, then, a redefinition of what was to count as painful
experiments was important if one was to be able to meet the requirements to
produce vaccines and medicines. As such, the ‘old’ management of painful
experiments was not commensurable with the demands from the public health
authorities and the organization of science, the latter which now depended upon
routine work performed by a team of professionals. A license to inflict pain on
animals had to be institutional rather than personal. The demand was taken up and
made integral to the new law (Ministry of Agriculture, 1974, p. 18).
Simultaneously, the Law Committee (1968, p. 47) recognized ‘the not
insignificant disquiet that has existed in regard to vivisection’ and assumed that
this was linked to ‘the obscurity that has surrounded the treatment of these cases’.
Thus, central to the Directive on Biological Experiments on Animals (Ministry of
Agriculture, 1977) was the establishment of a committee composed of persons
who represented the main identified actors who would, it was argued, provide the
necessary transparency on decisions concerning necessary versus unnecessary
suffering, as well as necessary and unnecessary ends. It was decisive, the Law
Committee wrote, ‘to reach a well-balanced practice’ in granting consent to
perform painful experiments on animals. It would however be ‘at least just as
important to establish a powerful control system’. This was in part to investigate
the conditions of the (experimental) site before a decision was made and in part
to follow up the licenses that were granted the institutions (Law Committee,
1968, p. 47).
Animals as part of the biopolitical collective: ‘Caring for’ and

‘burdening with’
As Gunther Teubner (2006, p. 515) argues, granting nonhuman animals access to
justice means opening up ‘the legal process for entirely new interests’. He points to
how law has indeed enabled animals to take part in the biopolitical collective, if
only in indirect and highly fragmented ways (Teubner, 2006, p. 515).
This chapter has added to this argument, by demonstrating how the law has
acted, we argue, as a moral technology that has extended, limited and indeed
worked upon the biopolitical collective. Law is indeed a key technology for the
making up of our collective. Hence, as we alluded to already at the beginning of
this chapter, another strategy than seeking an abstract and philosophically
legitimate position vis-à-vis the animal condition is to turn to how law has indeed
experimented and struggled with these questions in practice, and how it has
worked as a moral technology and performed valuation work and initiated such
work in others.
One way of telling the overall story, and in a linear way, is to underline how
there has been a movement from the ‘mere’ protection of animals to increasingly
granting them rights. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food (2009, p.
7), the main objective of the Animal Welfare Act from 2009 is ‘to emphasize the
status and rights of animals’. It is stated that a core premise of the law is ‘the
recognition that animals have a value in themselves in addition to the use value
they have for humans’. Moreover, the Animal Welfare Act is described as a ‘modern
law’ that protects animals on the basis of ‘professional knowledge and the animals’
interests’ (Ministry of Agriculture and Food, 2009, p. 7). In this way animals have
been transformed into if not full-fledged persona or subjects of law, so at least
beings with interests and inherent value. But paradoxically, at the same time,
demands on animal performance have increased dramatically. Hence, the inclusion
of animals in the biopolitical collective has involved protection, care and rights, but
has also increasingly come to imply – as Teubner (2006, p. 515) puts it – the
‘burdening of animals with duties’. This crucially involves duties to serve human
ends well.
We have argued that law, then, is an art of government and a moral technology
that works upon, differentiates and modifies the biopolitical collective. As we have
shown, in doing this, law works by enforcements, by including and expelling both
humans and nonhumans. But it crucially also works by indirect means – by acting,
for instance, upon the moral capacity, the sense of responsibility and judgement of
humans who become intensely involved in handling the collective in concrete
situations and at distinct places. This is what we have called valuation work. As we
have shown, different and indeed shifting forms of science take part in these
operations and become intimately linked up with the managing of tensions
between ‘caring for’ and ‘burdening with’. Law is indeed a key technology for the
making up of our collective. What our empirical work suggests is that there is no
before or after the law, but rather a co-modifying of law and other moral acts.
Notes
1 See European Commission (2012). See also Lundmark, et al. (2014). For the American
case, see Wolfe (2013).
2 This and all following translations from Norwegian are by the authors.
3 See also Kirk (2014) for the British history of the stressed animal.
4 These sections concerned the use of animals in education (sect. 20), the use of animals
in laboratory animal science (sect. 21) and the license to perform animal experimen-
tation (sect. 22). The directive from 1977 addressed experimentation on live animals,
such as mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and decapods.
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5
PASTORALE
Sheep traffic in modern trauma surgery
Martina Schlünder
In the evening of 26 April 2008, shortly before 9 p.m., a group of sheep grazing
on a pasture near the German city of Fulda escaped from their fold and entered
the nearby Landrücken Tunnel – the longest tunnel of the high-speed railroad line
between north and south Germany. After ten minutes, a high-speed train crashed
into the flock, touched the wall of the tunnel and derailed. Twenty-one of the 148
passengers were severely injured, most of them suffering bone fractures, 77 sheep
died, the tunnel was blocked for three weeks and the material damage amounted
to ten million euros.
I was affected by this accident in various ways. Returning from a research trip
in the Swiss mountains, I couldn’t go back home to Berlin as initially planned since
the accident interrupted the main train connection between south and north
Germany. While returning by a detour, I had time to study the press and learn
more about the public speculation on the displaced sheep: how did the flock get
into the tunnel? How was it possible that some sheep bodies could be able to derail
a high-speed train? In contrast to France and Japan, the German high-speed tracks
are not fenced in, so a discussion began concerning whether technology (in the
form of train tracks) or nature (in the form of sheep) should be fenced in.
One reason why I was so interested in these gruesome sheepish events was that
my research in Switzerland focused on sheep. In my project about the history of
knowledge and technology transfer between humans and animals, and between
human and veterinary medicine in the field of trauma surgery, I came across a
unique sheep stable, situated in the beautiful mountains near Davos. Here, sheep
move between the Alps and the summer pastures, and from the farmer’s barns to a
stable where they are used as lab animals for experimental surgery. Here, sheep trip
over human technology, but in a completely different way, even if in the end the
sheep pay with their lives for these encounters. Sheep bones are used for testing
implants (like metal plates, screws or nails) in trauma surgery, implants that are used
86 Martina Schlünder
for injured people when they break their bones in a traffic accident, like those of
the derailed train. Obviously, the movements of sheep are not without risks, neither
for the sheep nor for the objects and the people they encounter en route.
In the following text I explore the movements of sheep and humans in the fields
of biomedicine and agriculture as part of my study about the coming-into-being
of sheep as laboratory animals in the field of orthopaedic surgery in the 1960s. I
argue that by bringing sheep into the labs and operating rooms of orthopaedic
surgery, two closely related but distinct versions of sheep emerged. I name them by
the products or the very matter they deliver: meat and wool sheep in the livestock
economy, and bone sheep in the knowledge economy. At the same time the sheep
versions – what Annemarie Mol would call a ‘sheep multiple’ (Mol, 2002) – are
closely connected and maintain complex relations with each other. What had to
be known about sheep to make them walk from pastures to labs, and what had to
be done to displace them securely? Making sheep multiple was also a result of
complex biopolitical reconfigurations – what Blue and Rock (2011) name ‘trans-
biopolitics’ – that affected several species and not only sheep and humans. Sheep
emerged at the same time in the labs of orthopaedic surgery when dogs, as the
established experimental animal, disappeared from them. At the same time when
sheep migrated from the pastures to the labs, dogs transformed from lab animals to
pets. Cats and dogs became potential patients that benefitted from the experimental
work of sheep (Schlünder and Schlich, 2009).
The core assumption of the historical actors behind this trajectory of sheep
from livestock to lab animal was that sheep and humans are completely familiar
with each other, that ‘we’ know everything about ‘them’. Indeed, sheep are among
the oldest domesticated animals (Clutton-Brock, 1999, pp. 69–75). For thousands
of years we have known them as livestock and flock animals, with their meat and
milk feeding us and their wool warming us. The Christian tradition makes us look
at them as sacrificial animals, with the ‘lamb of God’ as the symbol for the self-
sacrifice death of Christ and the ‘good shepherd’ as a figure and metaphor for care
and surveillance (Foucault, 1981, 2007; Franklin, 2001). The impressive corpus of
literature on sheep farming (Issler, 1991; Jacobeit, 1987; Thomas, 1965),
transhumance (Ryder, 1983) and animal husbandry (Trow-Smith, 1959) might also
have fuelled the surgeons’ assumptions that everything was known about sheep and
that there was neither a risk nor any preparations needed to transform them into
experimental animals. The flock of sheep in the train tunnel was surprised by
modern technology and catastrophically met this technology without preparation.
As a result of the traffic accident, a stricter separation of nature from technology
was discussed. Conversely, however, biomedical researchers considered how to
bring nature and technology together as closely as possible so that living beings
could incorporate technological artefacts like metal screws, plates, rods and clamps
into their bones in case of accidents. But, as we will see, sheep surprised the
surgeons in many ways, and it would take years in order to match sheep with
biomedical technology.
Sheep traffic in modern trauma surgery 87
The ‘traffic of thinking’

I look at the hustle and bustle between men, sheep and technology through the
lens of Ludwik Fleck’s (1935) concept of the ‘traffic of thinking’ in order to follow
their intricate and intertwined trajectories. The term is how I translate the German
neologism Denkverkehr, for even though it is one of the most important concepts
in Fleck’s book Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (Fleck,
1935), it was never translated into English and thus does not appear in the
American translation, titled Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Fleck, 1979).
This translation, by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Fred Bradley, is quite problematic since
it reads most of Fleck’s neologisms as bad or ‘idiosyncratic’ German (Trenn, 1979,
p. xv). In an apologetic mode, the translators paraphrased and weakened Fleck’s
concepts, especially the composite terms he created around the term ‘thinking’, and
thus totally missed their impact as heuristic tools (Schlünder, 2014). The translation
also does not capture Fleck’s procedural and practice-oriented approach: denken in
German means ‘thinking’, a verb describing an actual practice, but the translators
opted instead for the noun ‘thought’, which highlights ideas and concepts alone
and does not include the materiality of thinking (Jarnicki, 2014). Fleck’s book was
written in the early 1930s as a vivid and witty polemic against positions of logical
empiricism represented by members of the Vienna Circle and also by Polish schools
of philosophy. One of his main targets was their concept of ‘thinking’. With his
neologisms and composite terms Fleck attacked thinking as an abstract, individu-
alized and internal activity, as the most idealized form of reason and rationality in
Western philosophy. Through new terms like Denkkollektiv (‘thinking collectives’),
thinking is extended from a single mind to a shared practice of a community, and
in Denkverkehr it is connected with most modern daily routines and with
infrastructures of communication.
Fleck’s neologisms are provocations and arms in a battle against the traditional
understanding of thinking, which then becomes quite a different epistemic
concept (Schlünder, 2014): it is ‘collectivized’ and mobilized so that it transforms
from an internal to an interstitial process, and it is also pushed beyond the human
realm. The traffic of thinking in Fleck’s case study on the history of the
Wassermann test comprises not only ideas and concepts but also practices and
materials. These materials included instruments and lab devices like microscopes
and Petri dishes, substances like sera, and also animals like monkeys, rabbits and
guinea pigs. The way in which these things are related to each other, how they are
arranged, practised, done and enacted are ruled by what Fleck (1935) calls a ‘style
of thinking’ (Denkstil), and together they form a ‘thinking collective’.
Fleck’s notions of the ‘traffic of thinking’ and ‘thinking collectives’ do not only
re-conceptualize thinking as an epistemic category. They also allow me to rethink
the problematic position of animals in scientific research. Similar to Donna
Haraway, who once characterized lab animals as ‘significantly unfree partners’ and
co-workers that should always stay inside a ‘shared semiotic materiality’ (Haraway,
2008, p. 72), Fleck’s concepts enable an understanding of experimental animals not
as outsiders of research relations, nor as mere objects and victims which can be
sacrificed or pardoned. As members of a ‘thinking collective’, they become episte-
mological colleagues and co-thinkers of the human researchers. This is not to be
misunderstood as an anthropomorphic gesture (Daston and Mitman, 2005). Fleck
does not conceptualize ‘thinking collectives’ as merely additive; rather, they practise
a special form of collective work akin to that of an orchestra or a football team
(Fleck, 1979, p. 99). The traditional subject-object relations inside thinking
collectives are dissolved: ‘For cognition … is an active, live interrelationship, a reshaping
and being reshaped, in short, an act of creation. Neither the “subject” nor the “object”
receive a reality of their own: all existence is based upon interaction and is relative’
(Fleck, 1929, p. 49, emphasis in original). Written some 75 years ago, Fleck’s
relational and performative approach still resonates with contemporary scholarship
in feminist science studies, material semiotics and actor-network theory when he
discusses conflicting, multiple realities, the distribution of agency in ‘thinking
collectives’, and the impact of laymen (‘exoteric circles’) on fact and knowledge
production (Law, 2009; Law and Mol, 1995). Indeed, Latour (2008, p. 93) called
Fleck’s work radical and still far ahead of our time.
My text follows the (thinking) paths of researchers, surgeons and sheep in the
Swiss Alps from the 1960s onwards in order to investigate how a new ‘thinking
collective’ emerged in the field of trauma surgery. I explore how traditional
collectives of sheep (flocks) were incorporated in a new collective and how they
became part of a traffic of thinking about fracture care and broken bones by being
enacted as bone sheep. I am especially interested in the shared roots of agricultural
knowledge and biomedical infrastructures and how this new collective was built
both by spatial arrangements and by a rearrangement of epistemic and emotional
intra- and inter-species relations (Schlünder, 2012). What tensions arose in the
‘thinking collective’? How was the traffic inside the collective regulated? What
jams and accidents happened en route? The chapter is organized into five short
stories. They will lead us to the remote places and academic peripheries where
bone sheep emerged, tell us why and how the surgeons switched their animal
model on grounds of strong emotional attachments to dogs, and will introduce the
new surgical culture which had to be invented to connect sheep to experimental
practice. The last two stories discuss the complex relations between the two
versions of sheep – meat sheep and bone sheep – not only their entanglements, but
also how they are made distinct by practices of de-flocking and individualizing. In
the conclusion I will reflect on the possibilities of cultivating ‘the open’ (Haraway,
2008) as a space of new and surprising encounters between epistemological
colleagues, that is between animals and human researchers.
Up to the magic mountains: The AO Foundation and the

Laboratory for Experimental Surgery at Davos
In 1958 Martin Allgöwer, director of the surgical hospital at Chur in the Swiss
canton of Grisons, co-founded the AO Foundation, a group of 13 Swiss
orthopaedic surgeons (Schlich, 2002, pp. 41–2). AO stands for Arbeitsgemeinschaft

für Osteosynthesefragen, that is the Association for the Study of Internal Fixation
(ASIF). Osteosynthesis is the operation of joining the broken fragments of a bone
by a surgical intervention. In the case of the AO, the method meant bridging the
bone fragments with plates that were applied to the individual fragments with
screws.
At that time, most patients with fractured bones were not treated surgically but
rather through means like immobilization (bed rest for weeks or even months),
plaster casts and skeleton traction. Operative fracture care was considered too
dangerous since it increased the risk of bone infection, a severe complication that
could end with the amputation of the limb involved. But conservative, non-
operative fracture treatment had its disadvantages too: older patients often died
from the side effects of protracted immobilization. For younger patients it was
often difficult to return to everyday life where the likelihood of disability was very
high as a consequence of a failed process of bone healing leading to so called
pseudarthrosis, that is an artificial joint caused by a wrong and insufficient ossifi-
cation of a fracture. It was mostly younger patients who filled the wards at the
hospital in Chur and similar places in the rural peripheries of the Swiss Alps. This
was mainly due to the increasing numbers of ski tourists and a corresponding rise
in the number of accidents and bone fractures. Thus, local surgeons in rural areas
had to look elsewhere to find better treatments for their patients, and it was in this
context that the AO was founded with the aim of systematically developing a set
of standardized instruments and implants to be employed in the field of operative
fracture care. As a group of surgeons who were mainly engaged in health care
outside the realm of academic surgery, they had to organize a research
infrastructure of their own in order to provide scientific explanations for this new
treatment.
Later on in 1958, Allgöwer travelled to nearby Davos, also in Grisons, to search
for laboratory space for the AO. He inspected a stately villa in the city centre, once
part of the flourishing lung sanatorium culture which Thomas Mann (1924)
eternalized in his novel The Magic Mountain. With financial support from the
canton authorities, who wished to revitalize the remnants of the tuberculosis
treatment, the AO was able to rent the facility and reopened it in 1959. Thus, the
so-called AO Laboratory for Experimental Surgery was housed in a remnant of a
past medical culture and not connected to any clinical or academic department or
hospital. It was here that bone sheep began to emerge as standard lab animals in the
field of orthopaedic surgery.
Proximity and distance: Emotional epistemology

At the beginning of their research, AO members tried to establish a new concept
of bone healing. Their experiments, mainly histological in nature, were carried out
on dogs. In 1967 the lab in Davos was reorganized and renamed as the AO
Research Institute (ARI). Osteosynthesis meanwhile was an established standard of
fracture care, and the founders of the AO were appointed professors in Zurich and
Basel. One research group remained in Davos focusing on biomechanical aspects
of fracture care, with the aim of developing new measuring devices, fixation
concepts and implants.
The new head of the ARI planned a large number of test series on
biomechanical problems and wanted to start with long-term measurements of
compression in fractures. He looked for appropriate experimental animals since he
was determined not to continue with dogs, mostly for emotional reasons. A
passionate dog owner, he deemed mass tests on dogs to be ‘sheer lunacy’ (interview,
Perren). 1 Moreover, the breeding and maintaining of dogs as lab animals was quite
demanding and complicated. He sought animals that would be cost effective to
keep and easy to handle and care for. To fit in the biomechanical framework and
produce valuable results, these animals should be mobile after the surgical
interventions in order to test the material under load effectively, and they should
also – again from a biomechanical perspective – resemble humans in bone size and
weight. Thus, to go back to the typical lab rodents (rabbits, mice, rats, guinea pigs)
was no solution either (Rader, 2004).
Sheep were selected for their new task as experimental animals since they met
almost all of the criteria. Even if sheep were easier to obtain than dogs, shifting the
animal model for bone healing from dog to sheep entailed certain epistemological
risks. It was not easy to determine whether bone healing was the same in every
species or whether the results could be seen as valid for all mammals. As sheep are
ruminants and herbivorous animals, their bone metabolism differs a great deal from
that of humans. Dogs were closer to humans not only on a biological (histological)
level, but also emotionally. But this closeness was the main reason for choosing
sheep instead of dogs. Sheep, however, were understood as remote from humans.
Their relationship could be characterized in terms of mutual emotional disinterest:
‘Sheep are not so interested in humans, for them the most important thing is their
flock’, I was told by one caretaker (interview, Lanker). In sharp contrast to dogs,
sheep do not pay much attention to humans:
Sheep don’t try to gain the attention of humans when they are in pain. They
don’t whine, which would make humans compassionate and say to
themselves: ‘Oh, my poor animal.’ … Maybe it’s a bit cowardly, but it’s defini-
tively an advantage that sheep are not emotionally close to humans.
(Interview, Lanker)
But even this kind of distance doesn’t seem to be impregnable. Some sheep are
different. They start to become interested in humans. They follow them and
even seem to recognize them. And if they get a name, such as Tutsch, Miriam or
Emma, one cannot use them for experiments (interview, Lanker): ‘They are
spoiled, and one has to let them go. We will use them as leaders to organize the
flock. They will grow old and die of old age, not from being used in projects or
for their meat’.
What does proximity and distance then mean? Obviously it is very difficult to
answer that question in an unequivocal way. Measuring relationships between
animals and humans by the scale of closeness and distance produces a host of
contradictions. Sheep may be closer to humans than dogs from a biomechanical
standpoint, but then again this is not true from a histological perspective. And the
emotional involvement? Despite their remoteness, some sheep get attached to
humans, and vice versa. Apparently, much boundary and relational work has to be
done to achieve the favourable distance (or closeness), and it seems as if this work
cannot be done just once but has to be repeated time and again. And how do these
practices intermingle with the epistemological work? Because of changing research
methods and for emotional reasons, bone dogs disappeared and were no longer
enacted as experimental animals. Rather, they appeared as new patients in
veterinary surgery, benefiting from the work of sheep as new members of a
‘thinking collective’ (Auer, et al., 2013; Schlünder and Schlich, 2009).
Wiring sheep: Bone sheep and their places

During his ascent to the Magic Mountain in Thomas Mann’s eponymous novel,
the protagonist Hans Castorp reflects about the potentialities of being or becoming
displaced. What will happen when somebody is removed from all present
relationships? Is it possible that this moment of liberty – being stripped of all
relations, becoming free of all commitments – enables someone to change radically,
to make a vagabond out of a pedant? Recalling the displaced sheep vagabonds in
the tunnel that paid with their lives for straying helps us to recognize that
displacing someone or being displaced is a risky business. How were bone sheep
materialized then? Were they carefully displaced from the farmer’s barn?
Since the AO laboratory was located in the town centre of Davos, it was not
possible to maintain sheep in large numbers near the institute. Lacking their own
pastures and pens, the AO researchers decided to borrow sheep from the breeders.
Moreover, the laboratory in the villa was not a functional site. Thus, the setting of
the measuring experiments had to be carefully planned and adjusted to the local
conditions. The tibias of sheep were cut and then fixed with AO compression
plates which included a strain gauge compartment. The wires of this measuring
device left the sheep’s body from their backs. These wires had to be connected to
a read-out device that was located far away from the sheep boxes, since the floor
plan of the villa did not allow a closer installation. Thus, the wires had to be
enormously extended: they went from the sheep boxes across the open courtyard
to another wing of the building and entered the library to finally reach the room
with the gauging station. Caring for wired sheep was a challenging task: the
measurements were taken continuously, anywhere from several weeks to four
months, and had to be carefully registered, and the sheep had to be observed and
fed, their boxes had to be cleaned, and the wires too had to be supervised and
controlled. Sheep surgery at that time was not an ordinary business. Even in
veterinary medicine almost no one had ever tried to operate on sheep. As livestock
(wool and meat sheep) it made no sense to carry out larger operations on them.
Usually, they were put down when they got sick. Besides, sheep are ruminants, and
their digestive tract differs considerably from humans. Without any experience in
narcotizing ruminants, it was difficult to judge the effect of drugs on their
metabolism. Thus, the whole culture of sheep surgery, operating tables, instruments
and tools had to be invented, modified and scaled for sheep (interview, Geret;
interview, Perren; for pictures see Hecker, 1974; Schlünder, et al., 2014).
New bonds emerged between sheep and humans through wires, their care and
the daily encounters.Yet after some months the sheep were killed, their bones were
recovered and the process of bone healing was examined in the histology
laboratory. ‘You bet that we knew each other very well! That was not easy to put
them down after all’, the operating nurse, who also took care of the sheep, told me
(interview, Geret). Practising on bone sheep made the surgeons realize that they did
not know much about them. Sheep surprised them in many ways, and they had to
adjust their operating techniques and invent new instruments in order to keep
them in the ‘thinking collective’. The lab in the villa in Davos turned out to be a
difficult place for experiments, but these spatial difficulties brought the sheep closer
to the researcher: not only spatially but also emotionally.
From the mid-1970s onwards, the AO technique became very successful and
spread across the Western world. Since sheep had begun to be used as test animals
for the prototypes of new devices, they had to be maintained in larger numbers.
First the AO started to lease parts of flocks which continued to live in the farmer’s
pens and were only brought into town when the testing period began. Then some
stables on the outskirts of Davos were rented. The AO hired a farmer to take care
of the lab animals. He suggested building a new animal house responding to
agricultural and biomedical demands. This was also necessary in order to meet all
legal requirements related to animal welfare that slowly co-evolved with the
expansion of animal experimentation in Switzerland (Asdal, 2008; Bönning, 1993;
Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, 1995). Since then the animal house has
regularly been renewed and expanded, and today it is completely controlled and
standardized in terms of ventilation, temperature, humidity, light intensity, box
dimensions and so forth.
Sheep traffic and transhumance in the Swiss Alps

Transhumance is the regular seasonal movement of flocks between summer and
winter pastures. The Alpine type of transhumance is vertically structured and
originated from the need to clear the lowlands for cultivation, especially for cutting
the grass that was used as food for the livestock in wintertime. In high summer the
flocks of sheep, goats and cattle graze pastures at altitudes over 2,000 metres and
stay there for three months with the shepherds and the people who take care of
the dairy. Whereas the pastures in the valley are often the farmers’ private property,
the Alpine pastures are owned by cooperatives or local communities. Most of them
still refer to the traditions of common lands (Allmende) and common use
(Gemeinatzung) that intermingle and coexist with modern, capitalist-based

agriculture (Jacobeit, 1987; Mathieu, 1992; Ryder, 1983, pp. 383–8 and 646–55;
Weiss, 1941).
Despite changes in the sheep supply of the AO in the last decades, bone sheep
were and still are deeply entangled with this traditional Swiss Alpine pastoralism.
Since maintaining sheep in the old villa was such a difficult business, sheep were
often brought back to their flocks after the surgery and a postoperative period of
rest. At a certain time after the surgery, the surgeons had to locate the sheep for the
follow-up check. In summer, this involved going higher and higher to find the
sheep grazing in their mountain pastures. At that time, sending bone sheep to the
mountains after a surgical intervention was considered part of the experiment since
the implants were designed to be tested under such extreme Alpine conditions
(interview, Perren; interview, Pohler).
Bone sheep and meat sheep are entangled in many ways as much as the ARI is
embroiled with the community of sheep breeders around Davos. The communal
county sheep dipping in preparation for the Alpfahrt – the way up to the summer
pasture – is co-organized by the ARI. Furthermore, the AO organizes the weekly
training of the herding dogs for all breeders in the valleys around Davos and
maintains a special flock of sheep to this end. This strategy of public sharing, of
involving the community in the activities of the research institute, corresponds
with a ‘politics of militant openness’ (interview, Lanker) in public arenas, where the
research institute informs the public about their daily work with the animals as well
as keeping in contact with committed animal rights activists. Everyone can and in
fact should know how the animals live, what happens to them and so forth. The
door to the research stable is always open; there are no fences or barriers
whatsoever.
In 2006 the AO had to change its funding system for its research institute. All
patents were sold to a producer of implants and instruments, who no longer pays
any royalties to the AO. As a consequence, the ARI has to look for clients interested
in research and implant testing in the field of orthopaedic surgery. It then became
necessary to obtain European certifications in animal care in order to be
competitive. These organizations are very much interested in standardization, so it
will be a challenge to convince them that it is possible to combine the highest
research standards with the local caretaking tradition. These organizations are not
used to the fact that research animals are moving around from a standardized
environment to a less controlled ‘natural’ habitat, so they have to be convinced that
‘these animals are very happy in the mountains and that it is the very place where
they need to be’ (interview, Boure; interview, Lanker) The new head of the vet
surgeons at the AO Research Institute is French and lived in Canada for ten years.
When he came to Davos a couple of years ago, he was ‘stunned’ by the Swiss
‘system’. He tried to convince the caretakers that it would be better to keep the
animals in the animal house and perhaps at the pastures around the institute, in
order to:
have a very close look to our animals. But these Swiss people are going crazy
for cutting grass, they are hay farmers. It’s the normal, traditional Swiss way
… I think it is really good for the animal. For me it is a little bit stressful, and
also for the people who are doing the research, because you put a lot of effort
and you invest a lot in an animal, and you watch to have results in three years,
and then suddenly the animal is somewhere in the mountain. And when we
speak with our collaborators, who are sponsors, we say, yes, our sheep are in
the mountains, and they go, ‘What? Where are they?’You know, it is all very
scary for them.
(Interview, Boure)
In 1995, the AO had already started to build research herds as a kind of standardized
flock. All the sheep are bred by a single farmer, who is at the same time the head
of the animal caretaker group of the AO. The sheep are all the same breed, and they
are all female since sexual hormones significantly affect bone metabolism and
calcification. The trajectory of bone sheep or sheep as experimental animals differs
from those of other lab animals. Even if something like a ‘research herd’ exists, the
degree of standardization is rather low compared to traditional experimental
animals like rodents. It is impossible to breed specific pathogen-free sheep despite
the effort that was made to develop such animals. Since sheep are ruminants,
essentially they need microorganisms in their digestive system in order to survive
(interview, Lanker). To be used in the projects, sheep have to give birth to lambs
two years in a row. The length of the project ranges from two months to three
years. When sheep are used in long-term studies, they are only separated from the
flock for the time of the surgical interventions, and afterwards they continue living
in groups. But they do not return to the original flock; rather, they live together
with their ‘project group’ and no longer go to the highest pastures, so that they are
easier to observe and control. This can be understood as a compromise between
the scientists’ requests for more standardization and the remaining habits of Swiss
pastoralism. Obviously, there is a growing tension between bone and meat sheep
and sometimes also between care and standardization (Druglitrø and Kirk, 2014).
Different forces are pulling and pushing at the connections and intersections
between the sheep versions. It is an open question as to how much and in what
way they will relate to each other in the future.
Feeding ‘scientific hunger’: De-flocking, caring and killing bone

sheep
In Fraser’s (1980, p. 178) book on farm animals, you can read that ‘sheep are usually
awake for 16 hours per day. They drowse for about four and a half hours, far less
than cattle. Slow Wave Sleep occupies three and a half hours, REM sleep occurs in
seven periods for a total of 43 minutes’. What is known about an animal depends
on the different practices which make it material it in different ways. Do bone
sheep dream differently? What else makes them distinct from meat and wool sheep?
Six weeks before a project starts, the sheep that will be involved in it are selected
on the farm. Normally, an average of 10–20 animals is needed. They have to be as
homogeneous as possible in age, sex and weight since the structure of their bones
depends on all of these factors. It takes a long time to select them. Then, the group
is taken to the animal house at the research institute. The following four-week
period is devoted to preparing the experiments. This time is mainly needed to
adapt the sheep to their life in the stable:
You have to break their herd instinct, you have to individualize them and put
them in single boxes. At the beginning of a project there is a lot of agitation
and hustle in the stable. Sheep are not accustomed to that kind of closeness
to humans. So you start making them familiar with yourself. Every day you
have to go to every single sheep, feed it with some special candies.
(Interview, Lanker)
The most important practice to enact bone-sheep is to individualize them, to de-

flock the sheep, that is to create singular, individually measurable and observable
animals. It is interesting that it is impossible to describe the result of this process in
correct English, since ‘sheep’ is a mass noun, an uncountable noun (Krifka, 1991;
Nicolas, 2008). These nouns treat any quantity of a certain substance – be it water,
sand, money, fish or sheep – as an undifferentiated unit. Correspondingly there is
no term like ‘sheeps’ because mass nouns cannot produce singular and plural forms.
Since sheep usually live in flocks the term ‘sheep’ is mostly understood as plural, or
it contains the possibility of being plural or multiple (Law and Mol, 2008). For
thousands of years flock sheep have been counted in a different, relational, non-
individualizing way (Barry 1969; Ryder 1983, 670–71). De-flocking techniques
make sheep countable, they transform sheep into another mode of existence, into
another system and practice of being individualized and counted. Not in the realm
of linguistics but in the reality of a research stable sheep become singular/plural,
they turn into sheep/s.
During this process, sheep are counted and marked with different numbers. The
AO project number is stamped in red numerals on the sheepskin. An external
veterinarian comes along every week without announcing the visits in order to
check if the sheep are fit. Blood and stool examinations have to be done. After an
experiment – in the case of the AO sheep this always means surgery, cutting bones
and bringing in some implant or material in order to test it – the sheep are
returned to the animal house. During the first 24 hours after surgery they are
closely monitored. The animal caretakers even organize a night shift to look after
them. They are treated with analgesics and netted in a suspension system. The
sheep can rest and sleep while hanging in the net and avoid putting weight on their
operated limbs. The suspension system reduces pain and avoids re-fractures of the
limbs.
It sounds strange, but killing sheep is part of the caring. Sheep are treated like
patients after the surgery. But of course they are special patients:
Well, perhaps I’m excusing myself and my morals, but I say to myself that all
these animals are meat for the shambles sooner or later, and now as we have
enough food for everybody here in the Western part of the world, there is
this kind of scientific hunger, and I say to myself, okay, now we have to
sacrifice some animals in order to satisfy the scientific hunger.
(Interview, Lanker)
As the research of the AO relies on biomechanical testing and tissue cultures, all
sheep have to be killed after the process of bone healing is finished. There is no
other option to get the precious ‘matter’. Sometimes sheep are killed during
surgery so that they do not wake up, sometimes they have to be killed in the stable:
I think this kind of work shouldn’t be done by somebody who is doing it

from time to time … Every time you prepare the injection, you have to ask
yourself, what am I doing here, you are taking a life.You have to witness the
moment, that’s very important, not to treat the animal as an object, as a thing.
And then after it is done you have to stay with the animal and to look for it,
if it is really dead … And then teaching my colleagues, I tell them, everything
that you are doing with the animals you have to do in the same way you
would have liked to be treated too. When I saw how they brought Saddam
Hussein to the gallows, I must say … if I were in this situation, I wish that
everything would be done as quickly as possible. It’s the same with the
animals, somebody has to go in with all his experience, has to know what he
is doing and tack …
(Interview, Lanker)
Thus, caring in many different versions is practised in the ‘thinking collective’ and
is extended between life and death (Asdal, 2014; Holmberg, 2011; Law, 2010; Mol,
et al., 2010) It is interesting to look to another emotional paradox that is involved
in the emergence of the collective. Sheep were selected as lab animals in order to
replace dogs, since the relation of sheep to humans relies on a (supposed) mutual
emotional disinterest. But the closer emotional relation of sheep to each other –
their herd or flocking instinct – has to be dissolved to be able to perform the
experiments in an epistemologically and ethically correct way. Replacing these
intra-species relations with inter-species relations always takes the longest time span
in the experimental procedure. An objective assessment of the lab animals’ well-
being during an experiment becomes possible only by getting to know them
individually. Here we are confronted with another tension, a tension between
ethics and emotions.
Conclusion: Into the open

Whereas some of us are used to digesting sheep as roast mutton, it might be news
to us that sheep can be incorporated in our bodies in quite a different way. In this
chapter I explored how sheep became part of a ‘thinking collective’ in trauma

surgery. Bone sheep emerged at a time when bone dogs seemed to be increasingly
‘undoable’ as research subjects for emotional and societal reasons. Sheep seemed to
present a perfect solution – not only out of the long-standing familiarity between
sheep and humans, the age-old bond of some thousand years of domestication –
but also because of their history as sacrificial animals. Even in the 1960s it seemed
easier to kill them in place of dogs. But then in practice this idea turned out to be
more complicated. It proved to be quite difficult to keep sheep alive as individu-
alized research subjects and to stabilize them as bone sheep. To the great surprise
of the researchers, there was not enough knowledge about sheep to ensure their
survival in their new incarnation as lab animals. It became necessary to know sheep
better, so new relations had to be created, and with them many new tensions arose:
tensions between the different versions of sheep, but also between emotions, ethics
and epistemological necessities. The immediate response to tensions in research
today would be the enactment of new guidelines and regulations. And what would
be more natural if you want to make the ‘traffic of thinking’ flow? Fleck’s model,
however, suggests a different option.
For Fleck there exists a ‘uniquely democratic’ (Fleck, 1929, p. 50) element in
natural science research and in the process of cognition. This is not at all meant as
an ironic or cynical remark, and it also does not deny the hierarchies, the mis-
distribution of power and the different degrees of freedom between humans and
also between humans and nonhumans in ‘thinking collectives’. It does not mean
that justice and harmony prevails in the esoteric circle or between the experts and
the exoteric circles. But even though power and impact might be distributed
unequally in a collective, the most powerful part of the collective cannot control
the whole ‘traffic of thinking’, which does not at all follow top-down
infrastructures. Rather it circulates along intricate paths in feedbacks and loops
through all parties of a collective. It includes the most esoteric researchers as well
as the nonhumans, the animals and instruments but also the most exoteric circles,
the population, the patients who believe and enact the facts, since it is at the
peripheries of the thinking collectives where ‘the word has already become flesh’
(Fleck, 1979, p. 117). Only from there can a fact return to the experts as materi-
alized and secured, as solid and vivid as ‘flesh’. The democratic element thus does
not refer to the status of each member of the circle; rather, it is embedded in the
infrastructure of thinking, the way in which the ‘traffic of thinking’ runs through
the whole collective, and the fact that the traffic can neither be controlled by the
most powerful party nor produce valid facts by itself alone.
Fleck’s model thus leaves an open space for surprising encounters between the
unequal members of a ‘thinking collective’, encounters which need responses other
than regulations and guidelines (Despret, 2005, on Thelma Rowell’s work with
sheep). In Donna Haraway’s (2008, p. 34) claim for a responsible co-presence of
researchers and lab animals, she conceives quite a different concept of ‘the open’
than Heidegger and Agamben: not as a comfortable space of radical disengagement,
but rather as ‘the space of what is not yet and may or may not ever be; it is a making
available to events; it is asking the sheep and the scientists to be smart in their
exchanges by making it possible for something unexpected to happen’. How then
can we ask sheep interesting questions so that they can surprise us with their
responses, and how will we incorporate their possible responses into our body of
knowledge about sentient creatures?
Acknowledgements
The research was funded by a grant (RO 1133) from the German Research
Foundation to Volker Roelcke (Giessen University) and from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Thomas Schlich (McGill
University). I thank Kristin Asdal, Sarah Blacker and Lisa Onaga for enlightening
comments and criticisms on a former draft of this chapter.
Note
1 Translations from interviews are mine. See Schlünder (2012) for the analysis in German
of the interviews.
Interviews
Boure, L., 2010. Interviewed by Martina Schlünder. Davos, 25 June 2010.
Geret, V., 2008. Interviewed by Martina Schlünder. Davos, 22 April 2008.
Lanker, U., 2008–10. Interviewed by Martina Schlünder. Davos, 8 January 2008; 25 June
2010.
Perren, S., 2007–8. Interviewed by Martina Schlünder. Davos, 28 March 2007; 23 April
2008.
Pohler, O., 2007–8. Interviewed by Martina Schlünder. Basel, 26 November 2006; 29 March
2007; 15 April 2008.
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6
THE MEASURE OF THE DISEASE
The Pathological animal experiment in Robert
Koch’s medical bacteriology1
Christoph Gradmann (translated by Gabrielle Robilliard)
Introduction
Georges Canguilhem (1979, pp. 110–32)2 repeatedly characterized the history of
medicine during the nineteenth century as a history of shifts: the laboratory
replaced the clinic, the active agent with its chemical structural formula replaced
prepared medication, and, finally, the experimental animal replaced the sick person.
Although this latter shift was not necessarily an innovation of that era,3 it was
during the nineteenth century that the animal experiment assumed a central
function, and it was once again Canguilhem (2001, p. 12) who pointed out the
fundamental problems that medicine and physiology encountered therein: first, the
distance between the animal species used in experiments and human pathology
(the source of this scientific interest); and second, the artificial character of
knowledge produced about pathological states, a knowledge which always remains,
in one way or another, a pathology of the laboratory inasmuch as it is inextricably
tied to the conditions present there.
Canguilhem’s own interest, as well as that of historians of science and medicine
studying his works, lay primarily in physiology. Pathological animal experiments, in
particular those in the field of medical bacteriology, have received comparatively
less attention. Canguilhem’s contribution to this topic is largely confined to a short
essay entitled Bacteriology and the End of Nineteenth-Century ‘Medical Theory’ (1979,
French edition 1977). This essay, however, is more concerned with the relationship
between mid-nineteenth-century physiology and late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century chemotherapy, that is to say more with the completion of the
second as opposed to the third shift which, according to Canguilhem, characterized
this epoch. In addition to this work, there are several passages in Canguilhem’s
(1974, pp. 96–100) monograph The Normal and the Pathological (French edition
1966) which Canguilhem developed systematically and at depth in the essay
102 Christoph Gradmann
Experimentation in Animal Biology (2001, French editions 1965/1952). Taken

together, these texts permit a characterization of medical bacteriology and its
relationship to the animal experiment. In doing so, it is important to first consider
the tradition in which Canguilhem situates the showpiece discipline of laboratory
medicine. In describing laboratory medicine as a further shift in nineteenth-
century medicine, Canguilhem places medical bacteriology within the tradition of
pathological-anatomical dissection that emerged from the late eighteenth century
onwards. Medical bacteriology concluded a logical shift wherein the causes of
disease were transferred from the surface of the body – off which the older
tradition of semiotic medicine had read the state of the organism – into the body’s
depths. The emergence of medical bacteriology concluded a ‘process of reduction
of the pathogenic causes’ that had commenced with the systematic spread of the
autopsy at the end of the eighteenth century (Canguilhem, 1979, p. 129).
Central to this development was the introduction of the animal experiment into
(human) pathology, for it was this experimentation with animals that rendered a
generic description of diseases unaffected by the individual case possible in the first
place. Canguilhem, however, clearly articulated the price to be paid for this
development: the specificity of the research object used to study a disease limited
the logical generalization permitted by the experiment. Thus, Canguilhem (2001,
p. 10) pleaded that ‘the laws of phenomena which … almost always bear the name
of the person who conceived them [should] always receive the name of the animal
used for that experiment’. 4
For Canguilhem, the characteristic feature of the bacteriological concept of
disease – or rather, the bacteriological construction of what is pathological – is
therefore not merely its reduction to the question of aetiology. It is above all the
fact that the measure of the disease is no longer the sick person’s pathology, but
instead, its reproduction in an animal experiment.5 This knowledge about a
pathogen is, for Canguilhem (2001, p. 15), the product of an environment ‘created
artificially by humans in order to destroy [the pathogen]’. Accordingly, experi-
mental animals play a central role in this process as living apparatuses. Such a
pathology of the laboratory results, so Canguilhem argued, in a peculiar definition
of the disease, the measure of which is the presence of bacteria or the pathological
anatomy of the experimental animal.
Should we wish to pursue Canguilhem’s ideas further and describe the
importance of experimental animals in experimental bacteriology, it is clear that
we must follow two lines of enquiry: first, how experimental animals relate to other
technologies of the bacteriological laboratory, and, second, how they relate to the
physiological animal experiment. As far as the first point is concerned, it is evident
that experimental animals, unlike microscopes, cultural media, Petri dishes, cover
glasses and other technical apparatuses, have received scant attention as living
components of investigative technology.6 This may be explained by the fact that, as
living organisms, they appear scarcely compatible with common definitions of
(technical) innovation (Kohler, 1994, p. 6). As for the second point, the historical
sources are considerably poorer than for example those available for experimental
The measure of the disease 103
physiology. Whereas Elias von Cyon’s Methodik der physiologischen Experimente und
Vivisektionen (Methods in Physiological Experiments and Vivisections) from 1875
dealt with this topic in great detail,7 Ferdinand Hueppe, who authored the first
manual on bacteriological techniques in 1885, restricted himself to merely a few
pages. Although he mentioned the use of the experimental animal as a ‘living
culturing apparatus’, Hueppe (1885, pp. 98–9) failed to elaborate on the techniques
applied in such experiments. In the chapter dealing with ‘parasitic’ (i.e., pathogenic)
bacteria, the author spent but a few words on the possibilities and limitations of the
animal experiment, which in Hueppe’s (1885, p. 139) rather succinct manner
served ‘to determine whether or not a species of bacteria is pathogenic’. Animal
experiments, Hueppe continued, would enable scientists to verify their
assumptions about the intricacies of infection and the progress of infectious diseases
in an experiment. He then proceeded to briefly describe the usual methods of
infecting experimental animals via inhalation, feed, inoculation and injection, and
also commented on the problems of this self-described ‘indirect’ research method.
As far as Hueppe (1885, p. 139) was concerned, the animal experiment was both
indispensable and a method in which ‘the certainty of the conclusions reached is
often in glaring contrast to the uncertainty of the material observed. The experi-
mentor, who in possessing susceptible animals maintains complete control over the
experiment, easily commits the error of thinking too much in terms of
contagion’.8
Subsequent authors were similarly content to limit their comments to relatively
general parameters. Neither Carl Flügge’s Grundriss der Hygiene (Overview of
Hygiene; Flügge, 1889) nor the chapter on methods in the six-volume Handbuch
der pathogenen Mikroorganismen (Handbook of Pathogenic Microorganisms;
Friedberger and Reiter, 1912) dealt with the topic in a breadth characteristic of
physiological manuals of the period. 9 In contrast to experimental physiology, it is
clear that questions relating to the selection or handling of experimental animals
in medical bacteriology were not subject to specific discussion. The reason for this
was, perhaps, that contemporaries did not consider this aspect of laboratory
technology as their own innovation, but instead, as one borrowed from the
disciplines of physiology and experimental pathology.10
Indeed, this method of animal experiment had been introduced much earlier,
particularly in the discipline of physiology. As Robert Koch began delving into the
experimental pathology of infectious diseases in the 1870s, physiology – the
leading experimental discipline of the period – could look back upon a generation
of such studies.11 The animal experiment had established itself as the major method
of gaining knowledge in physiology around the middle of the nineteenth century.12
In Germany it was largely the generation of students under physiologist Johannes
Müller that propagated the method of animal experimentation. Frogs, christened
ironically by Helmholtz as ‘martyrs of science’, were used within numerous
apparatuses, largely in the discipline of sensory physiology. By the 1840s they had
become the heraldic animal of experimental physiology (Holmes, 1993). Its
pioneer status meant that the physiological laboratory shaped the reputation of
experimental medicine for both better and worse. Criticism from within the
discipline and from antivivisectionist movements concentrated on animal
experiments in physiology. The experimental pathology of infectious diseases was
not subject to the same level of discussion.13
In light of these considerations, this chapter examines the history of the
pathological animal experiment in medical bacteriology.14 In doing so, I focus on
the studies of Robert Koch (1843–1910), one of the discipline’s founding
scientists.15 As well as identifying the pathogens of crucial diseases such as
tuberculosis (in 1882) and cholera (in 1884), Koch and his team of scientists have
been further credited with laying the methodological and technological
foundations of medical bacteriology, that is mass pure culture, bacteria staining,
microphotography of bacteria, et cetera (Brock, 1988, Chapters 11 and 12). The
question is whether the animal experiment ought to occupy a place in this list, that
is, whether a medical-bacteriological style of animal-experimental work exists.
Accordingly, this chapter explores the general characteristics of Koch’s animal-
experimental work. The 1870s and 1880s, that is the period in which Koch’s
studies dealing with the techniques and methods of animal experiments originated,
form the chronological focus of this study. The richly researched history of the
animal experiment in physiology serves here as a point of reference. And lastly, the
main question that concerns me here is: in what manner does the animal
experiment serve as the measure of the disease, that is to say, which concepts of
measuring and of the disease are connected to the animal experiment?
The bacteriological laboratory

‘The least reliable results were those yielded by experiences gathered at the bedside
of the sick’ (Koch, 1884a, p. 467).16 Scepticism about the value of clinical
knowledge was one of the founding tenets of medical bacteriology. To counteract
the development of disease concepts derived from knowledge gained by observing
the sick, medical bacteriologists deployed experimental investigation in the
laboratory. The decision to experiment ‘not with humans, but instead, with the
parasite itself in its own pure cultures’ (Koch, 1890, p. 659) entailed more than just
the spatial shift from the hospital ward to the laboratory; indeed, it changed the
very object of investigation. Knowledge of disease was now gained less through the
observation of sick persons and more through the reproduction of the pathological
process in the experimental animal. Even when the sick person – in instances
where the investigation concerned human pathology – continued to be
indispensable as the starting point of such research, he or she was entirely absent
from the experimental process. Present in the laboratory (besides the scientists)
were merely the pathogens, which embodied the disease within the functional
context of a biotechnical ensemble of microscopes, Petri dishes, culture media,
experimental animals, et cetera.17
Even though animal-experimental techniques did not belong explicitly to the
group of innovations in medical bacteriology subject to critical reflection, the early
aetiological studies of Koch and other bacteriologists are to a great extent based on
such experiments. In this respect, it is important to reconstruct the relationship
between these and other animal-experimental studies.18 In light of debates on the
history of the experimental animal in the twentieth-century biological sciences, it
is appealing to conceive the deployment of experimental animals as an aspect of
medical-experimental technology during the nineteenth century.19
The rise of the experimental pathology of infectious diseases did not commence
before the 1860s.20 Jacob Henle’s 1840 work Von den Miasmen und Contagien (On
Miasmas and Contagions), which related to cutting-edge methods of its days to
investigate what caused infectious diseases, made no mention of animal
experiments. The absence of animal experiments in bacteriological-pathological
studies carried out in the late 1860s did not attract criticism until several years later
(Gradmann, 2000, p. 158). Even in studies published by a medical bacteriological
pioneer such as Edwin Klebs, the animal experiment – which enjoyed a compar-
atively prominent standing in pathological anatomy – was confined largely to the
background (Gradmann, 2000, p. 162).21 Impetuses for this development came from
various directions. In 1863 the French microbiologist Casimir Joseph Davaine
conducted experiments for propagating anthrax. What was innovative about his
experiments was that he was able to transmit infectious material from a sheep – the
disease’s usual ‘victim’ – to a guinea pig in order to study the disease under
laboratory conditions (Predöhl, 1888, pp. 169–74).22 From 1865 onwards Jean
Antoine Villemin experimented with infections in guinea pigs and rabbits,
establishing animal experimentation as a method in tuberculosis research. Finally,
Julius Cohnheim introduced the animal experiment into his pathological research
in the 1870s and, although not concerned with bacteria, his method had consid-
erable influence on Koch’s early bacteriological work.23 Cohnheim and the Danish
bacteriologist Carl Julius Salomonsen discovered a way of increasing the usefulness
of the rabbit as the object of investigation by injecting tubercular material into the
eye cavity, which made it possible to observe the pathological process directly
(Opitz, 1968, p. 200; Predöhl, 1888, pp. 223–5). Both men worked at the University
of Breslau, and it was here in the mid-1870s that Robert Koch familiarized himself
with the then cutting-edge methods in experimental techniques. Thus,
Canguilhem’s (1979, p. 129) assertion on the relationship between medical
bacteriology and pathological anatomy is borne out en détail.
Koch’s own methods drew upon these and many other authors who he cited
regularly. His own contribution to the field was informed by the dual importance
he accorded experimental animals: for the bacteriologist they served as living
culture apparatuses, for the experimental pathologist as animal models. As for their
use as living culture apparatuses, Koch had originally even assumed that experi-
mental animals would replace pure cultures in the laboratory.24 Insistence on
bacterial pure cultures was, according to Koch (1878, p. 102), ‘in theory
undoubtedly correct … but not conditio sine qua non for every investigation on
pathogenic bacteria’. Rather, the animal body was in certain respects even superior
to other culture media and there was, as Koch (1878, p. 103) claimed at the time,
‘no better culturing apparatus for pathogenic bacteria than the live animal body’.
Koch formulated this view prior to developing his technique for propagating mass
pure cultures on solid culture media.Yet this procedure, first presented by Koch in
1881, did not reduce the importance of the animal body as a culturing medium,
because successful ‘pure cultures’ relied upon the purest possible source material
(Koch, 1881, pp. 112–63).25 Obtaining ‘pure’ material from experimentally induced
infections was far more likely to succeed than the method of harvesting human
cadavers for infectious material, which was ‘was always dirty on the surface and
moreover not always fresh’ (Koch, 1884a, p. 521). Consequently, Koch (1884a, pp.
520–21) inserted a step between cadaver and Petri dish; a passage through a guinea
pig served to purify infectious material, which then proved itself excellently suited
to the production of pure cultures.
The ability of the experimental animal to serve as a culturing apparatus
depended upon two premises: first, the assumption that the healthy organism was
free of pathogenic germs, for this was the only way in which the animal could be
conceived as analogous to a sterile culture medium; and second, the conviction that
whereas bacterial infections in members of the same species always proceeded in
the same manner, the progression of infection varied quite considerably from one
species to another. In this way, it was possible to filter individual species from a mass
of mixed bacteria by varying, for example, the experimental animal used. ‘It is quite
wonderful how differently bacteria behave in different animal species’, Koch wrote
to Carl Flügge in 1879 and presented an example of this technique in his studies
on wound infections at around the same time (Koch, 1878). Although Koch
demonstrated a certain penchant for guinea pigs and mice, 26 his animal-experi-
mental studies were characterized by enormous effort and skill in varying the
species of animal used as well as by long series of experiments. As far as Koch
(1881, p. 130) was concerned, a single successful experiment provided evidence of:
next to nothing. It must first be proven that a single success was neither an
apparent nor a coincidental one and that inoculation leads to illness or death
of the experimental animals every time, or at least in such a number of cases
that excludes every coincidence.
As well as providing a means of verifying results, varying experimental animals also

served a heuristic purpose. When using the same or similar animal species, it was
the level of variation that yielded further findings:
When transmitting infectious material onto individuals of the same or

related species, the experiment may not stop [there]: the reaction of as many
different animal species towards the infectious material is to be further tested
… Highly instructive observations about the extraordinary sensitivity of
pathogenic bacteria to the culture media in which they are able to flourish
or which they spurn can be made during such experiments. 27
(Koch, 1881, pp. 127–8)
Creatively varying experimental animals as solid media for pathogenic bacteria was
a procedure specific to the discipline of medical bacteriology. Even though
contemporary physiologists also worked with different animal species, their main
aim was to increase the level of generalization in their propositions (Logan, 2002).
Quite in contrast to this purpose, Koch’s practice of varying animals was a heuristic
procedure which – as previously mentioned – might serve to filter out certain
species of bacteria, for example.
In addition to their role as culturing apparatuses, experimental animals were
used to develop models of diseases. Because of high levels of variability in the
disease process, making a choice about which animal should facilitate observation
of the pathological process was, in theory, determined by the animal’s proximity to
the starting point of the investigation. Thus, apes were the most suitable experi-
mental animals in human pathology:
As for the choice of experimental animal, it is expedient to first take animals

from the same species as those from which the infectious material originates
… In the case of human infectious diseases, one should likewise resort to
those animals closest to human beings, to apes.
(Koch, 1881, p. 127)
Clearly, contemporaries still conceptualized the relationship between animal and

human pathology without drawing upon the idea of a model system – first
commonplace in the early twentieth century – into which the experience of an
irrevocable distance between the reductionist reproduction of pathological states in
the (animal) experiment and the complexity of the objects of investigation in the
clinical manifestation merged. Whether or not we can speak of model organisms
in relation to experimental practices in nineteenth-century biology and medicine
is debatable. The biological historian Frederick Churchill (1997, pp. 266–7)
proposes, for example, that we should only speak of model organisms in historical
perspective once they fulfil three criteria: an organism occupies a central place in
the work of a whole institute; it has been standardized via domestication, selection
and interbreeding; and, finally, the scientists that use the organism formulate
explicit statements regarding its universality. Whilst Churchill developed these
criteria for analysing biological research (and the first criterion, for example,
generally makes little sense within the context of infectious disease research), they
facilitate one important insight: Koch’s experimental animals clearly did not even
fulfil the second or third conditions. Koch, Hueppe and other bacteriologists of the
period were more concerned with imitation than they were with standardization
and universalization. Rather than drawing on the concept of such a model, they
insisted instead upon the greatest possible proximity between the source and the
experimental organism. Accordingly, the bacteriologists’ studies contain little
reflection on the potential distance between animal and human pathology. At the
same time, their bacteriology was not premised upon the idea of a generalizing
transferability from species to species, as is characteristic of the twentieth-century
concept of the animal model. Koch, Hueppe and Co. attempted instead, like their
physiologist contemporaries, to accumulate evidence of the capacity to generalize
by experimenting on as many different species as possible.28 In his studies on
tuberculosis, Koch (1884a, pp. 539 and 550) used 13 different species, some of
which were highly unusual, such as sparrows, goldfish or tortoises. Yet in contrast
to the elaborate discourse on methods that flourished in the discipline of
physiology at the time, only once in all his extensive and very detailed works on
animal experiments – namely in 1881 for his study Zur Untersuchung von pathogenen
Organismen (On Investigating Pathological Organisms) – did Koch (1881, pp.
127–31) address systematic questions in any depth.
In practice, moreover, calls to experiment on organisms closely related to
humans bore little fruit. Apes, for example, were only seldom deployed, and when
used in experiments their number remained very small. We can suppose several
reasons for this, first and foremost relating to cost and space. Substituting the
countless rabbits and guinea pigs Koch used, for example, in his studies on
tuberculosis, with larger animals would have exceeded the spatial and financial
means of the Imperial Health Office. Even studies conducted at the Office on
anthrax had to forgo experimentation on cattle for financial reasons (Opitz, 1968,
p. 198). Sheep were evidently affordable, however, ‘suitable locations [were] not
available at the [Imperial Health] Office’, so that a stable had to be built for the
purpose on the grounds of the Berlin Police Headquarters (Koch, 1884b, p. 233).
A further consideration was that kinship between the species used did not
always correlate with consistent susceptibility to disease. Koch was certainly well
aware of the differing reactions exhibited by different species and, when in doubt,
generally chose a susceptible animal for his pathological experiments. 29 At least on
paper there was no evidence of an explicit predilection for any particular experi-
mental animal, as was the case with the frog in electro-physiology. In practice,
however, the bacteriologists largely deployed guinea pigs, rabbits and white and
wild mice in their pathological experiments for a number of reasons: these animals
demonstrated consistent reactiveness to disease, could be accommodated in the
laboratory in the numbers necessary and were affordable – in the case of the mice,
the offspring of two mice given to Koch’s daughter as a gift by a colleague sufficed,
at least initially (Heymann, 1932, pp. 155–6). Not least, Koch had accumulated
most of his experience experimenting with these animals. Although he did
experiment on apes, he did so only once in his study on tuberculosis, and this
occasion stood in stark contrast to his consumption of ‘many hundreds of rabbits
and guinea pigs’ (Koch, 1884a, p. 512).
Compared to those of his colleagues Cohnheim and Salomonsen, Koch’s studies
place greater value on guinea pigs than on rabbits. His preference for guinea pigs
indicates an accentual shift from pathological anatomy – or more precisely the
pathological process in infected tissue, which was readily observable in the eye
chamber of rabbits – to the identification of a pathogen in infected tissue, for which
purpose the ‘happily reactive’ and inexpensive guinea pig was eminently suitable.
This shift hints at the fact that the depiction of the disease process now took place
in the form of a controlled culturing procedure, which Koch deployed as well as,
and increasingly in preference to, the received practice of reproducing infectious
diseases through the typical pathological anatomy of diseased tissue as employed by
Cohnheim and others. Although Koch set great store in reproducing typical
pathological findings, he nevertheless sought to use experimentation in order to
prove, for example, that one and the same bacterium could be identified in relation
to the various different forms of tuberculosis. 30 Koch’s early studies aimed to
produce consistently identical pathologies of the disease using infectious material
derived from various clinical manifestations of human tuberculosis (see Figure 6.1).
These experiments could then be repeated using the cultures harvested from
the dissected experimental animals, whereby the protocol of the experiment now
documented a slightly more extensive procedure (see Figure 6.2).
Crucial in all of this was the presence of the bacterium in the infected tissue, and
the guinea pig was far better suited than either the ape or the rabbit to provide this
evidence. In Koch’s (1884a, p. 531) words: ‘As far as … confusing non-tubercular
nodules with true tubercles is concerned, nothing is simpler than to exclude this
[confusion]: true tubercles are infectious and contain tubercle bacilli, the false ones
do not’. In animal experiments on tuberculosis Koch used only two apes, but 35
rabbits and 179 guinea pigs. At the same time, animals that did not demonstrate
consistent susceptibility were deemed unsuitable, in particular because Koch was
unable to conduct his various series of experiments on unsusceptible animals.
FIGURE 6.1 Koch’s early studies from November 1881. This series of experiments is
about reproducing human tuberculosis in guinea pigs. Tissue taken from
cases of miliary tuberculosis (I.) and caseous pneumonia (II.) is employed
Source: Robert Koch papers, Robert Koch Institute/Berlin
FIGURE 6.2 This series of experiments was started in early December 1881. The notes
document a slightly more extensive procedure. Starting from cultures
rather than tissues, rabbits and guinea pigs are infected
All of Koch’s explicit statements relating to animal experimentation originate

from the period before 1884, and there is no indication that he altered his opinions
at a later date. This also holds true for those issues on which we might have
expected Koch to correct his position; the introduction of pure cultures on solid
media in 1881, for instance, did nothing to diminish the importance of the body
of the animal as a culturing apparatus.
The pathology of the laboratory

The decisive achievement of the bacteriological laboratory was its ability to both
observe a disease without recourse to the diseased person and replace clinical
symptomology with reproduction of disease won through animal experiment.
Evidence that specific microorganisms present in association with the pathological
changes they caused became the measure of disease. It is worth noting that this act
of measuring was, by and large, devoid of quantifying measurement, mathematics
and statistics. The relationship between this measure of disease and the norm of
health was not at all based upon quantitative deviation, but instead, upon an experi-
mentally reproducible qualitative opposition between a state of health and a state
of sickness. In a Canguilhemian sense, the reproduction of pathological processes
in experimental animals is artificial inasmuch as it was bound to the laboratory
environment. As far as tuberculosis was concerned, experimental reproduction
enabled Koch to depict a disease in an experimental animal which, as far as we are
aware, did not suffer from said disease outside of the laboratory. When investigating
wound infections, Koch went so far as to demonstrate entirely artificial diseases.
Whilst working on the aetiology of septic infections, he dispensed with human
source material entirely, contenting himself with proving the presence of six
aetiologically significant bacteria in mice, the evidence of which he used as a basis
for demarcating six diseases. These diseases were artificial inasmuch as their clinical
manifestation in wild mice was unheard of. Having to admit that sepsis in humans
was caused by entirely different bacteria, Koch considered it nonetheless proven
that sepsis was a primarily bacterial infection. As the septic infections produced in
his experiments on mice demonstrated ‘great similarity with human wound
infections’, Koch (1878, pp. 100–1) considered ‘the conclusion justified, that human
diseases arising from wound infections will most probably also prove themselves to
be parasitic diseases when the same improved method of investigation is applied’.
Such research transformed the image of disease in a characteristic manner, as
illustrated by one final example from Koch’s experimental work dating from 1881–
82 (see Figure 6.3 and the transcription in Appendix 6.1). In this case, Koch
arranged a series of experiments according to one schema. When summarizing his
experiments, Koch usually noted in each case the transmission of the pathogen
from culturing medium to culturing medium in a manner reminiscent of a
genealogical schema. Koch was indifferent as to whether the culturing medium
was an experimental animal or a pure culture. Several aspects of these depictions,
which Koch presumably produced in order to maintain an overview of his own
work, are noteworthy:
FIGURE 6.3 A final example from Koch’s experimental work dating from 1881–82. In
this case the notes summarize a long series of experiments. They
originate in a small monkey who dies spontaneously from tuberculosis in
October 1881
Appendix 6.1 A series of animal experiments on tuberculosis
Small ape † 29/8 (spontaneous tub[erculosis])
29/8 2 guinea pigs † 14/10, 18/10 (46, 48 days)
14/10 6 guinea p[igs] † 3/12, 3/12, 6/12, 6/12, 13/12, 15/12 (50, 53, 60, 62, 54 days)
6/12 4 guinea pigs (cage XX) † 28/1, 28/1, 30/1 15/12 3 guinea p[igs] (cage IV) †27/1
killed 4/2 (43, 53, 55, 60) killed 4/2 4/2 (38, 50, 50)
With dried spleen (dried for 56 days) With lung saturated in alcohol (57 days in alcohol) 29/8 3 mice
26/10 5 guinea p[igs] 27/10 4 guinea p[igs] 3 rats
† 2/2 (inoculation wound unchanged, glands not enlarged, † 8/1 (lymph glands unchanged, few no tuberculosis
lung [illegible] with the pleura nodules located in the lungs Inoculated with
incipient tuberculosis in liver and spleen) in spleen a[nd] liver furthermore incipient fresh sputum
Sputum tub[erculous] tuberculosis. Sputum tub[erculous])
killed: 4/2, 4/2, 4/2, 4/2 (1 healthy, incipient inhal[ation] killed: 6/2, 6/2, 6/2 (1 healthy, both others
tub[erculosis] in others). with incipient [illegible] inhal[ation] tub[erculosis].
(Stood from 2/12 onwards in a cage with tubercul[ar] The animals slept from 2/12 onwards in a cage together
guinea p[igs]), with tubercular guinea pigs).
All inoculated: 3 rats without success with dry tub[ercular] substance 5 guinea p[igs] without success (56 days)
3 mice without success with substances treated with alcohol 4 guinea p[igs] without success
With fresh inh[aled] substances { 19 guinea pigs with success spontaneous tub[erculosis] 1 ape, 6 guinea p[igs]
2 cats with success
Explanation: The groups of numbers in decimal format in the original document denote the date of death. The lines in the diagram show which deceased
animal provided the material for the next infection. The data below the dividing line summarize experiments designed to investigate the efficacy of different
types of tubercular material and the susceptibility of different species. Of particular note is the occurrence of additional laboratory-borne infections.
Source: Robert Koch Institute, Archive, as/w2/001.
1. The clinical symptomology, that is the visible and measureable symptoms of a

disease exhibited by a patient, is absent from this depiction. An ape that had
acquired tuberculosis spontaneously and subsequently died merely supplied
source material for infection and culturing experiments. As an isolated case of
non-artificial infection, the ape’s status within the experimental process does
not differ fundamentally from that of a diseased human who, in other series of
experiments, provided source material in the same vein.
2. Troubles that arose during the experiments, for example, spontaneous
pulmonary tuberculosis in guinea pigs (unknown outside the laboratory),
provide us with evidence relating to the special laboratory environment that
in the first place facilitated a stable connection between a particular experi-
mental animal and a particular bacterium.
3. A series of culturing processes propagating a consistently identical pathogen
has supplanted the disease as a clinical entity. This pathogen only varies the
location in which it appears (experimental animal, culturing medium).
If we consider that Koch’s documentation of his experiments on tuberculosis

consists quite substantially of these or similar schemata, we may then view these
records as manifest depictions that illustrate the key terminologies and methods of
Koch’s medical bacteriology. These representations demonstrate how vastly
important the animal experiment was in shaping medical bacteriology’s
reductionist concept of disease.
Sick humans feature in Koch’s aetiological studies more or less exclusively as
cadavers which, once dissected, provide source material for culturing
experiments.31 As such, the pathogenic units detected are neither defined nor
demarcated on the basis of clinical symptoms exhibited by the sick person, but
instead via a taxonomy of pathogens and the pathological anatomy of the experi-
mental animal. In fact, in the case of tuberculosis, the functioning animal model
was based almost entirely on the pathologies of the guinea pig and the rabbit,
behind which stood a whole zoo of animals unsuited for one reason or another to
experimentation. The serial procedure, that is the study of a pathogen and its
activity in the medium of the experimental animal, marks the core of the concept
of disease in medical bacteriology. It links the concept of disease to those pathogens
that cause it and their pathogenic activity. Only through the serial procedure do
these pathogens emerge as functional representatives of a disease (Schlich, 1997).
The process whereby a pathogen is transplanted from one medium to another – a
process that corresponds to the reproduction of pathological symptoms in the
experimental animal – forms the core of the concept of disease. The idea that this
procedure marked the minimum requirement in such experiments later became
known as Koch’s postulates, a concept coined by Friedrich Loeffler. With its
threefold process of isolating the pathogen, cultivating it in a pure culture and
inoculating an experimental animal with the cultured pathogen, this procedure
outlines the string of different locations and media at and with which the discipline
of medical bacteriology studies the activity of disease-causing bacteria in any given
investigation.32 It is precisely the animal-experimental approach in which the

reductionism so peculiar to early medical bacteriology emerges – a reductionism
that derives its concept of disease exclusively from pathogenic activity
demonstrated in the medium of the experimental animal and which, moreover,
accords prominence to aetiology rather than to pathogenesis. Medical bacteriology
thus proves to be a kind of pathological anatomy of the experimental animal, for
it is only this animal medium that permits the bacteriologist to demonstrate not
only the existence of microorganisms but also their pathogenic activity. Pathogenic
processes unsuited to depiction using a suitable animal model, for example, the
aetiology of Asiatic cholera, were either considered unproven or led to exceedingly
intensive efforts to yield such a model, including for example attempts to
manipulate experimental animals (Koch, 1885, pp. 76–81).33
It is striking that Koch’s extensive animal-experimental practice was
accompanied by only a minimum of methodological-theoretical reflection. The
scope and specifics of his methods are scarcely present in his threadbare
commentary on the foundations of his experiments. They remain implicit and
must instead be drawn from the countless instances in which Koch applied them
in his experiments. As a result, the scope and specifics of Koch’s methods
demonstrate considerable variation from one case to another – in some cases, as I
have already illustrated, to the point of contradiction. Thus, a central characteristic
of Robert Koch’s medical bacteriology also reveals itself in the animal experiment.
Fundamental questions relating, for example, to pathogenesis, are not elucidated in
any depth. Instead, they are dealt with only implicitly in the techniques Koch
employed to observe and manipulate various objects within the laboratory, such as
bacteria, experimental animals, et cetera. 34 When viewed at closer quarters, even the
famous postulates turn out to be nothing more than a historiographical construct
of Koch’s students; the criteria Koch himself applied to proving the existence of
bacterial aetiologies varied from case to case.
If we make a point of comprehending the romantic idea of parasitical disease
entities as a theory without practice, the discipline of medical bacteriology – in
particular in its animal-experimental work – reveals itself to be a practice without
theory. Instead of pursuing a systematic discussion on the problem of disease, medical
bacteriology contented itself with the question of correct investigative techniques.
Notes
1 This text is a translation from an earlier German version, published as ‘Das Maß der
Krankheit: das pathologische Tierexperiment in der medizinischen Bakteriologie
Robert Kochs’ (Gradmann, 2005).
2 References to Canguilhem are to German translations throughout the text.
3 For an introduction to the animal experiment in medicine, see Opitz (1968), Rupke
(1987), Bynum (1990) and Löwy (2000). On animal experimentation prior to 1800,
see Maehle (1992).
4 This refers both to the distance between two species, generally between the human and
the experimental animal, and to the variation within a single species, that is the individ-
uality of the experimental animal.
5 Canguilhem defines disease, even in the special case of an infection, not as a gradual,
definable aberration from the physiological norm of good health, but rather as a
‘functional innovation’ quite separate from the affected organism (Canguilhem, 1974,
p. 96; 1979, p. 121; cf. Faber, 1930, pp. 59–94).
6 See the overviews on the history of the technology employed in bacteriological labora-
tories in Bracegirdle (1978) and Clark and Kasten (1983). On microscopy, see
Hellmuth and Mühlfriedel (1996).
7 The first chapter, entitled ‘Allgemeine Versuchsregeln’ (General Rules for Experiments,
pp. 1–68), consists largely of instructions for using experimental animals. Numerous
images in the accompanying atlas provide very detailed explanations of these
instructions.
8 Only a few years after publishing his manual, Hueppe became one of Koch’s harshest
critics. His criticisms largely targeted the neglect of pathogenesis in favour of aetiology
and also served to expose the artificial character of the ‘infectious diseases of the
laboratory’ that Koch produced.
9 From over 250 pages in Friedberger and Reiter’s article, only 21 (pp. 491–512) deal
with this topic.
10 In fact, in the 1860s Jean Antoine Villemin, for example, carried out animal
experiments on the transmission of tuberculosis without taking recourse to
bacteriology (Predöhl, 1888, pp. 169–75; cf. Bynum, 1990, p. 401).
11 In Koch’s case it is also necessary to draw upon Julius Cohnheim’s Institute for
Pathology at the University of Breslau as an important source of methods (Gradmann,
2009, pp. 51–4).
12 For introductory literature, see Rothschuh (1953, Chapter 5), Coleman (1988),
Cunningham and Williams (1992) and Rheinberger and Hagner (1993).
13 For an introduction to antivivisectionism, see Tröhler and Maehle (1987). Still worth
reading today is Rothschuh (1974).
14 For an introduction to the history of medical bacteriology, see Bulloch (1938), Foster
(1970), Geison (1995), Mazumdar (1995) and Mendelsohn (1996).
15 For introductory reading on Robert Koch, see Gradmann (2009, pp. 1–18). Standard
biographies are Brock (1988) and Gradmann (2009); on Koch’s writings, see (Koch,
1912).
16 For introductory studies on the relationship between clinical medicine and
bacteriology, see Bynum (1994, pp. 118–41) and Faber (1930, pp. 95–111).
17 In light of this, it is hardly surprising that for contemporaries and later observers,
clinical practice in the discipline from the 1890s onwards appeared as a massive
extension of human experimentation. For an introduction to this topic, see Lutz
Sauerteig’s excellent article (2000); see also Lederer (1995) and Elkeles (1996).
18 For an introduction to this topic, see Opitz (1968) and Bynum (1990).
19 The journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences has
published a special issue on this topic which serves as an introduction to this field
(Geison and Craeger, 1999); see also Lederman and Burian (1993) and Kohler (1994).
As for the borderlands of biology and medicine, a slew of studies focusing on the
history of experimental behavioural research have been published, for example Todes
(1997), Dror (1999) and Logan (2001).
20 On the pathological animal experiments of the early nineteenth century, see Bynum
(1990).
21 Compare Klebs and his student Zahn, whose work was in microbiology: see Carter
(1987, 2001) and Benaroyo (1991).
22 Compare Predöhl (1888, pp. 169–74); cf. Opitz (1968, p. 197).
23 On Cohnheim, see Maulitz (1978, pp. 173–4); cf. Diepgen (1953).
24 At this point in time a ‘pure culture’ was not understood as a ‘mass culture’ – a concept
later deployed by Koch. Instead, it entailed demonstrating one full generational cycle
of, where possible, a single microorganism. See Gradmann (2000, p. 152); on pure
culture as mass culture, see Schlich (1997).
25 Compare also Schlich (1997).

26 Thus Koch commented in 1876: ‘As a very convenient and easy-to-handle object for
inoculation, I generally use mice’ (quoted in Heymann, 1932, pp. 155–6).
27 Note the denomination of experimental animals as culture media.
28 This attitude towards the question of generalization was shared, as Cheryl Logan (2002,
p. 331) has shown, by bacteriologists and physiologists of the period.
29 Koch (1884a, p. 531) on how he selected experimental animals in his studies on
tuberculosis: ‘The more susceptible a species is to infection with the tubercle virus, the
better suited it is to said infection experiments’.
30 For greater detail on this, see Gradmann (2001, p. 10).
31 (Koch, 1884a, p. 483) Koch obtained these cadavers from two Berlin hospitals,
Friedrichshain and Moabit.
32 For an introduction to this topic, see Carter (1985). On Loeffler’s coinage of this
concept, see Grafe (1988).
33 Such manipulations could consist in surgical interventions such as creating an artificial
entrance to the intestine or in trying order to lower the acidity of the stomach.
34 Gradmann 2001 (p. 30) for Koch’s concept of tuberculosis.
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7
KNOWING SENTIENT SUBJECTS
Humane experimental technique and the
constitution of care and knowledge in
laboratory animal science
Robert G.W. Kirk
If, as Foucault claimed, ‘a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached when
the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’ (Foucault, 1998b, p.
143), then what do we make of his later claim (Foucault, 2005, p. 17) that truth
enters its modern period only when the philosophical demand to ‘know thyself ’
became detached from, and superior to, the ‘care of oneself ’? In one of his public
lectures in the early 1980s, Foucault stated that:
[W]e enter the modern age (I mean, the history of truth enters its modern
period) when it is assumed that what gives access to the truth, the condition
for the subject’s access to truth, is knowledge (connaissance) and knowledge
alone … I think the modern age of the history of truth begins when
knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to
say, it is when the philosopher (or scientist, or simply someone who seeks the
truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it himself and solely
through his activity of knowing alone, without anything else being
demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as
subject.
(Foucault, 2005, p. 17)
Are we to suppose that the condition for truth in the age of biopolitics is divorced
from the ‘care of the self ’ understood as the reflective transformation of the
knowing subject? This chapter critically explores this question by reconstructing
the historical emergence of the so-called three Rs, or the replacement, reduction
and refinement of animal experimentation. At the time of writing, the three Rs
provide the ethical framework governing the experimental use of animals within
the biomedical sciences. If, as has been argued, biomedicine has become the
dominant means by which citizens have come to be understood and by which
120 Robert G.W. Kirk
citizens understand themselves, and if there is truth to be known about what it is

to be human, we would expect that truth to rest in biomedical knowledge (Clarke,
et al., 2010; Rose, 2007). Accordingly, whilst nonhuman animals were perhaps the
least of Foucault’s concern when he wrote of ‘modern man’ being ‘an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’, we might
nonetheless suppose that nonhuman animals, through their place in biomedicine,
have a constitutive role in modern biopolitics. Ours remains predominantly a
human society, but a human society that relies on encounters with the nonhuman
to understand itself. Moreover, if the modern citizen is understood, and
understands his or her self, through biomedicine, then the encounter between
knowing human and experimental nonhuman animal within the laboratory
becomes a critical site at which the human comes into being.
The three Rs, when first articulated in the 1950s as ‘humane experimental
technique’, provided a systematic framework which sought to establish ethical
concerns as a constitutive part of the epistemology of animal-dependent science.
This was achieved by making the moral character of the knowing human a
condition of his or her access to truth. Humane experimental technique demanded
that experimental design take into account care for the animal: to do so was to
know well, epistemologically and ethically. In this way, the professional and moral
identity of the individual became entangled with good science, and good science
came to depend on a humane consideration for the nonhuman animal. At stake in
the act of knowing well was the human subject. Consequently, experimental
practices operated to constitute the knowing subject. From this perspective,
nonhuman animals contributed to the constitution of the human subject in a
double sense. On the one hand, biomedical knowledge produced through animal
experimentation served as the condition of possibility for biopolitical
understandings of the citizen. On the other, situated experimental encounters with
nonhuman animals act to constitute the individual knowing human subject as
scientist. In sum, the laboratory animal became a collaborating partner in the
production of the human as a biopolitical subject.
This chapter will argue that the experimental encounter can be understood not
only as the medium in which the nonhuman animal was constituted and cared for
but equally, and interdependently, as the site where the knowing human subject was
similarly constituted and cared for (Arluke, et al., 2007; Holmberg, 2011; Mol, 2009;
Mol, et al., 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). Humane experimental technique
envisaged knowledge production as dependent upon building reciprocal and
cooperative working relationships between human and nonhuman animal.
Reliable experimental knowledge required the careful management of cross-
species relationships which, moreover, were implicitly framed as mutually
constitutive of those who related. Responding to the themes of the volume, this
chapter explores how we might understand humane experimental technique
through Foucault’s notion of biopolitical governmentality, being the ‘government
of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others’ (Foucault, 1998a,
p. 88). By casting the human knowing subject and experimental nonhuman animal
Knowing sentient subjects 121
as interdependent, the process of mutual constitution within humane experimental

technique operated as the guarantor of both ethical practice and the reliability of
experimental knowledge. As such, at least in its initial mid-twentieth century
articulation, the three Rs can be seen to have imagined the experimental
encounter as a site at which the task of ‘knowing oneself ’ was united with that of
the ‘care of the self ’.
Making a ‘science’ of animal welfare

Humane experimental technique was the second phase of a project to develop a
‘science of animal welfare’ by the London-based Universities Federation for Animal
Welfare (UFAW). A self-styled ‘scientific’ society, UFAW shaped the modern
meaning of animal welfare by creating a new space for dialogue and action
intended to transcend public and political debate in favour of scientifically
grounded pragmatic action. Established in 1926 by Charles Hume, UFAW was
partly inspired by the British Science Guild, which sought to promote the
application of science for the improvement of state and society. UFAW borrowed
from the British Science Guild the idea that science, through its claim to
ideological neutrality, was better placed to improve society than democracy and
public debate. In contrast to appeals to emotion, which shaped the rhetoric of
existing animal advocacy organizations, UFAW claimed a pragmatic scientific
approach, free of sentimentality yet motivated by sympathetic understanding of
animal suffering. The aim was to create a space where scientists, veterinarians and
the elite intelligentsia could work to improve animal welfare without being
tarnished through association with the rampant emotionalism perceived as charac-
teristic of animal advocacy (cf. Kean, 1998). Harnessing expertise in this way
formed a deliberate strategy to create a ‘science’ of animal welfare. Nevertheless,
whilst UFAW’s language distanced itself from unwarranted emotionalism, it did
not seek to eradicate the affective relations from the work of caring for animal
welfare. On the contrary, a certain form of affect characterized UFAW’s ‘scientific’
animal welfare, which was to seek ‘a maximum of sympathy but a minimum of
sentimentality’ (Hume, 1962a, 1962b).
Sympathy, of course, is inherently relational. By evoking an affinity between
sentient creatures, generating similarities from their differences, sympathy cannot
be merely a property of an individual. Rather, it is emergent within shared
relationships. Sympathy, as an orientation to the world, may be one means to
perform Despret’s (2013, p. 44) rethinking of agency so that ‘the issue is not about
seeking independent existences but about inquiring about the multiple ways one
given creature depends on other beings’. UFAW’s commitment to sympathy derived
from Hume’s Anglican commitment to the tradition of Christian-led societal
reform. Many prominent left-leaning interwar scientists, not least J.B.S. Haldane
and J.D. Bernal, shared Hume’s view that science was the best means to improve
society. However, they believed science and religion to be antithetical, preferring a
materialist techno-scientific eschatology wherein the biomedical sciences promised
a secular, immanent salvation (e.g. Bernal, 1929; Haldane, 1927). Hume (1957, pp.
8–9, 17–19), in contrast, believed religious and scientific values to be mutually
supporting, sharing ‘mental attitudes’ such as a ‘love of nature’ and virtues including
‘honesty’, ‘humility’ and ‘neighbourliness to animals’. Science was not only a means
to realize Christian values but was dependent on the same. Reliable scientific
knowledge required a biologist to keep animals:
happy as well as healthy. Failure to do this is inhumane, but it is also

inefficient, because healthy and contented stock are an asset in any research,
and the biologist who is indifferent to the feelings of his animals would to
that extent be technically incompetent as well as callous.
(Hume, 1958b, p. 425)
Science, as much as Christianity, demanded adherence to the moral virtue of

sympathy towards animals. As such, what Hume called ‘neighbourliness to animals’
served as a condition for experimental truth.
Decades before Peter Singer (1976) linked animal advocacy to women’s liberation
and civil rights movements, Hume associated animal welfare with nineteenth-
century figures such as William Wilberforce (who fought for the abolition of slavery)
and John Colam (founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children), both of whom campaigned against cruelty to animals. The abolition of
slavery, the protection of children and the prevention of cruelty to animals were
embodiments of a singular moral imperative which, according to Hume (1946, p. 1),
could not be subdivided because it was ‘unlikely that a person deficient in one will
be rich in another’. In contrast to nineteenth-century humanitarianism, UFAW’s
approach made the improvement of animal welfare a worthy object of concern in
and of itself, regardless of what it may or may not mean for human society.
Nevertheless, human exceptionalism was retained in other ways. Utilizing animals for
human ends, even if those ends required the killing of animals, was not an issue as
long as the means were ‘humane’ – a term that functioned to re-inscribe human
identity through the medium of moral values. Whilst animals could not become
human(e), humans could become inhuman(e) by inflicting cruelty.
Within the biomedical sciences, the experimental use of animals appeared to
contravene the moral prohibition against the infliction of cruelty, raising ethical
questions whilst appearing to make access to truth seemingly a matter of
knowledge alone.
This view is reflected in period literature, which critiqued biomedicine by
questioning the humanity of the scientist. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), for instance, presented rational
intellect and the scientific mind as both inhuman and dehumanizing. The novelist
and antivivisectionist John Cowper Powys went further, describing science as an:
abominable wickedness [that] so perverts the mind that its exponents have
now begun to brand as ‘sentimental’ and ‘unpractical’ the deep honest
realistic human instinct which it is deliberately seeking to stifle … [W]hat

science … is really doing, is nothing less than suggesting to the conscience
… it is a sign of superior intellect, to be completely devoid of natural
goodness, of natural pity, and of all natural sensitiveness.
(Powys, 1946, p. 3)
Cowper Powys was responding to the attitude that rational intellect was a distinctly
human characteristic, whereas irrational emotion was shared by animals. In 1938,
for instance, Julian Huxley, G.P. Wells and H.G. Wells explained to a popular
audience that:
the reasoning faculty … so frequently written down as ‘inhuman’ … this

‘cold’ power of abstraction … is the one emergent property which the
human species alone possesses, while our warm ‘human’ emotions we share
with the brutes. There can be no reasonable doubt that other mammals are
subject to the same kinds of passions, feel the same sorts of emotions, as we
ourselves. Our sheep can be frightened, our dog is glad when we come
home, feels something closely akin to shame when caught in some misdeed;
our cats can experience anger and disappointment. But the capacity to
subtract eleven from twenty-four, to grasp that the earth is round and the sun
some ninety million miles away, to understand general statements such as
Honesty is the Best Policy … this is all distinctly human.
(Wells, et al., 1938, pp. 1165–6)
At stake in such arguments was the moral status of science and the virtue of the
scientist. UFAW’s philosophy was an attempt to move beyond such arguments by
establishing that the nature of science could only be properly understood by
recognizing a place for emotion within the practice of rational intellect. In this
sense, ‘humaneness’ indicated a sympathetic concern for the ‘feelings of animals’
distinct from the emotional rhetoric of conventional animal advocates who traded
on a ‘sentimentality’ that was more concerned with ‘the feelings of humans about
animals’ (Hume, 1943, p. 3). This perspective engendered a human subject that
cared for the feeling of the nonhuman other for their own sake, which is to say for
the sake of the collective as opposed to humanity alone.
Care as biopower
It was not until 1942, however, that UFAW had established sufficient credibility to
address laboratory animal welfare. In 1926, the organization’s establishment had
coincided with the discovery of a stolen dog within a University of London
physiology laboratory. In the subsequent antivivisectionist controversy, the
uncertain positioning of the new society saw it viciously attacked by antivivisec-
tionists, who viewed it as a front for the sciences, and by the medical community,
who viewed it as a home for ‘crypto-antivivs’ (Worden, 1951). The very tensions
it had been established to overcome threatened to crush UFAW at its origin. Hume
responded by writing into UFAW’s constitution a ‘non-committal policy … on
animal experimentation’ asserting the society ‘abstained from entering the
controversy on either side’ in the hope of avoiding its own destruction by the very
conflict it sought to transcend (UFAW, 1927, p. 3). In subsequent years, this policy
allowed UFAW to establish a credible reputation attracting a large majority of its
membership from the veterinary and biomedical professions. In 1942, therefore,
when Hume learned of the Association of Scientific Workers’ proposals to establish
standards for laboratory animal production, care and use, UFAW was well
positioned to appropriate these underlying concerns to serve UFAW’s own agenda.
By presenting the promotion of animal welfare as the practical means to improve
laboratory animal quality and achieve standardization, UFAW successfully
reconfigured welfare from a rhetorical-cum-philosophical ideal to a set of material,
scientific practices, making animal welfare, experimental reliability and scientific
truth interdependent.
UFAW approached laboratory animal welfare by addressing the problem of
recognizing and controlling animal pain. In part, this was engaging with an issue of
longstanding importance, pain having been the crux of antivivisectionist objections
to animal experimentation. In this sense, making suffering the central object placed
UFAW within a historical trajectory that inherited nineteenth-century humani-
tarian sensibilities. However, rather than mobilizing moral and emotive rhetoric to
present pain as simply abhorrent, UFAW appropriated scientific discourse to recast
pain as a problem that could be measured, managed and mobilized to serve experi-
mental needs. UFAW’s (1939, p. 2) raison d’être, to ‘lessen … the pain and fear
inflicted on animals by man’, embodied this logic of assuming that pain could be
quantified and thus controlled. In the decades following the close of the Second
World War, UFAW developed a distinctive science of animal welfare that moved
the language of suffering away from subjective rhetoric, grounded in moral virtues,
towards biological values grounded in science. This approach, presented in 1947 in
the UFAW Handbook on the Care and Management of Laboratory Animals (Worden,
1947), made the moral imperative to minimize pain a condition of biomedical
truth. As Harold Himsworth, secretary of the Medical Research Council, wrote in
his foreword to the substantially enlarged second edition of 1957:
No man wittingly brings about the failure of his own work. The great
difficulty in all scientific research is to exclude complicating factors. Pain,
suffering and illness are such factors. Only insofar as these are either excluded
or kept under control can the research worker hope to achieve the object of
his investigations.
(Himsworth, 1957, p.vi)
In this way pain was re-imagined as material, biological and physiological and thus
a tangible, quantifiable and objective entity, as opposed to a subjective moral value,
emotion, feeling or otherwise affective experience. As such, pain became the
central object about which the moral debate around animal well-being took on a
new form, radically departing from the established language of animal advocacy. In
contrast to philosophical-cum-political rhetoric, UFAW developed an language of
animal welfare compatible with scientific discourse, presenting a practical
biopolitics, exercised through new expertise and technologies of biopower, which
aimed to ‘reduce the sum total of pain and fear inflicted on animals’ as though pain
was an economic value (UFAW, 1950, p. 2). As such, moral concern became
quantifiable acting as a mesure of humanity that equally served to guarantee
scientific truth.
Importantly, this approach catalysed the reconfiguration of animal care from an
unskilled ad-hoc practice into an expertise upon which reliable experimental
science depended. This new expertise was embodied in professional organizations
such as the Animal Technicians Association, established in 1949. Here, language is
telling. The work of the animal attendant was transformed to that of the animal
technician, indicating the new technical expertise and status possessed by those who
occupied the role. The UFAW Handbook, for example, contributed to the profes-
sionalization of animal care, and here the prominence of care over management
indicates a subtly different alignment of priorities. These trends shaped, and were
shaped by, the post-war development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine
(LASM) as an auxiliary multidisciplinary field operating to sustaining the growth
of the biomedical sciences by improving the production, provision and care of
laboratory animals. LASM focused various areas of biomedical expertise, including
genetics, pathology, microbiology, epidemiology, nutrition and veterinary medicine,
to the improvement of laboratory animal welfare and the standardization of animal
care so as to take the form of an expert practice compatible with science. Animals
themselves were transformed by new breeding regimes, which rationalized and
bureaucratized production through the systematic introduction of record keeping
to track the genealogical history of both individuals and populations of laboratory
animals over time. Simultaneously, systems of intensive breeding were developed
which improved economic production by establishing species-specific practices for
minimizing prenatal losses and maximizing food conversion (Lane-Petter, 1955).
Equally, the laboratory and animal-house working environment was rebalanced,
with the focus moving away from the ease of human labour towards prioritizing
laboratory animal welfare, which itself was increasingly framed in categories of
biological health and productivity. Guinea pigs, for instance, had traditionally been
housed in floor pens, which provided easy access for animal attendants but allowed
infections to spread quickly through stocks. From the 1940s, guinea pigs were
increasingly re-housed in cages, specifically designed to prevent the spread of
infection by minimizing interaction between stocks whilst maximizing hygiene as
the cage could be autoclaved (Lane-Petter, 1957, p. 38).
By framing welfare as health, LASM prioritized hygiene within regimes of
animal care. The movement of animals, for instance, was subjected to increased
regulation to prevent the exchange of infections from animals of different
origins:
[N]ew mice from an outside source should be isolated from the main colony
for an adequate period of strict quarantine before being introduced into the
laboratory … Even though the newly introduced mice do not show any
symptom of disease, they may carry strains of infectious organisms to which
they themselves may be partially resistant, but which would introduce
diseases into the colony to which the laboratory strains have no resistance.
(Strong, 1950, p. 81)
In Britain, an annual census of the laboratory animal population was introduced,

which not only constituted a ‘national’ laboratory animal population but provided
the Medical Research Council with a sophisticated and efficient surveillance
mechanism for tracking infections to their source (Lane-Petter, 1953). In these
ways, the care of laboratory animals, encompassing breeding, nutrition, caging,
handling and health. Hitherto considered a matter of little importance undertaken
by untrained anybodies with time on their hands, animal care became a matter of
expert technique. These new regimes of animal care practice are comparable to
that which Foucault (2000, p. 96) outlined in his analysis of the politics of health
in the eighteenth century, wherein the ‘biological traits of a population become
relevant factors for economic management, and it becomes necessary to organize
around them an apparatus that will ensure not only their subjection but the
constant increase of their productivity’.
As the importance of proper animal care increased in stature, so too did the
importance and prestige of the animal house. If successful experimental work in
the laboratory relied on preparatory labour conducted in the animal house, then
the work of the former must be seen as ‘not less important, and perhaps even more
important, than the laboratory itself ” (Parkes, 1950, p. 1). Arguably, it was the space
between animal house and laboratory that had enabled UFAW to integrate its
animal welfare agenda within the professionalization of laboratory animal care.
Even as a self-styled ‘scientific’ animal welfare organization, for UFAW to instruct
scientists on how to conduct experimental work within the laboratory would have
been a contentious intervention. In contrast, the work of animal care within the
animal house was not only a comparatively less politicized subject but one that
researchers were eager to see improved by a third party. In 1943, when UFAW had
initially surveyed interest in a general book on the care, husbandry and
management of laboratory animals, the response had been entirely positive. The
UFAW Handbook (Worden, 1947) made a significant contribution to the reconfig-
uration of animal care as an expertise, whilst simultaneously appropriating scientific
concerns to serve UFAW’s moral agenda. UFAW aligned the needs of science with
those of animal welfare by arguing that care practice must ‘conform to a high
standard of humaneness and will at the same time ensure that … [experimental]
conclusions shall be thoroughly reliable’ (Dalling, 1947, p. v).
Nevertheless, there was a distinction between UFAW’s approach and that of
LASM more generally. LASM can be productively understood as technologies of
biopower, seeking to promote the biological properties of laboratory animals (as
individuals and populations) for specific instrumental and economic aims. Such
an analysis, however, would only capture specific, largely material, practices that
made up techniques of ‘scientific’ animal care that clustered around the language
of scientific standards. Arguably, in seeking to produce a docile laboratory animal,
these technologies sought and presumed a docile human carer who followed
laid-out instructions without deviation from specified norms. In contrast to
techniques that framed welfare in terms of hygiene and infection control, health
and biological productivity, there remained aspects of animal care that operated
on a more affective register. Such concerns, though widely accepted to be
important, remained marginal to discourses that presented animal care as expert
knowledge as they resisted alignment with the expectations of scientific episte-
mology. Nevertheless, they could not be ignored and can be found most
prominently in UFAW’s literature as it was the tangible results of affect that
allowed the reliability of experimental knowledge (access to truth) to be aligned
with the moral constitution of the knowing human subject. The remainder of
this chapter will explore how the knowing subject, through the extension of
UFAW’s project from the animal house to the experimental encounter, was
placed in what we with Haraway (2008) might term a ‘response-able’ relationship
with the animal.
Humane experimental technique and the constitution of sentient

subjects
On publication in 1947, the UFAW Handbook was widely and positively reviewed.
The British Medical Journal, representative of general biomedical opinion, reported
it to be a ‘practical blend of economics and humanitarianism’ and ‘indispensable to
all concerned in any way with the production and use of animals in laboratories’
(Bacharach, 1949, p. 20). In addition to securing a healthy profit, this success gave
the society the confidence to continue their work on the care and welfare of
laboratory animals. On the back of the handbook’s success, UFAW began a
programme to extend its work from the animal house to the laboratory, from
animal care to the design and practice of experimental research. It was one thing,
and unique at that, for an animal welfare society to intervene on animal care
practice, but quite another to comment on experimental practice. Nevertheless,
UFAW gained credibility from the support of leading scientific figures, not least the
eminent biologist Peter Medawar, who joined the society in 1950 and oversaw the
development of humane experimental technique, which he viewed as ‘research on
methods of research’ (Medawar, 1957, p. 5). In 1954, William Russell, a recently
graduated Oxford educated zoologist and ethologist, was appointed alongside Rex
Burch, a microbiologist, to ‘catalyse the development of humane experimental
technique as a conscious process’ (Russell, 1954, p. iii). This work culminated in
the publication of The Principles of Humane Technique (Russell and Burch, 1959),
which contained the aforementioned three Rs of refinement, reduction and
replacement of animals in experimental science.
Today, the three Rs have been widely institutionalized, shaping ethical practices
and providing a regulatory framework that sustains the moral legitimacy of animal
experimentation. On publication of the Principles, however, the scientific reception
was broadly indifferent. Commentators critiqued the book for being far from ‘easy
reading’ (Anon., 1959a, p. 34) and concluded it would be ‘left on the shelf ’ (Anon.,
1959b, p. 650). One explanation for this is that the Principles devoted considerable
space to philosophical discussion of the meaning of ‘humane’ in relation to the
character of science and the scientist. In contrast to the pragmatic focus of the
UFAW Handbook, the Principles presented a synthetic discussion weaving together
an epistemological, ontological and ethical argument in an obtuse discussion that
drew on disciplinary knowledge ranging from physiology and biology through
ethology and cybernetics to psychoanalysis, social science and history. Scientific
epistemology required the humane treatment of animals, not only as a guarantor of
truth, but because the desire to reduce suffering inflicted upon others was a charac-
teristic of humanity by virtue of the fact that ‘man surpasses all other species in his
capacity for social co-operation’ (Russell and Burch, 1959, p. 14). The possession
of a humane orientation towards animals was asserted as both the defining charac-
teristic of ‘human’ identity and the hallmark of reliable scientific knowledge:
science and inhumanity were antithetical.
Drawing on psychoanalysis, Russell explained that scientists were ‘only too
happy to treat their animals as humanely as possible’ because not to do so reflected
a pathological psychiatric condition that would have prevented an individual from
becoming an experimental scientist in the first place (Russell and Burch, 1959, pp.
14, 154–55). Russell employed then state-of-the-art techniques to identify the core
personality factors associated with humane and inhumane orientations towards
animals. By modifying the personality scales developed to identify the pathological
‘authoritarian personality’, Russell created a series of tests that correlated
inhumane attitudes towards animals with the authoritarian ‘F Scale’, where F
indicated susceptibility to prejudice and fascism (Adorno, et al., 1950).
Furthermore, the rigid and fanatical love of animals characteristic of antivivisec-
tionists was correlated with an equally pathological personality type termed
‘revolutionary’. In contrast, humane orientations towards animals, characterized by
a desire to minimize suffering and promote their well-being, was indicative of a
healthy personality (Russell and Russell, 1958). Moreover, the authoritarian
personality was incompatible with science because scientific epistemology
demanded that one think in terms of multiple variables, something that the author-
itarian type was not equipped to do. This reasoning allowed Russell (1956) to
conclude that practising scientists, by virtue of having become established in the
field, would possess a healthy personality that was performatively displayed through
their humane attitude towards laboratory animals. In this way, experimental science
and the humane treatment of animals were presented as interdependent, resulting
in the problem of humane experimental technique becoming ‘at the individual
level … largely one of knowledge; application may be taken for granted’ (Russell
and Burch, 1959, p. 155).
One possible reading of Russell’s somewhat cryptic argument is that

performance of animal-dependent science simultaneously produced knowledge of
the human whilst driving a moral transformation of the knowing human subject.
From this perspective, the experimental encounter might be approached as a
technology of the self, doubly so when the knowledge produced mapped aspects
of what it meant to be human (Foucault, 1988, p. 18). Within humane experi-
mental technique, therefore, the production of truth cannot be divorced from the
care of the self. On the contrary, care of the self was a condition for biomedical
truth. In Russell’s work, the performance of animal experimentation worked to
transform the (human) knowing subject. Yet, at the same time, the desire to be
humane constituted the animal as, in some way, a sentient subject. As such, experi-
mental work became a collaborative endeavour as human and animal became
entangled in a shared process with collective stakes. Russell explicitly correlated the
presumed nonhuman ability to experience fear, pain, suffering and distress to a
form of ‘consciousness’, which for Russell was best understood as a ‘variable’
process as opposed to a definable object. As such, Russell contended, there was
neither a need to define precisely what consciousness was nor to deny it to
nonhuman animals (Russell and Burch, 1959, p. 16).
Consequently, humane experimental technique emphasized that scientific
practice depended upon properly managing the material and subjective
relationship between knowing human and laboratory animal. Ethical responsibility
became integral to the reliability of experimental knowledge, both requiring the
human(e) ability to recognize and provide for the needs of animals so as to
promote and protect their welfare. Michael Chance, a pharmacologist turned
ethologist who pioneered ‘environmental enrichment’ in the laboratory, illustrated
this ethos by referring to laboratory rats:
Many previous studies on their behaviour have been carried out during the
daytime, which is most convenient for ourselves but … the middle of the
‘night’ for the rat. Most laboratory procedures, therefore, involve for a start,
kicking the rat out of bed and then asking it to go through some fairly active
procedures.
(Chance, 1957, p. 70)
Rather than working with chronically sleep-deprived rats, Chance (1959, p. 70)
continued, the simple measure of installing reverse lighting would be ‘sufficient to
call the attention of the rat to the matter at hand’ ensuring ‘misunderstandings
between rats and experimenters would then be much fewer’. Chance’s ethological
studies of laboratory animals were a major influence on the development of
humane experimental technique, providing much of the inspiration for the R of
‘refinement’.
Humane experimental technique’s attempts to align subjective and affective
considerations with scientific epistemology and experimental practice did not go
unchallenged. Chance’s UFAW-funded investigation of humane technique in the
laboratory, for instance, was met with concern, confusion and criticism of its claim
that the programme ‘inaugurates a long-overdue study of the psychology of
laboratory animals’ (Anon., 1958, p. 632). Far from inaugural, the psychologist
R.H.J. Watson (1958, p. 747) responded, this work would build upon the ‘now
considerable volume of work in the field’ as it ‘is probably true to say that in many
respects we have greater knowledge of the psychology of the rat than we have of
the psychology of human beings’. Not so, responded Hume. UFAW’s programme
initiated a new field of ‘study for the benefit of the animals themselves’ (Hume,
1958a, p. 802). Oliver Zangwill (1958, p. 851), the Cambridge experimental
psychologist, recognized the subtle shift in emphasis and argued that the body of
work Watson referenced had ‘taught us surprisingly little about rats’, necessitating
‘a real need for the close ethological study of the lower mammals … which would
have obvious application for the keeping of laboratory animals’. At issue was the
object of the study. Experimental and comparative psychology questioned and
constituted objects of knowledge (such as ‘learning’) that produced little if any
knowledge of the rat itself. In contrast, UFAW sought to catalyse questions that
produced knowledge of what it was to be a rat (cf. Despret, 2004). The latter was
framed as foundational knowledge upon which the former depended. Knowing
the rat as a rat would allow the artificial environment of the animal house and
laboratory to be altered so as to provide the ‘happy home life’ necessary to assure
the welfare of animals as much as ‘uniform results in test animals’ (UFAW, 1957, p.
4).
Importantly, the social environment, both within and across species including
the human, was a prominent consideration within humane experimental
technique. Though vague, it was implicitly assumed that reliable experimental
knowledge required the enrolment of the animal as a collaborating partner
imagined as a sentient subject. The distribution of power within this relationship
was unevenly balanced in favour of the human, a fact that was acknowledged to
emphasize the importance of humane approaches. Recognition of the needs,
limitations and resistances of animals, together with the limited ability of
domesticated animals to shape their environments, brought increased moral
obligations to the human(e) subject:
Domesticated animals … have lost many of their original responses … in

connection with their long history in a new kind of environment, one in
which many of their needs may be supplied by man … Where they are
concerned, we have often to supplement their behaviour, for we are now an
essential part of their world.
(Russell, 1956, pp. 20–21)
In this way, humane experimental technique made the human-animal relationship

within the experimental encounter an object of concern and scientific study. One
approach was to render apparently affective factors as material and thus compatible
with expectations of what could or could not be studied scientifically.
Domesticating laboratory rats, for instance, had been shown to cause radical
alterations in the adrenal cortex and rhinencephalon, which had clear importance.
However, Russell could not help but speculate that physiological changes such as
this ‘must have important psychosomatic aspects’ yet to be understood (Russell and
Burch, 1959, p. 32). Russell repeatedly emphasized the ‘importance of social aspects
of an animal’s happiness’ since a ‘defect in this sphere can be just as disastrous for
the health of other animals as it is for our own’ (Russell, 1956, p. 21). It was in
assertions such as this that humane experimental technique can be read as
implicitly suggesting that human and animal were co-constituted in the experi-
mental encounter, however unequally. Similar assumptions shaped the UFAW
Handbook, for instance in this discussion of the ‘psychological make-up of the
animal’:
A buck rabbit may be a vicious brute and a bear gentle. With every species
the human attendant who is prepared to lavish care on his charges and makes
determined efforts to make pets of them is an essential ingredient to success.
An unsympathetic man will drive the best of animals into a vicious circle of
suspicion and moroseness.
(Rewell, 1957, p. 167)
As such, UFAW’s project to develop a science of animal welfare, framed as humane

experimental technique, implicitly understood that knowing-human-subject and
animal-sentient-subject were mutually constituted through the experimental
relationship.
Conclusions
Whilst some would think it perverse to suggest laboratory animals might resist the
power relations in which they exist, it would be inattentive not to do so if we
approach these relations as biopolitical. For Foucault, there always remained
possibilities for action to bring about change. Such options were, of course,
constrained by multiple cultural, social, economic, material and above all historical
factors. Nevertheless, however limited possibilities for resistance might be, no
matter how unequally balanced a given set of power relations might be, all parties
could act to alter the relationship. Put another way, if there is no reason to exclude
nonhuman animals from biopower, then their inclusion must acknowledge their
collaborative, albeit unequal and always situated role in structuring the power
relations in which they are brought into being and are always already enmeshed.
Arguably, by tasking the knowing human with the work of managing these
relations, humane experimental technique implicitly recognized this to be so. For
Russell, the production of biomedical knowledge required the human knowing
subject to manage the encounter so that the ‘human individual may be so
completely in tune with an animal’ that the ‘two systems, human and animal …
become linked together by subtle feedback circuits … in such a way as to become
one coherent system’ (Russell, 1956, p. 21). Rather than being oppositional, the
power relations between human and animal in the experimental encounter are
presented as mutually constitutive of a larger interdependent whole. Something
akin, perhaps, to the notion of ‘becoming with’ (Despret, 2004).
Foucault differentiated between moral action as the care of the self, wherein
there was no moral conduct that did not call for oneself as an ethical subject, and
systems of moral action based on obedience to codes or laws where disobedience
brought punishment (Foucault, 1998c, p. 28). Societal regulation of animal experi-
mentation has increasingly relied on forms of the latter, established in law
supported by voluntary guidelines and (bio)ethical codes, which collectively
regulate from the outside and tend towards conserving established practices rather
than encouraging as yet unimagined possibilities. Consequently, as humane experi-
mental technique has been institutionalized as the three Rs, a process that only
began in earnest in the 1990s, the original emphasis that humane experimental
technique placed upon the moral character of the knowing human subject has
been lost. Indeed, the ideal of humane experimental technique is all but forgotten
in favour of the three Rs as a codified set of ethical, and increasingly legal,
‘principles’ to be followed.
Accordingly, the work of meeting the three Rs has become depersonalized, to
such an extent that the work can be outsourced. Indeed, ethical labour has become
a profitable side-industry for commercial laboratory animal suppliers, which
increasingly offer consultancy services to ensure modern facilities meet the latest
regulatory standards. As presented in the 1950s, humane experimental technique
encouraged the knowing human subject to relate to the animal as an active sentient
subject rather than a passive technological object. Placing the human knowing
subject into an interdependent partnership with the sentient animal subject
established a double guarantee that the knowing human would strive to build an
ethical relation to the animal conceived as a sentient subject. On the one hand,
reliable biomedical knowledge depended on the welfare of the animal. On the
other, the knowing human placed their own sense of self at stake. Importantly, this
recognized that the experimental encounter cannot be governed in its entirety
from outside. Regulatory law and ethical codes are unable to determine all aspects
of the human-animal relationship within the laboratory. In 1912, the Royal
Commission on Vivisection noted the same, stating that ‘strict compliance with the
provisions and intentions of the [law] cannot be ensured, no matter how extended
or inquisitorial inspection may become; it must always mainly rest on the care,
ability, and honest endeavour of the licensee’ (Anon., 1912, p. 77). Here, ‘good’
science became indistinguishable from ‘good’ conscience. Essential to the way
humane experimental technique sought to sustain the moral character (or ‘honest
endeavour’) of those who worked with laboratory animals was the way in which
it created an interdependent, cooperational relationship between human and
animal as a condition of reliable knowledge.
In contrast, the institutionalization of humane experimental technique as no
more than a set of principles disempowers the three Rs on this point. Detaching
the three Rs from the context of humane experimental technique may well enable
their institutionalization in law and ethical code, but the consequence is that
something of their originary ethos is lost. As the three Rs become depersonalized,
transformed into checklists that meet increasingly bureaucratic concerns, they
become processes that can be outsourced to third parties, and the animal is reduced
to an objective technology through which biomedical truth can be conceived as
being a matter of knowledge alone. This trend is prevalent in early twenty-first-
century society, where, for example in the academy, the performative virtue of
knowledge as a process of self-forming has been all but forgotten as the value of
knowledge has come to be understood exclusively in terms of economic
production. Merely extending the analytic of biopower to the laboratory animals
would be complicit with the trend; it reveals only the economic promotion of
welfare for instrumental purpose. Such narratives would be static, reinforcing the
status quo. In contrast, complementing such studies with an understanding of how
human encounters with nonhuman animals operate as processes of subject
building, akin to what Foucault termed ‘technologies of the self ’, promises more
radical narratives, attentive to ethical consequence and replete with potential for
collective change. It is the latter that should be at the heart of human encounters
with nonhuman animals.
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8
ONE HEALTH, MANY SPECIES
Towards a multispecies investigation of bird flu
Natalie Porter
On 29 September 2004, health experts from around the world assembled at

Rockefeller University to address growing concerns about zoonoses, or diseases
transmitted between animal and human populations. After discussing case studies
of Ebola, chronic wasting disease and avian influenza, the experts concluded:
Recent outbreaks of West Nile virus, Ebola haemorrhagic fever, SARS,

Monkeypox, mad cow disease and avian influenza remind us that human and
animal health are intimately connected. A broader understanding of health
and disease demands a unity of approach achievable only through a
convergence of human, domestic animal and wildlife health: ‘One Health’.
(Cook, et al., 2009)
Citing mutual benefits to humans and animals, the experts delineated twelve
priorities for a holistic approach to preventing epidemics and zoonoses. Today, the
‘One Health’ initiative guides the policies and activities of health institutions across
the globe. Positing that ‘[w]e cannot solve today’s threats and tomorrow’s problems
with yesterday’s approaches’, this initiative signals a paradigm shift in public health,
wherein efforts to address human health problems are increasingly rooted in
considerations of our links to other species.
The emerging ‘One Health’ order is particularly visible in Vietnam, where
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza [HPAI] is decimating poultry populations and
causing alarming human fatality rates. Since initial outbreaks occurred in 2003, the
country has become a centre for efforts to control bird flu at the ‘human-animal
interface’, or in the shifting ecologies where species meet (FAO-OIE-WHO
Collaboration, 2010). This chapter uses the case study of Vietnamese bird flu
management in order to develop an approach to biopower that accounts for
entanglements between species in contemporary global health. Drawing on
One health, many species 137
ethnographic research with multinational policymakers, health workers and

poultry producers, I examine how Vietnamese bird flu interventions govern
humans with poultry, and explore the implications of this type of governing for
political and ethical practice.
Scholars have recently argued that an anthropology of biopower must consider
how humans govern animals, how humans are governed like animals, and how
animals are governed in moral terms (Pandian, 2008). Recasting biopower to
include animals addresses the ‘transspecies’ concept in anthropology, which moves
beyond the human to examine emergent relationships among species (Kohn,
2007). While incorporating animals into biopower, this scholarship nevertheless
tends to consider humans and animals as distinct groups: biopower acts on humans
through animals, on humans as animals or on moralized animals (Ahuja, 2011).
Expanding this research in light of bird flu management shows that biopower also
operates on humans and animals collectively, as one social group composed of
humans living with animals. I use ‘with animals’ to highlight how bird flu
interventions target relationships between people and poultry in order to govern
the existence of both species – though in different ways. To this end, bird flu
management is concerned with regulating connections between poultry health and
human health, which are determined by the ways people live with poultry. As such,
I analyse bird flu biopower through the framework of multispecies ethnography,
which foregrounds the diverse organisms whose vitality is linked to human social
worlds (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). My aim here is to examine processes for
governing multispecies collectivities and explore their implications for ethical
conduct. I argue that zoonoses raise new questions about human obligations to
animal health, which spur conflicts about how humans should conduct themselves
in the name of an existence they share with other species.
I begin the chapter by providing a background of bird flu in Vietnam and
delineating a framework for applying the concept of biopower to multispecies
relationships. I then provide an empirical account of how a particular zoonosis, bird
flu, reconfigures biopower by expanding its purview to include both human and
animal bodies. I start by tracing how the knowledge-producing and disciplinary
mechanisms of public health incorporate multiple species. Next, I explore the
novel forms of political and ethical reflection that result from these transformations
in health governing. Specifically, I relate a case where bird flu interventions
struggled to govern people’s conduct with poultry in Vietnam. This example
reveals how strategies for securing human-animal collectivities confront hetero-
geneous moral codes surrounding the place of animals in Vietnamese knowledge
hierarchies, village economies and notions of individual worth. Citizens draw on
these codes as they engage and interfere with bird flu interventions through
strategic interactions with poultry. Taken together, the study suggests that in
contemporary ‘One Health’ orders, animals figure prominently in individuals’
recognition of their obligations and in the ways in which those individuals
subsequently conduct themselves.
138 Natalie Porter
Avian influenza and the turn to ‘One Health’ in Vietnam

Vietnam offers a particularly fruitful site for inserting animals into biopolitics. It
was among the first countries to report outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian
influenza in 2003, and has since suffered some of the heaviest losses to the disease.
The country tops the list of reported poultry outbreaks and ranks third worldwide
in terms of human fatalities (World Health Organization, 2016). Compounding
these casualties, the status of poultry production as a chief industry in Vietnam has
meant that bird flu also threatens the country’s economic health. In the first year
of HPAI outbreaks alone, Vietnamese poultry producers lost approximately 66
million birds to the disease and related culling operations (McKenna, 2006). With
nearly two-thirds of national poultry production coming from semi-commercial
and household farms, small-scale producers have borne the highest economic losses
relative to income (McLeod, et al., 2004; Otte, et al., 2008)
The scale of human, animal and economic losses to bird flu has made the
country a locus for multinational interventions against the disease. Vietnam has
received the highest per capita amount of foreign bird flu aid of any country (Vu,
2009). Further, in contrast with countries that address pandemic flu through
strategies that target humans, such as vaccine development, surveillance systems and
drug stockpiles, bird flu management in Vietnam concentrates on humans and
animals simultaneously. An early official statement declared that the ‘Joint
Government-UN programme was established to support an integrated, multi-
sectoral and well-coordinated response to the challenge of controlling avian
influenza in animals and responding to the threat of a possible human pandemic’
(United Nations Vietnam, n.d.). This purposeful linking of human and animal
health sectors characterizes bird flu interventions in the country, where a ‘bold
approach of veterinary intervention has attracted worldwide attention and praise’
(Vu, 2009, p. 5). Bringing animals into the fold of human health in unprecedented
ways, Vietnamese bird flu management provides an ideal site for extending
biopower across species.
From 2008 to 2009 I conducted ethnographic research to examine the effects
of avian influenza management on poultry production practices and human-animal
relationships in Vietnam. I employed a multi-sited approach that began in Hanoi,
the country’s capital and centre for health policy. I then surveyed poultry farming
in two socioeconomically distinct provinces: B ắc Giang in the north-eastern Red
River Delta, and Đông Tháp in the southern Mekong Delta. Over the course of
this fieldwork, I joined two multinational campaigns to alter interactions between
farmers and poultry, engaged in participant-observation with several poultry
producing families, and worked alongside state veterinarians implementing bird flu
measures in local communities. This materially and historically grounded investi-
gation extends recent approaches to biosecurity by focusing on the ideas, strategies
and modes of ethical reflection involved in governing both human and animal lives
(Lakoff and Collier, 2008).
Recasting biopower for bird flu

In his now famous formulation, Foucault developed biopower to describe systems
of knowledge and strategies for intervention focused on optimizing the vitality of
human beings. Biopower moves between two poles, an anatomopolitics that
maximizes the force of human bodies through disciplinary measures, and a
biopolitics that administers the population via regulations on birth, disease and death
(Foucault, 1990, p. 139). For Foucault, biopower marks a crucial shift in the
modern era wherein individuals and populations are understood as sets of natural
processes to be defined and controlled according to normative behaviours.
Since its introduction in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1990), the concept
of biopower has permeated research in the social sciences and humanities, finding
particular purchase in investigations of health and medicine (Petersen and Lupton,
1996; Rabinow, 1996, 1999; Rose, 2006; Rose and Rabinow, 2006). But while
frameworks of biopower shed much light on the social categories and normalizing
practices of public health, the role of animals in these processes remains less
understood. Bridging this gap in understanding is urgent in a contemporary
context where zoonoses comprise over 70 per cent of diseases worldwide
(Chomel, et al., 2007). These animal-to-human infections require projecting
concepts of biopower past the human realm, towards examinations of the ways that
health systems define and administer the intersecting lives of humans and animals.
This approach aligns with a growing body of research pointing to the importance
of animals in processes of knowledge formation, social organization and bodily
regulation (Despret, 2004; Haraway, 2007; Davies, 2008). Animal-to-human diseases
provide particularly salient revelations about humans’ shared identity with animals.
When examined in agricultural settings, such diseases expose how humans and
animals become dual subjects in health regimes whose measures are aimed as much
at upholding political-economic systems as they are at safeguarding health
(Donaldson, 2008; Franklin, 2001; Hinchliffe, 2001). In interfaces where animals
dictate life and death, zoonoses challenge the centrality of humans in the knowledge-
producing mechanisms, intervention strategies and bodily practices of biopower.
This chapter takes up this challenge by expanding biopower past the realm of
human life, and considering its applications to Vietnamese bird flu management
where human existence is inextricably tied to animals. Attending to the diffuse
nature of biopower, it examines several levels of public health: the discourses and
authorities that direct bird flu management, the interventions that target people
and poultry, and the ethical conduct between species that result. In keeping with
Foucault, I treat ethics as a mode of subjection whereby individuals identify
themselves as subject to particular obligations or agreed-upon standards (Foucault,
2000, p. 263). With regard to biopower, this includes the behaviours through which
individuals act in the name of individual and community health. I suggest that
inasmuch as people and poultry are caught up in similar biological, political-
economic and historical transformations, their relationships do much to shape
ethical practice in current health orders.
140 Natalie Porter
Analysing ethical conduct from a multispecies perspective requires

foregrounding how individuals interact with animals in historically specific
situations. My concern here is not to explore broader debates about animal ethics
that, when taken out of their material contexts, can lend themselves to ideological
abstraction. Instead, this investigation follows Lakoff and Collier’s (2004) interest in
the local ethical formations that emerge within broader strategies for securing life.
They develop ‘regimes of living’ as a tool for analysing the ‘congeries of moral
reasoning and practice that emerge in situations that present ethical problems – that
is, in situations in which the question of how to live is at stake’ (Lakoff and Collier,
2004, p. 420). Highlighting the role of animals in moral practice shifts the analysis
from questions of how to live towards questions of how to coexist, or how to
conduct oneself with animals.
Multispecies biopower in Vietnam

This section begins an empirical account of multispecies biopower in Vietnam by
examining (1) the discourses and expert authorities assembling around animal-to-
human diseases, which take as their problem biological processes that cross species;
(2) the interventions resulting from these discourses, which target collectivities of
humans living with animals; and (3) the modes of subjectification arising from
these interventions, in which self-government entails humans transforming their
relationships with animals.
Knowledge-power: New truth discourses and authorities

Inasmuch as they expose and draw force from interspecies connections, zoonoses
require inserting animals into truth discourses about human existence. Foucault
(1990, p. 143) writes that biopower brings life and its mechanisms into the realm
of explicit calculations, so that knowledge acts as a source of power that transforms
human life. In the context of bird flu, human and animal existence intertwines such
that the knowledge used to manage human life must include considerations of
animal life. Following recommendations from the United Nations, whose agencies
stress the importance of fusing animal and human health expertise, the Vietnam
Integrated National Plan for Avian and Human Influenza calls for ‘an integrated,
multi-sectoral response based on clear, shared objectives. Responses must address
the animal health and human health dimensions as well as appropriate social
measures’ (NSCAI, 2006a, p. 4). The overall objective of the national programme
thus entails inserting veterinary knowledge into a newly expanded public health
system that seeks to administer multiple species. Penetrating multiple arenas of
health administration – partnerships between public health and veterinary experts
spanning local to multinational levels, technical instruments and training that
bridge human and animal science, and surveillance activities that target multiple
species – bird flu management takes as its problem the entangled lives of humans
and animals.
Yet the insertion of veterinary expertise into human vital matters has not been
seamless. Part of its inconsistency derives from intersections of national, global and
nongovernmental institutions in Vietnamese bird flu management, whose represen-
tatives disagree over the extent to which knowledge about animals can inform
human health practice (Keck, 2008). Many of the multinational technical advisors
for HPAI have expertise in both veterinary and public health science and share a
conviction that understanding HPAI risks to humans requires research on disease
occurrence and transmission in animals. In Vietnam, where veterinary medicine is
a low-status profession, animal and human health specialists are wary of translating
expertise across sectors. For instance, a foreign, multilateral health institution tried
to enrol human and animal health workers in a field epidemiology training
programme with modules on disease diagnosis and prevention across species.
However, the programme failed to recruit any animal health workers. In addition,
in an interdisciplinary workshop I attended, an international veterinarian opined
that in the event of an influenza pandemic, veterinarians could help vaccinate
humans. He was met with laughter from Ministry of Health officials, one of whom
mumbled, ‘Leave them to the pigs and chickens’. In interviews, government
officials, health workers and citizens commonly suggested that veterinarians are
failed medical students too slow to work with humans. Given this hierarchy, animal
health workers are reluctant to collaborate with human health workers, who can
be patronizing towards them.
These examples illuminate the growing but unstable role of animals in human
health knowledge, and illustrate the competing ideological positions and institu-
tional practices emerging in bird flu management: multinational advisors seeking
to bridge human and animal health sectors, state agents weary of translating
knowledge, and citizens who are mistrustful of veterinary medicine and
government workers (whom I discuss below). Evincing hierarchical divisions
between species, these trends challenge whether humans and animals can be placed
under the same medical gaze.
Interventions: Multispecies collectivities and unintended others

Vietnam’s integration of human and animal health knowledge has shaped the bird
flu strategies that follow. HPAI interventions place people and poultry into social
groups based on biological circulations, namely the exchange of viruses. As such,
the target of biopower is a unique collective composed of humans interacting with
animals – multispecies collectivities characterized by shared biological states and
risks.
Vietnamese bird flu interventions treat humans and poultry collectively, as living
beings connected by biological and social practices related to farming, exchange,
consumption and recreation. Official bird flu discourses construe these practices as
inherently dangerous, exemplified by a Joint UN-Government Programme
communications poster for bird flu that reads, ‘Stay away! Danger. Don’t touch sick
or dead poultry. Inform local authorities immediately’. The image of a boy playing
142 Natalie Porter
with a chicken points to biological and social links between species, which the
woman standing behind him in the poster warns is dangerous. Fuelled by long-
standing dichotomies between East and West, primitive and modern, pure and
impure, the poster reflects broader discourses of perceived risks associated with
close relationships between people and poultry in Asia (Lockerbie and Herring,
2009). The English-language version of the Joint UN-Government Programme
poster conjures this discourse. It reads, ‘Don’t touch! Danger. Sick and dead birds
are not toys’.
HPAI posters make visible Braun’s (2007, p. 7) argument that bird flu biopower
conceptualizes the human subject in terms of a global economy of exchange and
circulation. Indeed, bird flu interventions do not target individuals in isolation but
rather individuals interacting with poultry. These interventions link human and
animal vitality in ways that spur debates about proper conduct with animals. A
growing body of research on biosecurity illuminates the indeterminacy of human-
animal connections, and exposes the intense negotiations that surround security
interventions for zoonoses (Lakoff and Collier, 2008). The malleability of species
connections became clear to me when farmers proclaimed that their close
proximity and frequent interaction with poultry made them resistant rather than
susceptible to HPAI. One farmer told me emphatically, ‘I can eat with my chickens
and sleep with my chickens every night and not get sick. You Americans invented
this bird flu problem, it doesn’t affect us!’. The chicken producer with whom I
lived frequently said that Vietnamese farmers could not contract HPAI because
they hang around poultry every day. When I pointed to cases where Vietnamese
people were infected with the disease, farmers explained that the victim must have
been in contact with a relative who had travelled abroad.
These proclamations are not unlike immunity theories positing that exposure to
pathogens fosters disease resistance. What is important to note is that in explicitly
de-linking HPAI risks from interactions with poultry, farmers challenge bird flu
interventions and set themselves apart from a different kind of dangerous other:
those outside of Vietnam. Bird flu management thus provokes tensions surrounding
appropriate ways to identify and engage with animals, as authorities and citizens
draw on different biological and territorial subjectivities to alternatively condemn
and celebrate relations between species.
Working on selves: Ethical conduct and regimes of coexisting

So far this discussion has highlighted the tenuous insertion of veterinary expertise
into Vietnamese biopolitics, and signalled contentious interactions between people
and poultry in matters of multispecies existence. This section explores the
implications of these unstable knowledges for the actual practices of governing
humans and animals against bird flu. A central aspect of Foucauldian power is its
diffuseness, or its ability to penetrate all levels of society down to individual subjects
who are brought to work on themselves (Foucault, 1990). In public health, this
includes casting external health imperatives as private interests through the
establishment of social norms, habits and desires to which individuals must aspire
(Peterson and Lupton, 1996). Vietnamese health policies and discourses entail
novel forms of subjectification centring on interactions between people and
poultry; work on the self involves working on, and with, animals. Put another way,
bird flu management extends ethical conduct past the human by asking individuals
to regulate their conduct with poultry, under veterinary authority, and in the name
of their collective health.
A poster created by the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) in Vietnam illustrates the will to govern humans and animals collectively
by regulating interspecies interactions. The poster was created for a behaviour
change campaign that encouraged people to immediately report sick or dead
poultry to veterinary authorities. In the illustration, one farmer tells another, ‘I
always immediately notify the veterinarian when my chickens and ducks show
strange symptoms’. His companion replies, ‘If we were all like you, the whole
neighbourhood would be thankful’. The poster contains a moral directive
exhorting the reader to protect his community by voluntarily subjecting himself
and his poultry to the scrutiny of a veterinary authority. The tie between human
health, animal health and veterinary authority is made again in the statement at
bottom, which reads, ‘The health of the community is a priority, immediately
report poultry illness to a veterinarian’. The USAID poster impels ethical practices
that hinge on interactions with animals. The exemplary farmer points out shared
risks between people and poultry, and responds by encouraging his neighbours to
act in the name of an interdependent, multispecies collective that is reinforced by
the statement on the bottom: ‘Care for poultry, a healthy community’. What is
striking is how the poster links an individual’s responsibility to the community to
care of flocks, and encourages farmers to transform themselves into good
neighbours by regulating their conduct with poultry. In the context of bird flu,
where lives and livelihoods are intertwined, subjectification means self-regulation
vis-à-vis animals – under the watchful eyes of veterinarians.
Yet, like the various agents in Vietnam’s health sector described above, farmers
resist the insertion of veterinary authorities into their production practices. The
USAID poster’s exhortation to report disease is a response to the fact that farmers
rarely consult state vets about matters affecting poultry (NSCAI, 2008). The
farmers I spoke to were confident about their ability to safeguard the health of
their poultry, relying on several tools to diagnose and treat illness: phenomeno-
logical experience, livestock handbooks and the advice of experienced neighbours
and relatives. Another reason that farmers avoid reporting poultry illness to veteri-
narians is that bird flu prevention measures have required vets to cull thousands of
birds at singular reports of illness. These culls often pre-empt laboratory testing for
H5N1 virus, and many farmers shared anecdotes about healthy flocks getting
culled because of a few (H5N1-unrelated) poultry deaths in the area. Bird flu
policy justifies sacrificing some poultry (whether infected or not) as a safeguard
against further poultry deaths and the risk of human infection. However, this
instrumental form of reasoning faces contestation in local settings. When the
144 Natalie Porter
existence of more than one species is at stake, the question of how to live becomes
more complicated. The entangled lives of poultry and people raise ethical
dilemmas over the terms of inclusion in multispecies collectives.
Making subjects across species: Withholding and stealing poultry

How do these ethical dilemmas between species manifest in practice? This section
considers a case in which biopower failed to discipline human-poultry interactions.
It describes farmers withholding chickens from a national vaccination programme.
These strategies of withholding chickens reconfigured biopower by mobilizing
existing moral practices in rural Vietnam surrounding the role of animals in
knowledge hierarchies, village economies and notions of individual worth.
Focusing on this site foregrounds the mundane ‘fleshy historical realities’ through
which humans become subjects in relation with animals (Haraway, 2007, p. 66).
Withholding poultry from ‘corrupt’ veterinarians

As noted above, my research surveyed the effects of bird flu management on
human-animal relations in two poultry production sites in Vietnam. Part of this
work involved living with a family of chicken farmers in a rural commune north
of the Vietnamese capital. I became close to several poultry-raising families in this
commune, with whom I concentrated the bulk of my interviews, conversations
and participant observation. Common to these households was a mistrust of
government officials and state veterinarians. Farmers particularly resented a state-
mandated H5N1 vaccination even though the vaccine is supposed to be
administered free of charge to smallholders (those with fewer than 500 birds).
Those families who raised birds to supplement farming income did not participate
in the vaccinations, preferring to conceal their poultry ownership from the
commune veterinarian in order to avoid the process altogether. Concealment was
relatively simple in this area because although commune veterinarians were
required to keep updated records on the numbers of poultry under their
jurisdiction, they tended to rely on citizens to report these numbers to them rather
than conducting surveys on their own. As such, small-scale farmers were not
concerned with getting reprimanded for withholding their birds from veterinary
census, claiming that the vets ‘never come around here anyway’. Some farmers
argued that small flocks are invulnerable to bird flu or that they did not have time
to get birds vaccinated. But the most striking explanation for vaccine resistance
came from Thủy and Trí, the farmers with whom I lived.
Importantly, Thủy and Trí actually vaccinated their chickens, whose eggs
constituted their primary source of income. However, they preferred to administer
their vaccinations independently of state-employed (commune) veterinarians, and
for larger jobs recruited family members for assistance. In the case of bird flu – the
only disease requiring a certificate of vaccination, in the event one is to transport
poultry over district boundaries – Thủy and Trí hired a private veterinarian to
observe, assist and verify the process. Like many of the farmers I met, Trí
complained that Duy, the commune’s veterinarian, had theoretical knowledge (lý
thuyết) about poultry, but no sense of the practical realities (kinh nghiệm thực tế ) of
poultry production. He also stated that state veterinarians are corrupt. For instance,
one night I told Thủy and Trí that a state-employed veterinarian in a neighbouring
commune was about to retire and only worked sporadically in her capacity as a
veterinarian. Thủy huffed, ‘It’s not because she’s about to retire, it’s because she’s a
state cadre (cán bộ). They’re all like that – they’re never interested in farmers. I bet
if you asked her how many chickens are in her commune, she won’t be able to tell
you!’. Thủy then pointed to a census of poultry numbers in their hamlet that Trí
had compiled and was planning to submit to Mr Duy, the commune vet, and said,
‘Look at this list Trí made, see? We have to make these lists ourselves. The vets have
to ask us! Mr Duy is the same way. We know better about what medicines to give,
and we go and buy them ourselves. They don’t give us any help’. Trí agreed:
I don’t want to speak ill of people, but the People’s Committee is really
corrupt. They keep all the resources for themselves and don’t interact with
farmers. They even take things that the government sets aside for the people
and resell them. Mr Duy does that. The government gives free bird flu
vaccines to the people, but he doesn’t distribute it to us. He resells it instead.
He’s a certified sales agent, you know. All of the state vets have their own
shops and sell the stuff from the government to make their own profit.
I want to consider Th ủy and Trí’s story in light of the questions posed at the
beginning of this discussion: how are humans and animals targeted collectively in
bird flu interventions? What are the implications of this type of multispecies
governing for the making of ethical subjects? Starting with the first question,
Vietnam’s national vaccination policy targets humans and animals in conjunction.
First, household heads write their name down alongside the number of birds they
keep. In this way, farmers and poultry are dually enrolled in census data that
underlay the statistics crucial to Foucauldian biopower. Here biopolitics acts on a
multispecies body, or on a population composed of people and poultry. Second,
farmers and poultry undergo bodily discipline; the farmer must bring his flock to
vaccination centres, and each bird must submit to injection. Here, anatomopolitics
acts simultaneously on the bodies of humans and animals. In this way biopower
demonstrates its diffuse penetration of individual subjects. Individual farmers are
supposed to internalize this process by voluntarily submitting themselves, with their
poultry, to the data-gathering mechanisms and probing instruments of bird flu
biopower.
However, in turning to the second question, Thủy and Trí’s story signals
interferences in local settings, which reveal much about the relationships between
farmers, poultry and veterinary agents. Prior to bird flu outbreaks, state veteri-
narians had little involvement with the chicken farmers I worked with because the
financial losses to poultry illness and death are generally lower than the cost of
146 Natalie Porter
professional diagnosis and treatment. In the past, farmers exercised the right to
choose when and how to interact with veterinarians, and generally devalued their
knowledge vis-à-vis their own experience and that of their neighbours.
Importantly, farmers did not reject veterinary knowledge as a means to safeguard
animal health. Those I spoke to shared a high regard for veterinary expertise. Rural
farmers value experience as a source of knowledge and authority with regard to
poultry, and often pointed out that state veterinarians only raise a handful of birds
in comparison to village experts. It is thus not veterinary expertise that farmers
found objectionable, but rather the idea that a state agent possesses expertise that
outweighed their own. Within local hierarchies of knowledge, authority lay in the
hands of farmers themselves.
Those who did vaccinate, like Thủy and Trí, sought out a private veterinarian
and trusted, experienced relatives to complete the job instead. By withholding
chickens from state vets, farmers subjected themselves and their birds to a different
kind of authority, one formed through existing knowledge hierarchies and local
relationships of trust. Farmers acted in the name of health, but nevertheless carved
out modes of coexisting with chickens that interfered with bird flu biopower
(Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008). In this way they signalled responsibility to
alternative obligations and inserted different ethical configurations into health
orders.
FIGURE 8.1 Thủy, Trí, and family vaccinate chickens against Newcastle disease, Bấc
Giang province, northeastern Vietnam, 18 June 2009
Source: Photo by Natalie Porter
Further, through these withholding practices, farmers drew on a moral

economy in rural Vietnam in which the people claim ownership of the means and
products of their labour, sometimes in opposition to state directives. In the late
1950s, for example, the Communist Party collectivized the means of production
across the country. In protest, household farmers neglected to care for communal
land and tools (Scott, 1976). When the economy worsened in the late 1960s
through the 1970s, there were cases where northern and central Vietnamese
villagers altered production arrangements by expanding their private plots and
refusing to turn their animals over to cooperatives (Fforde, 1999; Kerkvliet, 2005;
Vickerman, 1986). Older residents in the commune described the period of collec-
tivization as a time of suffering and privation, juxtaposing it to the present day in
which there is not only enough to eat, but also the opportunity to expand land
holdings and livestock ownership.
A historical memory of collectivization as an affront to animal-keeping rights
compounds the ethical dilemmas posed by bird flu management, which asks
farmers to again hand their birds over to state agents. Inasmuch as farmers saw
veterinarians acting immorally by vaccinating carelessly and reselling the people’s
property (state-provided vaccines), these state agents threatened farmers’ rights to
safeguard animal health as hard-won poultry owners and caretakers. As Haraway
(2007, p. 100) writes, becoming with animals means inheriting shared histories that
require ethical responses. In this multispecies framework, withholding poultry is a
historically informed act that upholds existing village economies, knowledge
hierarchies and relations of trust.
Conclusion
Following current strategies to integrate humans and animals in global health
policy and practice, this chapter reconceptualizes biopower as a multispecies
project. Rather than examining how humans are governed as animals or through
animals, I have focused my analysis on the ways that humans are governed collec-
tively with animals. This approach foregrounds entanglements across species to
interrogate the very object of a ‘One Health’ paradigmatic order. Moreover,
examining multispecies collectives provides the necessary framework for
understanding the changing parameters of ethical subject-making in light of
humans’ shared vitality with animals.
Vietnamese bird flu policies insert animals into knowledge-producing and
regulatory apparatuses concerned with an expanded concept of health that crosses
species. However, local hierarchies of expertise tend to devalue animal health in
comparison to its human counterpart, and prompt tensions among state and
multinational actors who differentially assess public health science and veterinary
medicine. Though site-specific, these tensions reveal the growing but unstable role
of animals in the truth discourses of interdisciplinary ‘One Health’ orders. Further
interferences emerge in health practices that insert animals into human vital
matters. Vietnamese bird flu strategies demonstrate how health experts discursively
148 Natalie Porter
locate humans and poultry in communities connected by ‘risky’ biological

circulations. Farmers reformulated these circulations by celebrating their
interactions with poultry as a safeguard against, rather than a vulnerability to,
disease. Turning intervention strategies on their head, farmers posited alternative
biological links between species, and spurred debates about what constitutes
appropriate conduct when living with animals.
Finally, human-animal interdependence and interactions shape the disciplinary
practices of biopower. Bird flu interventions subjectify humans with their animals
under veterinary authorities, imploring individuals to transform their conduct with
poultry in the name of their collective health. While these modes of subjectifi-
cation ostensibly protect both humans and animals, in practice avian influenza
policies provoke dilemmas surrounding whose lives and livelihoods are worth
protecting in multispecies biopower. As Blue and Rock (2011) suggest, zoonotic
diseases engender ‘trans-biopolitics’, a set of practices that assesses the relative value
of human and nonhuman animal bodies, and that prioritizes the vitality of some
species while at the same time marginalizing others. Although embedded in
contemporary global, industrial and technological formations, ‘trans-biopolitics’
nevertheless manifests in historically and culturally specific situations. Bird flu
management in Vietnamese poultry farming communities provides an empirical
example of the locally situated ethical dilemmas spurred by zoonotic disease
control. By withholding chickens from veterinary authorities, both individuals and
communities acted according to heterogeneous codes surrounding the place of
animals in local knowledge hierarchies, village economies and notions of individual
worth. Mobilizing these codes in their strategic interactions with animals, actors
carved out ethical configurations in which humans and animals coexist under
alternative forms of authority, and enacted a trans-biopolitics that resonates with
historical memory and local social relationships.
This analysis does not intend to condone or condemn withholding and stealing
chickens. Rather, examining these cases focuses attention on the locally specific,
historically situated sites of ethical conduct involving humans and animals.
Haraway (2007, p. 27) calls these sites contact zones, risky spaces where species
become available to one another and to the events surrounding them. Indeed, the
chickens and villagers in these stories are not necessarily ethically or politically
intertwined prior to or outside of the moments of concealment or theft. Chickens
are many things in addition to the targets of biopower and embodiments of moral
worth described here. They are meat; they are commodities; they are biotech-
nologies; they are fighting cocks; they are friends; they are viral loads. The forces
that determine an individual’s conduct with poultry are therefore not always
motivated by ethical concerns. But at these sites of concealment and thievery,
chickens and villagers became entangled in momentary and contingent reconfigu-
rations of bird flu biopower. Examining these interspecies entanglements thus
begins the crucial task of reflecting on and refashioning how to live with animals
in a ‘One Health’ order.
Acknowledgments
This chapter would not have been possible without the help of numerous people
in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Đồng Tháp and Bắc Giang, whose time, expertise
and patience helped me to understand health and human-animal relations in the
context of bird flu outbreaks in Vietnam. For their comments on and critiques of
this analysis, I would like to thank Claire Wendland, Linda Hogle, Idalina Baptista,
Katherine Bowie, Stephanie Clare, Eric Haanstad, Amy Hinterberger, Javier
Lezaun, Catherine Montgomery and Susan Rottmann. I am also grateful to Kristin
Asdal, Steve Hinchliffe and Tone Druglitrø, as well as the participants in the
Sentient Creatures Conference, for their helpful comments on the chapter.
Research for this chapter was supported by the International Dissertation Research
Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided
by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation
Research Abroad Program, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork
Grant. Subsequent work on the chapter was supported by a Mellon/American
Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the
European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh
Framework Program (FPT/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 263447
(BioProperty). The initial, extended version of this chapter is published as ‘Bird Flu
Biopower: Strategies for Multispecies Coexistence in Vietnam’ (Porter, 2013).
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9
SENSORY BIOPOLITICS
Knowing birds and a politics of life
Steve Hinchliffe
For Aristotle, and for the philosopher of science Michel Serres, there is nothing in
the mind that hasn’t already been sensed. And, for Serres (2008), sensing is
everywhere – it is done with many and through others. ‘[T]he thinking I quivers
along the spine, I think everywhere’ (Serres, 2008, p. 76). The nervous system is, it
turns out, anything but centred. It is dispersed, distributed, but more than that it
defies any straightforward geometrical mapping or system diagramming. Rather,
we could say that being sentient is spatially and temporally composite, made up of
intensities, events and atmospheres. And, in being so, it is also more than human. It
involves or folds together a suite of other bodies. In this chapter I will tease out,
empirically and theoretically, the consequences of Serres’s creaturely sentience, this
re-distribution of sensing and knowing, for a politics of life. The latter is often read
through a biopolitical lens, as the exertion of human powers over life, often
through an intensification of surveillance, observation and intervention. But Serres
invites us to make a distinction between surveillant and observant societies. The
latter can be what he calls ‘object rich’ and can foment an approach to the world
that is altogether livelier, open to difference and less likely to assume mastery or
control. My argument is that there are resources here for a different kind of
biopolitics. The overarching question is, what does a non-central, nervy
assemblage, with its wide supportive cast of characters and props, do for a re-
configured, less anthropocentric, more lively, and indeed noisier, biopolitics?
The specific issue for this chapter is ‘knowing birds’ – a phrasing that, in English
at least, is ambiguous and potentially unsettling. At first blush it signifies the activities
that are necessary for people to know birds (what are they, what do they do?), but it
also troubles hard and fast divisions between human knowers and nonhuman
knowns. Knowing birds are also just that: birds who know and make collective
knowledge possible. Indeed, birds are understood here to be active players in
knowing worlds rather than passive bearers of features available to knowledge.
Knowing birds and a politics of life 153
The chapter starts with a brief history of knowing birds, highlighting the notion
of avian wisdom, a wisdom that will course through this text. In this, I focus on
the philosophy of Michel Serres in order to set up a more collective approach to
knowledge and sensing. I then make a brief excursion into biopolitics, using recent
work in sociology and geography to open up the possibility for a livelier politics –
a politics in which birds and others are treated as knowledgeable rather than the
mute objects of knowledge. Following this I develop an empirical account of
knowing birds. Starting with ornithologies and migrations, I focus on the moment
when avian sensitivities were drawn into a ‘viral cloud’ (Lowe, 2010) with the
arrival of highly pathogenic avian influenza. The gentle science of ornithology
took on a strategic urgency once avian migrations changed from being a source of
wonderment to a source of potential danger. However, I contest a conventional
reading of biopolitics which suggests that knowing birds were simply drawn in to
an apparatus of power and tasked with extending human knowledge. Knowing
birds were not simply added into the government of things (Foucault, 2007; Lemke,
2015). Instead they may open up a different kind of biopolitics, where liveliness and
sensing are affirmed as eventful in and of themselves rather than as a means to pre-
specified ends.
Knowing birds, sensing life

The appearance, departures and re-appearance of birds have long been a matter of
delight, foresight and also foreboding. The flight of birds, their seasonal appearances
and disappearances, their movements ahead of changes in weather, as well as their
airborne vantage, provided for a sense of knowing birds or avian wisdom. The
novelist and amateur ornithologist Margaret Atwood summarizes the intrigue that
bird knowledge, flight and movement has generated for their terrestrial observers:
For as long as we human beings can remember, we’ve been looking up. Over
our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We
gave their wings to our deities … and their songs to our angels. We believed
the birds knew things we didn’t, and this made sense to us, because only they
had access to the panoramic picture … a vantage point we came to call ‘the
bird’s eye view’ … Some of us once believed that the birds could carry
messages, and that if only we had the skill we’d be able to decipher them.
Wasn’t the invention of writing inspired, in China, by the flight of cranes?
Thoth, the Egyptian god of scribes credited with the invention of
hieroglyphic writing, had the head of an ibis. In the ancient world, an entire
job category grew up around bird reading: that of augury, performed by seers
and prophets who could interpret the winged signs … ‘A bird of the air shall
carry the voice,’ says Ecclesiastes, ‘and those that have wings shall tell the
truth’.
(Atwood, 2010)
154 Steve Hinchliffe
Indeed, there was a time when people did nothing without first observing what
birds had to say. Soothsayers would, in Roman times for example, consider bird
flight or the way they pecked the ground before sanctioning a matter of empire.
As Serres (2008, p. 99) construes it, the greatest empire of all time put its fate in
birds. Observing or consulting birds was an addiction. Addicere is to ‘speak in
favour of ’ or, in augury, it signals the assent given by birds. For Serres, more
radically, this assent is key, and provides the pre-conditions for human speech. The
ability to speak accrues through the movements of birds. Indeed, the speech act, so
triumphantly associated with human rationality and the birth of civilized order,
was, for Serres, predicated on birds. As Livy, the Roman historian, stated, nothing
could be instigated without the favourable signs or addiction of birds. 1 Rome itself
was founded upon the noisy flyby of avian life. The pinnacle of the ancient world,
the triumphant empire, was inscribed with nonhuman nature. Augury was a pre-
condition for the city, or the polis. Indeed, augury is the ‘feral, non-historical origin
of the city’ (Serres, 2008, p. 99), and the polis in this sense was always already a bio-
polis.
As is characteristic of Serres’s philosophy more generally, we should engage
augury or the sensing of birds as not so much a quirky historical example of how
things used to be, but as a lesson in how sense and sentience is made. Here, the
before-speech noises and movements of birds echo Serres’s other works on the
non-human foundations of human civilization (Serres, 1991) and his similarly
irreverent histories of science, wherein nonhumans and technologies mediate
knowledge in ways that de-centre human subjects (Serres and Latour, 1995). So
rather than an arcane practice, knowing birds is, for Serres, an exemplary case of a
general characteristic of the acts of sensing and knowing. To know and know well,
for Serres, involves a pre-engagement with a world of movement, a fore-cast, or a
leap into the world and an entangling of different kinds.
Read in this light, augury and soothsaying need rescuing from disdain. Indeed,
these practices, which become symptomatic of superstition and myth in the
modern era, are on the contrary exemplary for Serres. In observing the avian world
prior to speech, soothsayers ‘are already acting like scientists’ (Serres, 2008, p. 102).
In presupposing a world that pre-exists language, where ‘meaning manifests itself
without us … [and o]bserving the world as though it were not something brought
into being by the collective’ (Serres, 2008, p. 102), augury alerts us to the more than
human components of sensing and knowing. There is a normativity here in terms
of preserving rather than excising a naïvity with respect to the reality of the world
beyond human construction. ‘Without being able to prove it I believe, like
soothsayers and haruspices, and like scientists, that there exists a world independent
of men’ (Serres, 2008 p. 102). And it is this worldliness, this Aristotelian notion that
there is nothing in the mind that has not first been sensed, 2 that underlines a
knowing that is still to be cherished and nurtured.
This sensing of bird sense also returns us to the familiar thread in Serres’s
writings on communication and the requirement for noise in order for there to be
information (Serres, 2007). The noise of the birds is not, for Serres, a signal or
message that is to be read or heard without mediation. It is rather the flurry of

activity through which, and partly in spite of which, speech is made possible. In
brief, the act of hearing or responding to atmospheric waves, vibrations and
movements is always more than a matter for the communication of clearly
bounded information. Noise is required for sense to be discerned. Communication
is an echoey process, a chattering of more than human voices, a continual
reverberation and diffraction of waves. The noisiness of communication, the
communing with the world that is necessary for making the community possible,
is configured in the sensory apparatus of human beings. This is a noisy sentience
where the human ear reverberates with the sound waves of avian lives. The ear, that
intricate labyrinth of folded skin and nerves, forms a resonance chamber that is the
very possibility for language, for theatre, for tribunal:
It is via this aperture that our eyes turn towards the world, our hearing heeds
sounds other than those of language, noises other than those of vocalizing.
The sounds of scratching or pecking, or the soft caress of feathered wings in
the turbulent air – not even Rome could be founded before this movement
was heard.
(Serres, 2008, pp. 100–101)
While Romulus may have visually read the signs of flying birds, his head was
turned by the caress of feathered wings in the air. Hearing, rather than sight, is the
pre-cursor for the bio-polis. And sensing movement, through the vibrations that
touch the ear, is something that augury preserved and amplified as a moment or
event prior to the speech act.
There are at least two issues in all of this. The first is that different bodies sense
the world after their own fashion. So, for example, Herbert Stanley Redgrove’s
twentieth-century account of augury suggested that various species of birds are
susceptible to electrical and barometric changes in their atmospheres, ‘too slight to
be observed by man’s unaided senses’ (Squier, 2006, p. 69), and that only this
reading of avian sensitivities can explain phenomena like the timing of seasonal and
pre-storm migrations. These skeletal and embodied features of avian lives have long
since been of interest to those who can gain from accessing the sensitivities of
others through various forms of body-snatching. It’s a practice that is apparent in
recent military and industrial investments in biomimicry, or the representation and
imitation of nonhuman capacities for human ends (Johnson, 2010).
This extension of human sense through engaging others’ sensitivities is of
course not what interests Serres. As I’ve hinted, augury takes us further than the
bodily capacities or affordances of other creatures with their varying skeletal and
tissue compositions that can undoubtedly make other kinds of sense. So, and
second, it’s the very matter of making sense as a composite activity that is augury’s
true promise and Serres’s concern. This is more than another account of human
sense-making though, albeit one that is enabled or extended by other species or
the prosthetics of attachment. As the social psychologist and science studies scholar
Steven Brown puts it, there is something going on here that is more than a
phenomenological understanding of how sense is made:
Serres strives for a more radical rethinking of subject and object. It is not
simply that we experience our selves through sensation, it is that what we
call ‘self ’, the nexus through which knowledge, feeling and memory are
intertwined, is literally there in the midst of things.
(Brown, 2011, p. 164)
Brown continues by quoting Serres’s (2008, p. 76) statement that ‘the thinking I
quivers along the spine, I think everywhere’. ‘I think everywhere’ is a displacement
of the subject, a nervous system that is not so much central, but dispersed. And in
being dispersed, there is a folding together rather than an extension of the subject.
To amplify, there’s a geography to knowing in this that is not simply extensive,
or about the effectivity or interessement or networking, and does not simply act to
incorporate others in the process of getting to know or in the act of sensing. The
spatiality is not about reach, or amenable to a geometry of the self, rather it is a
topological matter, a ‘blooming into life’ as Brown (2011, p. 164) captures it.
Sensing occurs in the middle of intra-active engagements. The term intra-action
is Barad’s (2007) and emphasizes the generativity of relations and that all parties
are altered as relations take shape. Knowing birds, then, is not a matter of humans
reaching out in order to sense what birds sense, but a matter of knowing with a
whole suite of sensings. If there is nothing in the mind (knowledge) that has not
already been sensed, then knowing birds is a matter of collective sensibilities. To
sense at all is already to be in amongst things, to be in the process of intra-acting.
So while Serres is famously associated with actor-network theory (ANT), with
its focus on a re-distribution of agency across an array of actants, he is also
pushing us to move beyond a common reading of ANT which can, in some
hands, focus upon the steady accumulation of heterogeneous matters (on this
tendency see Thrift, 2008). For Serres, effective action is a matter of intense
moments, repetitive but differentiating encounters where the game is not so
much an accumulation and arrangement of bodies, but the ongoing chatter and
responsiveness to others that makes being sensitive dependent on marking and
remarking events. Augury and science, for Serres, are not about extension and
effective networks, but about learning to be affected and to be affective in an
eventful, differentiating world.
Finally, for Serres, the augury lesson is one that requires re-learning, for we have
forgotten what it means to pay heed to anything but (human spoken) language.
Comparing the Roman emperors with contemporary world leaders, Serres
satirizes it thus:
I would love to see those who claim to hold the destiny of the world in their
hands, whose images we see and whose voices we hear ten times a day, in
these times when politics has been reduced to publicizing the State – I
would love to see them down in the farmyard, their brows furrowed,
meditative. Oh to see them thus, standing and gaping in anticipation!
The tragedy of speech collapses in laughter.
(Serres, 2008, p. 99)
The tragedy of speech is contained in the double meaning of addiction. While to

be addicted is to be made able to speak (through sensing the world and through
giving favour), addictions are also a sentence, a dependence. Herein lies the tragedy
for Serres, for there is nothing more noisy and disturbing than endless speech-
making (those voices we hear ten times a day, publicizing the state). So while
augury was once the subject of laughter for the rational philosophers, it is now the
turn of language and speech to collapse in laughter. Indeed, pushing this a little
further, it is the tragedy of a failure to engage with the ad-dictions of avian and
other nonhuman lives that could, in an age of avian influenzas and other zoonotic
diseases, prompt some soul-searching of its own. Before I return to this tragedy of
too much speech and too little noise, and before I reflect further on this tragic
failure of a politics over life, I need to say a little more about biopolitics and how
this interest in the communing of sensing opens up a livelier and nosier biopolitics.
A livelier biopolitics and a noisier sentience

This is not the place to exhaustively review biopolitics (see Campbell and Sitze,
2013; Lemke, 2011), but it is worth making three points that can help to draw the
links between the interest here in a noisier sentience, with its resonance chambers
and feathered turbulence, and a politics of life.
First, as is well known, biopolitics was a term coined by Michel Foucault to
mark a shift in emphasis in the government of human societies. In brief, it signals
a broadening of the techniques and apparatus of government from the disciplining
of individual bodies to the knowledgeable manipulation of a population, of
statistics and, crudely, the use of precise mechanisms and processes associated with
broad-scale changes as a means to affect the direction of those changes (Foucault,
1981, p. 137). The broad story is that nascent life sciences and statistics, many of
them honed in plant and livestock management, enter or become intricate with
politics in the guise of a range of regularized processes that could be more or less
effectively arranged in order to achieve an optimal result. The commonly noted
point is that the term applies largely to the management of society, and to humans,
and seeks to render the material or nonhuman world as predictable (speaking
before the event), at least at the level of population.
Second, and somewhat in contrast, biopolitics is also always a more-than-human
endeavour. Indeed, populations are not to be read as equivalent to a set of people.
They are risk pools, ‘literally inscribed through number, tabulation and calculation’
(Thacker, 2009, p. 142). And in being so, they necessarily incorporate all manner
of physical, environmental, biological and economic processes and ‘things’. Indeed,
Foucault (2007) stressed that the paradigmatic space of biopolitics was not so much
the territory of the state or nation, but the circulation of people, goods, finance and
so on. Circulation is both the lifeblood and the threat to a liberal society, a point
that brings forth the immunitary practices that have come to be known as security
(Esposito, 2011). This feature makes biopolitics rather less about the government
of ‘men’ and more about the government of ‘a complex of men and things’
(Foucault, 2007, p. 96; Lemke, 2015). This more relational, less determinate reading
of biopolitics prompts both sociologist Thomas Lemke and the geographer Chris
Philo (2012) to suggest that Foucault’s work be read in a less structuring, more
eventful manner. So we shouldn’t necessarily equate biopolitics with power over,
or control, or government, or necessarily with a narrowly anthropocentric logic,
but with a contingent and always to be worked out ‘intrication’ of humans and
nonhumans (Foucault, 2007; Lemke, 2015).
The final point is key, as it unsettles the anthropocentrism that inheres to a
biopolitics that is rooted in the Heideggerian distinction between proper and
improper life (Agamben, 2002; Campbell, 2011; Wolfe, 2013). It is a distinction that,
for Cary Wolfe (2013) in particular, results in the separation of ‘truly’ human life
from sub-human and animal life, and sanctions what he calls the non-criminal
putting to death of people, domestic and wild animals.
The point to raise here is that the creaturely sentience as I have described it so
far can be used to undermine any straightforward or foundational distinction
between humans and others. If birds helped to found Rome, and if speech acts are
addicted to nonhuman movement, then the proper and the improper cannot be
divided thus. Humans are predicated on nonhumans. Nevertheless, the resources
for avoiding this disqualification of many lives in the name of proper life are not
easy to discern, particularly when biopolitics is often read as a matter of
government towards specific ends rather than a politics of life whose ends are to
be discerned. But it is clear that simply stating that people and things are ‘intricated’
is insufficient for a different kind of biopolitics. Wolfe, for example offers a critique
of both the acceptance of an ahistorical humanism and what he sees as a blanket
affirmation of or pure hospitality to all forms of life. Here (and contra Wolfe), it
may be that Esposito’s immunitarian thinking offers us some hope. In basic terms,
Esposito rehearses some familiar political theory on the intricate relations between
privacy and publicity (for example in the question of property) and demonstrates
how the political notion of community is dependent on immunity, and how the
derived sense of biological immunity is constantly configured and reconfigured
through communing with others (Esposito, 2008, 2011). The simple point for now
is that immunity is a continuous process of communication (not pure hospitality
to others). Rather than pure hospitality, Esposito starts to outline a process whereby
living requires neither inclusion nor exclusion, but a continuous intra-active
learning process where the spatiality of entanglements is altogether more varied.
Haraway was here first of course and alerted us not to the borderless world but to
a borderlands that involves what Esposito later termed non-exclusive exclusion:
‘The pleasures promised here are not those libertarian masculinist fantasmics of the
infinitely regressive practice of boundary violation and the accompanying frisson
of brotherhood, but just maybe the pleasure of regeneration in less deadly,

chiasmatic borderlands’ (Haraway, 1993, p. 306).
Like the immune process wherein poison and cure can amount to the same
thing, the trick is to find means of learning from difference by engaging with, and
being exposed to difference. There cannot in this sense be a foundational
separation between the proper and the improper. Rather there is community that
is always already based on immunity. So, writing of the immunological conundrum
that is pregnancy in mammals, in a phrasing that would please Serres, Esposito
writes:
The fact that the genetic heterogeneity of the fetus rather than its genetic
similarity is what encourages the mother’s immune system cannot be
reduced to the simple function of rejecting all things foreign. If anything, the
immune system must be interpreted as an internal resonance chamber, like the
diaphragm, through which difference, as such, engages and traverses us.
(Esposito, 2011, p. 18, emphasis added)
This recurrence of the resonance chamber, this noisy, amplificatory, intensifying

and eventful figure, through which difference traverses us, provides some kind of
resource for working together a different kind of biopolitics with the activity of
being or becoming sentient together. So I want to return to the laughable
politicians with furrowed brows standing in the farmyard, and to knowing birds, to
indicate where this might go.
A perceptual ecology of knowing birds

The last few decades have been punctuated with events, particularly disease events,
that have drawn statesmen and stateswomen to the farmyard. From mad cow
disease to bovine tuberculosis, and severe acute respiratory syndrome to highly
pathological avian influenza, the fortunes of government ministers and even prime
ministers and presidents have risen and fallen as a result of their ability to handle
the labyrinthine complexities of trade, animal health, risk, public health and
countryside (Hinchliffe, 2001; Law, 2006). So in this sense politicians are on the
farm, brows furrowed. They too are concerned with matters of empire, with
powers to act. And scientists accompany them, trying to discern a world
independent of people. And yet, as Serres laments, perhaps those politicians have
forgotten the art of composition, an art that would make those repeated visits to
the farm less and less like déjà vu. How, then, to sense differently and to develop a
different kind of biopolitics? Let me return to the birds, to the wonders and threats
of avian and viral circulation as it developed once the viral cloud called H5N1
started to move over the United Kingdom in 2005.
In autumn, on the wetlands of the British Isles, bird people eagerly await the
return of seasonal migrating birds. Lying on the edge of the Eurasian land mass and
warmed by the Gulf Stream, these islands make a particularly favourable destination
for winter migratory visitors from Northern Europe, Siberia, Canada and Iceland.
Indeed no equivalent-sized area on Earth draws its wintering birds from such a
wide latitudinal span (Newton, 2010). Come spring, wildfowl and waders relying
on winter lakes that seldom freeze over will make their way to higher latitudes
where the lengthier days make for rich feeding and nesting grounds. At that time
of year, other birds, from as far away as South Africa and the Antarctic, will start to
migrate north to Great Britain and Ireland, taking advantage of the mild summer
and the new abundance of food.
It’s easy as a researcher amongst ornithologists to sense the anticipation as the
winter migration approaches. News passes from birders in the near continent, in
the Netherlands and Belgium: birds are on their way. Bird people watch the skies
for known birds and are visibly excited and relieved when they arrive ‘home’. The
differences from year to year in migratory arrival dates, with early birds returning
in October and late ones inching into November, provides a side show of endless
discussion about normal annual variation and weather patterns, and the more
sinister possibility that there are noisy signals of a shift in climate. Arriving birds
may be the harbingers of bad tidings with respect to the coming winter or even
shifts in climate, but the east winds that can accompany their arrival are the only
similarity to Du Maurier’s famous short story The Birds. Any foreboding in the
offices of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust relates to concerns over the plight of
individual birds, known to reserve workers for years or even decades. Their lives
and deaths are related to conservation concerns, to reductions in wetland habitat
along the ‘corridors’ that migrating birds use and which are vital stopovers and
feeding stations on their long and arduous journeys. There is a curiosity to see
which birds have returned, how they have fared and what social relations they have
maintained or started. The sense is one of hospitality to the wild migrant, and an
oft-expressed wonder at the capacity of birds to move long distances, to return to
the same places and to maintain social groupings through intercontinental
migrations, sometimes despite the odds.
This hospitality is underwritten with a suite of activities that contribute to the
knowing of migrations. This knowing is, as Serres might have anticipated, a
composite activity that enacts a sensuous world, a world that ‘blooms into life’
(Brown, 2011, p. 164). In other words, knowing birds is not a matter of human
subjects getting to know their avian objects through a representational economy so
much as a process of human-avian intra-actions. Sensing birds involves a suite of
embodied activities, bodies arched forward, lenses at hand and to eye. There are
rapid movements of eye muscle, retinas primed to ‘jizz’ (a mode of recognition
based on the slightest of ‘signals’, be that a silhouette, a fleeting glimpse, a reading
of proportion or a characteristic movement – it’s a semiotics of the fleetingly
readable). In short, there’s an embodied readiness to the world, an affective
attunement to avian bodies and movements. Using these learnt if not easily
codified ways of knowing, species are identified usually without a thought. The
material semiotics of the fleetingly readable are added to and made sense within a
set of other avian knowledge practices. There are counts, observations, ringing and
tracking, and I’ll say something about each in turn, but will focus for the main part
on observation.
The following field diary entry evokes the activity that takes place as part of a
routine day on a wetland reserve in Gloucestershire, England:
Up in an observation tower, a reserve warden counts Siberian white fronted

geese grazing in the fields along the estuary. ‘They’re a flagship bird.
Slimbridge has one of the biggest flocks in the UK, so we try to count them
daily on our rounds’. He’s also quick to spot new and unusual arrivals. ‘I
know this place like the back of my hand’, he says. ‘It took me only 30
seconds to get onto that ring necked duck’. The ring necked duck was a
single small brown bird amongst a dense mass of hundreds of ducks and
swans at the dawn feed. It’s a rare visitor to the reserve and news of which
will be circulated via visitor boards and blogs.3
So birds are identified, sometimes counted in order to compile population data, and
the out of the ordinary are quickly registered. The counts serve all kinds of
knowledge-building programmes, furnishing longitudinal studies of species
numbers which can, for instance, feed into studies of environmental change. In
addition, some species of bird are observed in detail, a practice that allows for
identification of individuals and social groups and helps to generate records of a
bird’s life, habits and relations. It’s a practice that may have a long and unwritten
history, but it is notable that here charismatic species become entangled with
charismatic and foundational figures in the twentieth-century conservation
movement. These ‘visionary’ pioneers managed to learn to be affected by morpho-
logical differences and generate a mode of recognition based less on the fleeting
glimpse and more on studied observation. So, Peter Scott, the huntsman turned
conservationist, artist and founder of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, learnt
through the careful observation and painting of birds that each Bewick’s swan had
an individual bill patterning. From the late 1950s, having successfully attracted
migrating Bewick’s swans to Slimbridge on the Severn in Gloucestershire, he
started to sketch every Bewick visitor to the reserve. Noting in his diary that this
minute and detailed observation ‘may or may not be scientifically useful’, 4 this is
now one of the longest running single species studies in the world.
Scott’s sketches (Figure 9.1) may appear at first sight to be nothing more than
an identification chart, a series of mug shots. But this is to miss the shift its
production configures in the ways in which bird lives are sensed. No longer a mass
of undifferentiated life, to be hunted or otherwise, the procession of swans
contributes to a reshaping of the ways in which humans start to engage with avian
lives. It is then, a sensorium of avian life – or, to co-opt Donald Mackenzie’s (2008)
phrase used in a very different context, the chart is as much an engine as a camera,
contributing to a shift in the sensing of life (on sensoria in multi-species anthro-
pology and feminism, see Hayward, 2010a, 2010b).
Informed no doubt by the work of Julian Huxley and others in developing
FIGURE 9.1 Scott’s swan sensorium

Source: Peter’s Bewick’s bill patterns, photographed by the author and used with the permission of the
Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, England
avian ethology (Huxley, 1912; Matless, et al., 2005), Scott noted each swan’s arrival
and/or return in autumn, as well as each bird’s habits and social behaviour. The
birds were differentiated on the basis of their beak patterns, but at the same their
associations and relations became matters for study. And these detailed observations
are still practised over half a century on, with certain staff maintaining the
painstaking work of learning to sense individual birds and record their movements
and social relations (their pairings, partings and battles), and adding to this database
any observations of health, status and changes in demeanour. The following extract
of field notes gives a sense of this activity:
From a pile on her desk, she pulls a clipped bundle of A5 papers. Each sheet
represents an individual bird, and has been produced from a template. There
are fields for notes about the individual bird, and blank outlines of a swan
head and beak on which the pattern can be drawn from the front and the
side view. ‘The process of drawing helps you remember,’ she says. She also
prefers drawing as it’s faster than setting up a camera for a photo when you
may only get a momentary glimpse of a bird … Every year she tries to
identify and record all wild swans over a year old that visit the reserve. Birds
that she can’t recognize fall into two categories: those that are confident, and
those that fly away at the bird feed. From this behaviour she judges whether
they are returning birds, in which case she must work through the records of
bill patterns to figure out which bird it might be, or a first-timer, in which
case she gives the bird a name and records its particulars.
What Scott’s sensorium and these field practices make clear is a mode of recognition
or differentiation that is careful, meticulous, repetitious, systematic and storable.
Moreover, for the social scientist in their midst, it’s notable that this is a mode of
attention that is quiet, patient and, to return to Serres, is the pre-condition for
speech. It is, to repeat, sensorial, a folding together and a blossoming of avian life,
and, despite the artifice of the landscape, the fact that the birds wouldn’t be here at
all if it wasn’t for Scott’s work, and for all the talk of bigger schemes, through this
science or augury, ‘a world independent of men’ (Serres, 2008, p. 102) flickers to life.
Species counts and on-site observations can help in developing the histories of
both bird populations and individual birds, and can also hint at movements, but it
is the ringing and tracking practices that really draw other places and migratory
routes into avian sensing. The first known bird ring was crafted by a Danish
schoolmaster in 1899, and since then the process of catching, ringing, releasing, re-
capturing and so on involves an international network of practitioners, data sharing
and electronic handling. Four million birds are ringed annually in Europe with a
re-sighting rate approximate to about 2 per cent of that number. Meanwhile,
tracking technologies provide for a much smaller but more reliable sample of avian
lives (for a recent review of tracking and population technologies, see for example
Braverman, 2014).
To be clear, I’m not trying to romanticize any of these activities, suggest their
innocence or mark them off as separate to or absolutely distinct from other kinds
of knowing. But, the point to emphasize for now is that within this suite of
practices there is an affective register that is more than body snatching, more than
simple representation. There is a knowing together, a folding together of twitchers
and birds, a becoming avian even, which is born from a repetitious making of
differences. From the embodied memory work of sketching beak patterns, to the
careful attachment of devices and rings to delicate feathered bodies, there is a
sensorial link made between avian and human bodies. The links are perhaps not
quite ones that entail a move from avian lives to Roman gods, and so fearful
worship. But there is a linking together of experience and cognition that is
productive of a reverence for avian life. Ornithology is then more than a matter of
accounting or drawing avian lives into the world of people. It’s a perceptual
ecology that involves intra-actions of people and birds.
Surveying life
If the observational science of ornithology is characterized by hospitality, the
welcome returns of travellers signalling another year of a frail order, then the advent
of highly pathogenic avian influenza threatened to overturn these established

modes of recognition, with hospitality giving way to hostility. A now familiar if
over-stated story is the resulting transformation of wetlands into frontlines in the
fight against the incursion of disease, with ornithologists becoming part of an ever
extending border agency in the fight against pandemic influenza (in geography, see
Braun, 2007; Wilbert, 2006). In biopolitical terms, the arts of ornithological
composition have been extended to a power over life, to the government of things.
And yet, life and knowing birds is not so easily co-opted. As I now go on to show,
the object-rich observational sciences with their more-than-human sentience
seem to desist from any easy affiliation to a control over life.
With the advent of the viral cloud called variously H5N1, highly pathogenic
avian influenza and Asian flu, migrating birds shifted from being a delight to being,
in some quarters at least, a possible danger, an invading presence, even a source of
terror. 5 Wild birds traversed and linked spaces and places across Eurasia where
highly pathogenic avian influenza was considered to be circulating within wild and
domestic bird populations. The migratory maps that ornithologists had produced
suddenly represented pathways from avian to human lives through the amplifi-
catory effects of domestic bird flocks. To be sure, and as others have demonstrated,
hospitality may well be permanently marked by the potential for things going
wrong, or for visitations to turn hostile (Derrida, 2002). Indeed, the desire that is
embodied in the observations of migrating birds, the alterity, the other worldliness
of avian lives, may well be contingent upon the possibility for things to be
otherwise. Migrating wild birds may well be both intoxicating and potentially
threatening. This is the unconditional condition for hospitality within Derrida’s
thought (Hagglund, 2008). Hospitality can never be unconditional in the idealized
sense as an opening to alterity, but is always haunted by the possibility for things to
go awry. That is, the very exposure of human and avian lives to one another is also
an exposure to incalculable or indeterminate others. The latter, wildness so to
speak, is both the source of threat but also, it needs to be emphasized, a pre-
condition for good. So things might go wrong in the hospitable relation, but also
for Derrida ‘nothing would be desirable without’ the possibility that the good
‘bears the cause of its own destruction within itself ’ (Hagglund, 2010, p. 297). The
immunitarian trope returns then as auto-immunity, but for now it is important to
briefly outline the practices that are involved in this making hospitality conditional.
The possibility that the arrival of migrating wild birds might augur an epizootic
in domestic livestock and, even worse, transform into a zoonotic disease capable of
mutating to become a human pandemic, initiated a set of responses from state and
industry that largely focused on biosecurity. In brief, these involved a risk-based
analysis of migratory sites and species, a sampling of found dead, shot and healthy
wild birds, screening of those samples for influenza, measures to separate wild and
domestic species and ornithological studies of affected sites in order to develop
appropriate exclusion and containment policies (Hinchliffe and Lavau, 2013). In
effect, the overall programme was one of separating domestic life from wildlife and
a policing of both in order to provide early warnings of infringements and
implement lockdown emergency measures (further containment and suspensions

of movements) once the sequestered safe life had been or was in danger of being
breached (Hinchliffe, et al., 2013).
In generating risk knowledge through to populating studies with samples and
expertise judgements, ornithologists were involved in offering practical expertise
and the labour necessary to developing what could be called, in the round, avian
surveillance. So for example, in developing an analysis of at-risk sites and species,
ornithological experts contributed their knowledge of migration routes and usual
feeding and nesting locations. Through longstanding pathological studies, they
could estimate which species were more likely to host the avian influenza virus,
with or without clinical symptoms. This knowledge, along with coarse-grained
information on British poultry, resulted in a prioritizing of certain locations and
species as most at risk of introducing HPAI to the United Kingdom and then
passing it to domestic livestock. Routine ringing practices were then augmented
with disease surveillance – the sampling of birds and the taking of biological
samples within which the presence or absence of avian influenza was to be
determined. As I wrote in my field notes:
I join a vet at the swab station. It’s her only real task for the day – she has
had to put one bird down, a mute swan with a foot problem, but all the other
birds have been healthy and released, seemingly unscathed by the whole
ordeal. She inserts a barcoded swab, a bit like a cotton bud stick, into the
bird’s mouth and about 6 cm down the throat. A gentle twist and then out,
into a plastic cylinder with a stopper top. This is placed in a box with the
others – the same is then done for the anus … [T]he birds are then weighed,
and we then carry them through a gate, behind a hide, and release them back
on to the mere.
The swab samples are carefully placed into boxes, onto which are attached
symbols indicating hazardous materials, and they will go back to Slimbridge
before going off to Weybridge in Surrey for analysis. 6
As was the case for the observation of birds, the bird survey is a repetitive and costly
process. At the time of the field ethnography around 4,000 wildfowl needed to be
caught per year in order to generate 8,000 swabs for the Avian Influenza Wildbird
Survey. Birds could only be caught at certain times of the year (in late autumn and
winter, before nesting takes place). An average catch, most usually making use of a
baited tunnel on a wetland reserve, would yield around 200 to 400 birds, and each
catch would take a good part of the day and involve a team of around 10 to 20
people. When you add in the laboratory time necessary to characterize all these
samples, as well as those sent in from shot and found dead birds, then the scope of
the survey in terms of the time and cost implications, if not in terms of its ability
to pick up a disease signal, becomes clear (for more detail on the survey and the
laboratory process, see Hinchliffe and Lavau, 2013).
There are undoubtedly some similarities between the observational work that I
discussed earlier, wherein a world of difference is produced through a sensorial

process, and the survey. There is a repetitious intensity and a care for birds.Yet there
are also crucial distinctions to be made. This is a technique that at least in theory
is set up to record the presence or absence of notifiable pathogens within wild
birds. Repetition here does not yield difference, or a new sensorium, but provides
confirmation or otherwise of the disease status of wild bird life. On the surface at
least it is a yes/no technique with little room for qualifiers or grey areas. In that
sense, there are known identities and categories (viruses), which are being surveyed
for transgressions (are they here?), with any positive result invoking a statutory
declaration of a notifiable disease with all the legal and international requirements
for spatial containment.
If the observation of birds provides an exemplar of the pre-condition for
knowing and sensing, then the survey might well be closer to what Serres (2008,
p. 39) somewhat polemically critiques as a ‘surveillance of relationships’. Here
Serres attempts to tease apart the observational sciences from what Foucault tended
to lump together as a largely synonymous grouping of surveillance, observation and
control. And a key difference for Serres in these modes of recognition is the status
of the object or ‘things’. In surveillance we are in the theatre of politics wherein
objects just are and the job of the surveyor is merely to police the relations between
these known entities. It’s a world without time, a Euclidean space of billiard-ball
entities, whose relations are only ones of geometrical distance and proximity. As
the geographer Doreen Massey (2005) would say, such a timeless world is also a
world without spatial multiplicity, a world where nothing new can happen. It’s also
a world that moves from (fixed) objects to their relationships, and in the process the
object effectively disappears as a matter of interest. In this sense politics is, for Serres
(2008, p. 40), ‘object poor’. And when the philosophies without object encounter
an object, ‘they change it, by sleight of hand, into a relationship, language or
representation’ (Serres, 2008, p. 41).
Observation and the sciences, however, come after the object and ‘foster its
emergence’ (Serres, 2008, p. 41). Observation is object rich, and is concerned with
things. Things, indeed, are in time, historical and, I would argue, geographical. That
is they are always in process, partially related – certainly not determined by those
relations, least of all by their relationships to people (Clark, 2010) – and spatially
multiple. This is one of the key lessons of the last few decades of science studies. To
observe and to observe well is to learn to be affected by the world (Latour, 2004), to
be attuned to it (Despret, 2004), to engage in building a sensorium and, in doing so,
to make differences. Rather than move from fixed and time- and space-less objects
to the surveillance and policing of their relationships, observation focuses on things-
in-relation, to their configurations and differences. To say it quickly, instead of
marking presence and absence of a virus, a more creaturely sentience attends to the
viral cloud. As Lowe’s ethnography of bird flu suggests, and as work in a broader
project called biosecurity borderlands also underlines, this cloud can be thought of as
a sensorium of differentiating and swarming viruses, of selection pressures, of avian
lives lived at the edge of biological margins (Hinchliffe, et al., 2013; Lowe, 2010).
For Serres (2008, p. 39), this ‘immense difference between the observation of
things and the surveillance of relationships’ which mark out two worlds and two
times in opposition – ‘that of myth and that of our history’ – is not simply a matter
of contrasting modes of address, but also marks out a formative and generative
condition for politics and culture. Moreover, Serres (2008, p. 39) continues, the
society where surveillance dominates ‘ages quickly, becoming old-fashioned and
abusively archaic. The past lurks there like a monster, harking back to the age of
myth’. But what is it to ‘age quickly’? Serres is ostensibly writing about the
exclusionary suspicions that lie within a marriage or a community, and the anxiety
that generates nothing but premature ageing. But to age quickly is also to become
out of date, to assume that any knowledge accrued is unconditional and
unchanging. It is to become too focused on the prematurely fixed objects (in this
case to fix a virus rather than see it as a constantly varying swarm of differentiated
elements and relations). It is to seek to police their relationships rather than allow
observation to engage with the constantly changing world of things and relations.
The broader point is that surveillance requires observation, and this changes the
politics from one of regularization and arrangement of things, to an engagement
with the resonance chamber of learning to sense and sense well. To be sure, this
worldly mutability and the constant vigilance that it seems to suggest has its own
troubles, not least of which is the co-option of life’s difference and differentiating
character as a means to govern through anxiety (Cooper, 2008; Lentzos and Rose,
2009). Nevertheless, once we allow the creaturely sentience of Serres to trouble the
ends of government, and not simply the means, then we start, at least, to configure
a different kind of life politics by challenging the ends of that politics.
Conclusions
I started this chapter with Serres and the soothsayers and auspices of ancient Rome.
I ended with a sense of what it might mean to talk again of knowing birds. To see
our politicians in the farmyard with furrowed brows observing birds would be
rather different to the fast-twitch responses that characterize the will to draw life
into the governance of things. If the soothsayers underlined that the polis has
always been a biopolis, then Serres’s excursion into sensing and sensing well
reminds us of the addictions that make speech and politics possible. This is a livelier,
noisier biopolitics. It is one that challenges not just the means of government but
its ends too. In this sense, we might not best view biopolitics as necessarily
involving the insertion or intrication of humans, nonhumans and otherwise, into
an already constituted biopower. Such powers over life inevitably fail; for Serres,
they age quickly and become obsolete. There is something that escapes in knowing
birds, that cannot be grasped, and that renders a policing of relations problematic.
Knowing birds involves a different kind of biopolis which continuously reminds us
of the more than human conditions for speech. It provides an opening, however
hesitant, onto the powers of life and of living together.
Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter was completed on receipt of a UK Economic Research
Council Grant entitled Biosecurity Borderlands RES-062-23-1882. Thanks to
Stephanie Lavau for supporting the fieldwork and for conversations on knowing
birds. Thanks also to Kristin Asdal and Astrid Schrader for insightful comments on
an earlier draft. All errors and shortcomings remain mine.
Notes
1 Livy, 6.41: auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace domi militiaeque omnia
geri, quis est qui ignoret? (‘Who does not know that this city was founded only after
taking the auspices, that everything in war and in peace, at home and abroad, was done
only after taking the auspices?’).
2 I’m relying here on Connor’s (2008) excellent and informative commentaries on
Serres’s collective body of work.
3 The diaries combine my own recording with those of Stephanie Lavau, who wrote this
entry. My thanks to Stephanie Lavau, who completed the ethnography of wildfowl
reserves in this part of the project.
4 The diaries from the earliest days of the Slimbridge project are kept in staff offices at
the WWT headquarters in Slimbridge. This is one of the earliest entries by Scott.
5 The distinction between a biological terrorism as orchestrated by enemies of the state
and that generated through emerging infectious diseases was, for some, becoming less
pertinent in a world that was being more anxious of, if not really prepared for,
unpredictable events. See Cooper (2006).
6 Author’s field notes.
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10
LOVING CAMELS, SACRIFICING
SHEEP, SLAUGHTERING GAZELLES
Human-animal relations in contemporary
desert fiction
Susan McHugh
In 2013, a photograph of approximately 20 dead, gutted bodies ran in international

news media with the ominous headline, ‘Libya’s Desert Gazelles under Threat of
Extinction’. The accompanying story casts the disappearance of hunting
regulations as at once an unintended outcome of the Arab Spring uprisings and an
extension of an ecological tragedy that scientists have been tracking across decades:
the rapid decline of the three remaining gazelle species from their last, large, de
facto refuge (Essul and Tombokti, 2013).1 Quoting Saleh Nuwaiji, President of the
Al-Haya Association for the Protection of Wildlife, the animals are portrayed in the
accompanying news story as becoming the wrong victims of ‘a desire to murder’
that now roams unchecked in the interstices between dictatorial and other
possibilities for statehood. Visually presented like the corpses of human migrants
who were persecuted on suspicion of being counter-insurgency mercenaries
during the Libyan Civil War, the dead gazelles in the photo all but reference the far
more deeply entangled conditions of statelessness that are shared across species
lines.
No longer state welfare recipients, now victims of an atavistic reversion of a
newly armed populace to a time of chaos – all too conveniently presumed to be
the only alternative to civilization – animals become enlisted in their own erasure
from history, in this case, together with nomadic human populations as well. Why
not ask: how have gazelles survived for millennia alongside the likewise migratory
peoples of the inner Sahara, and along with them become written out of history?
How might we think and speak of the losses of species as enmeshed with losses of
indigenous cultures and customs, such as local taboos against killing juvenile or
female animals, that conserved co-existence long before Arab and European
colonizers carved up the land? What if, quite apart from the rises and falls of
modern states, their stories were envisioned in terms of the biopolitical relations of
companion species? 2
172 Susan McHugh
In the decades leading up to these events, exiled Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni
explored such questions through fictions centred on the highly culturally specific
lived relations of nomadic peoples and gazelles along with camels and other creatures
finding anything but protection from colonial and postcolonial states. Referencing as
well as integrating creative expressions like proverbs, rock carvings, paintings and
storytelling, his novels extend a pattern in which art methods gain recognition not
only as refuges for collective memories of the colonized but also as a means of
theorizing indigenous experience, providing a critical counter-narrative to the
disempowering stereotypes of his protagonists as members of ‘passive and
manipulated traditional peoples without history’ (Ahmida, 2009, p. 3). 3 In their
stories, as imagined by al-Koni, men wielding automatic weapons and four-wheel-
drive vehicles are viewed only ever as invaders, as intruders encountering resistance
from deep within the locals’ own intersecting perspectives.
Two of al-Koni’s novels that were initially published in 1990 explicitly centre
on lived relations of interdependence among desert species: Al-Tibir, the English-
language version of which appeared in 2008 as Gold Dust, follows a loving but
doomed relationship of interspecies intersubjectivity shared between a tribesman
and a camel; and Naz īf al-Hajar, translated to English in 2002 as The Bleeding of the
Stone, uses encounters between humans, goats, camels and rare gazelles as well as
extinct mouflons – a large-horned species of wild mountain sheep thought to be
an ancestor of all modern sheep, and called in the local dialects (as al-Koni prefers)
waddan – to script the grim fate of a traditional herdsman. What distinguishes these
novels is their emphasis on re-animating the dead and dying within the modern
histories of species extinction and tribal peoples’ genocide in Libya, and in ways
that represent these particular humans and animals on their own deeply enmeshed
terms. In the process, al-Koni pursues some unique potentials for fiction that are
glanced in recent discussions of biopolitical theory.
Once lauded as the form that gave voice to the subject of the Enlightenment,
the novel is now seen as central to the valorization of intersubjective human-
animal relations as well as to the growing awareness of the intercorporeality of
mixed-species populations (McHugh, 2011). Along the way, these developments in
fiction mark not a de-personalizing so much as an im-personalizing process that
can be elaborated through Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical reading of Gilles
Deleuze. For Deleuze, fiction can figure forth an ‘impersonal singularity (or
singular impersonality)’ that ‘traverses men as well as plants and animals
independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their
personality’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 194). Esposito points to Deleuze’s interpretation of
the coma-reawakening sequence in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) to
illustrate that such a fictional depiction of life at its limit does not illustrate the
transcendence of ‘a norm of life’ so much as it crystallizes the Deleuzian sense of
‘the norm [as] the immanent impulse of life’:
It is this biojuridical node between life and norm that Deleuze invites us to
untie in a form that, rather than separating them, recognizes the one in the
Human-animal relations in desert fiction 173
other, and discovers in life its immanent norm, giving to the norm the
potentiality of life’s becoming.
(Esposito, 2008, p. 194)
There is much more to say about the biopolitical ‘presupposition’ here ‘that any
thing that lives needs to be thought in the unity of life’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 194) –
a ‘unity’ that is at once ‘a co-belonging of what is different’ (Campbell, 2008, p.
xxxi) – not the least of which is that Esposito articulates here some grounds for
agreement that the relations of lives in their singularities to the potentialities for
collective life are further linked to forms of communication, more specifically,
fictions of life pushed to the limits of existence.
In a very different context, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) likewise
figure singularity as linked to cross-species relations and fictions, and their more
recent examples are stories of and by indigenous peoples. Oriented towards futures
that hinge on singularities, whether ones that involve transforming identities, tradi-
tions and forms of resistance to unsettle relations of agency and power, Hardt and
Negri (2009, p. 105) point to Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s
contemporary fictions of indigenous life as exemplary. A key strategy of conveying
what they term alter-modern (as an alternative to fixed dialectical anti/modern)
senses of singularity, her novels outline ‘not simply the preservation of nature but the
development and reproduction of “social” relations … between humans and non-
humans’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 125). Although their ‘emphasis on the singularity
and commonality of the multitude’ becomes problematic from Esposito’s perspective
– precisely because it ‘may in fact be an attempt to ward off any suggestion of an
underlying antinomy between the multitude as a radically new social formation and
personal identity’ (Campbell, 2008, p. xxviii) – all together share a biopolitical sense
of singularity as taking shape in certain approaches to fiction writing.
Within literary studies, such potentials are not so easy to grasp, for the
postcolonial frameworks applied to stories of indigeneity tend to reduce
singularities like the endangered human-animal relations central to al-Koni’s
fiction to symbolic extensions of the indigenous human individual. While not
overtly patronizing, postcolonialist critics’ interpretations of al-Koni’s animist
figures and events strictly in terms of stand-ins for the human betray a curiously
studied ignorance of what not so long ago were readily dismissed as the simplistic
hallmarks of so-called primitive forms, like legends and folktales. Such a myopic
interpretive focus mirrors the ‘metaphor model’ problem in anthropology, through
which the agency of nonhuman actors likewise has long been dismissed as a
fanciful figure for human action, or, in Foucauldian terms, a substitute for the
human subject of anatamo-politics. In Deleuzian terms, this way of reading also
becomes troubling because it underestimates the novelist’s interest in ‘link[ing]
forms of communication to singular lives open to each other in a community’
(Campbell, 2008, p. xxx), or, more specifically, lives that hinge on the continuance
of a sense of community, and thereby securing a space for critiquing relations of
knowledge and biopower.
174 Susan McHugh
Reading al-Koni’s animism and other manifestations of highly localized

knowledges of human-animal relations instead in the new anthropological terms
of an ‘indigenous metaphysics’ helps to explain how these fictions deeply unsettle
‘ontological certainties’ by forcing a ‘critical dialogue’ concerning ‘theories of
knowledge’ (Willerslev, 2007, p. 3). From the perspective of animal studies theorists,
crucial to the process is engagement with creative practices on their own terms, as
offering a ‘distinct way of framing or unframing issues’ that employs ‘different tools
for thinking’ – albeit tools that are ‘viewed with suspicion because of their unfamil-
iarity’ (Baker, 2013, p. 2). At least, this begins to explain the allure and danger for
contemporary novelists of narrating the singularities of indigenous lives rendered
at once unique and rare in their cross-species interdependencies. Blasting open the
ideological fields that otherwise legitimate their mass killings, al-Koni’s novels offer
no sunny escapes to a fantasied idyll before colonialist history but rather work to
situate the exterminationist politics of the state amid possibilities for biopolitical
alternatives.
This chapter elaborates how certain creative elements of al-Koni’s fictions build
in ways of reading them on their own desert nomad terms, which in turn sustain
ways of knowing that serve as a powerful counter to the postcolonialist emphasis
on ‘transcendental’ qualities in lieu of the immanence of shared human and animal
lives (Sperl, 2006, p. 248). Viewing his animal representations anthropocentrically
as stand-ins or substitutes for people proves hard to reconcile with what for many
readers makes these narratives so special, namely their scrupulous attention to the
histories and material realities of Saharan life. In the sub-field of Arabic literary
studies, al-Koni’s novels are praised as pivotal for re-orienting the novel form away
from urban – or ‘oasis’ (another of al-Koni’s preferred terms) – settings, and towards
the desert countryside (Hafez, 2002, p. 55). By comparing his representations of
humans sacrificing sheep, loving camels and slaughtering gazelles across Gold Dust
and The Bleeding of the Stone, in what follows I elaborate how it is not simply the
arid and semi-arid landscapes but rather the multispecies singularities of severely
persecuted desert dwellers that make these novels so productively unsettling.
Sacrificing sheep
The most widely translated Arabic novelist today, al-Koni has long lived in exile in
Switzerland, but he was born in southeastern Libya into the nomadic, matriarchal
Tuareg (also Touareg or Tawāriq) tribe, who have long been notorious for their
veiled men, a practice that reflects their own highly localized adaptation of Islam
to a matriarchal culture with ancient roots across this region, and in recent years
for their political reassertion in the fissures of African states. Because they ‘endorse
an ideology that includes “statelessness” as an important feature of their identity’
(Calleja, 2012, p. 37), Tuareg tribespeople are seen as threatening in their
wandererings. They have been known to inhabit the deepest Sahara, ranging from
eastern Libya and southern Algeria to northern Burkina Faso, and their trade routes
cross most of Mali and Niger in between. The Tuareg’s home ‘is not the semidesert
conveniently close to major conurbations that most western visitors to the region
get to see’, explains one critic, ‘but the desolate wastes’ (Allen, 1997, p. 154).
Through details in al-Koni’s novels, his people’s history unfolds as one of systematic
persecution that derives from their allegiance to no single nation but rather to a
way of life that is inseparable from the grazing animals of the open desert.
In this extreme setting, human-animal encounters become terrific sources of
drama, more often than not proving matters of life and death, and in so doing
confront readers with a mindset in which survival entails resignation to an
indigenous desert metaphysics that defies settled reasoning. As one character in The
Bleeding of the Stone enigmatically illustrates, the Sahara at its deepest ‘hides all sorts
of treasures, including extinct animals’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 125). Steeped at once in
the nomad’s worldview and the aphoristic modes of expression favoured by locals,
such comments announce these fictions’ profound challenges to urban-oriented
logics, at once referencing and extending a belief system that ranges far beyond the
enclosures of modern living.
Scenes of mutual transformations of desert animals and nomadic people, again
often under extreme duress, are therefore no simple projections of human fantasy.
An exemplary moment midway through The Bleeding of the Stone involves the
metamorphosis of a captive man into a waddan, the wild mountain sheep
mentioned above:
[The event was] something the people of the oasis constantly recounted,
around which they wove legends. The young men told them how they’d
witnessed … a man break loose from his captivity and change into a waddan,
then run off toward the mountains, bounding over the rocks like the wind,
heedless of the bullets flying all around him. Had anyone ever seen a man
transformed into a waddan? Had anyone ever seen a person escape the
Italians’ guns, running on until he vanished into the darkness of the
mountains? The wise oasis Sufis … [were] convinced one and all that this
man was a saint of God. That evening they went to the Sufi mosque and
celebrated … filled with joy that the divine spirit should come to dwell in a
wretched creature of this world.
(al-Koni, 2002, pp. 73–4)
Relayed through so many interpreters – ‘young men’, ‘wise oasis Sufis’ and other
‘people of the oasis’ – what exactly happens here is difficult to say, but in this telling
the event brings into sharp focus a threat to much more than an individual’s life.
Asouf, the man in question, has arrived at this scene as a nomadic herdsman
who has lost all of his animals to an extreme drought. And, in seeking refuge at the
oasis, he inadvertently becomes entangled in a far greater tragedy. The Italian guns
refer obliquely to what is perhaps the least known and most horrific genocide of
the twentieth century, that is the Italian colonial authorities’ confinement from
1929 to 1933 of what is estimated to be over 100,000 nomadic North African
tribal peoples, who were then starved to death alongside their herds in barbed-wire
176 Susan McHugh
enclosures later used as models for the Nazi death camps (Ahmida, 2005, pp.
43–54). Driven by hunger to his ‘first and last encounter with the oasis people’ (al-
Koni, 2002, p. 74) at a time and place around which countless others like him died
in battles or detainment, the meek fictional herdsman’s capture by colonial military
forces seems tantamount to a death sentence, from which he is delivered by his
fantastic transformation into a waddan. As ‘the oldest animal in the Sahara’ (al-
Koni, 2002, p. 136 n. 2), once revered for its ‘totemic, noble significance in
pre-Islamic Berber North Africa’ (Colla, 2008, p. 169) and subsequently rendered
extinct in parts of Europe as early as the seventeenth century, the waddan seems a
fitting metaphor for the Maghribian nomad fleeing colonial European forces. But
the novel envisions a far more complex situation.
Although the animal that Asouf appears to become in order to escape certain
doom is one he himself has known all his life in the Sahara, the waddan erupts as
an extremely rare spectacle to the oasis people witnessing the transfiguration. Not
exactly innocent bystanders, men in their situation came to use automatic
weaponry – upgrades from what they disparage as their own ‘Ottoman guns’ – and
eventually, as the story shows, vehicles like trucks and even helicopters to hunt this
kind of animal along with so many other wild species to the brink of oblivion.
Amid a novel in which the traditional herdsman comes to believe he was born to
protect this severely endangered species, and in the end gets slaughtered in place of
the animal when he refuses to show hunters where to find the last of its kind, al-
Koni introduces a curious flight-line through this flickering image of the hybrid
human-animal fleeing the circumstances of historic mass killings. One of several
similar moments across al-Koni’s fictions, it anchors a pattern in which the
thanatopolitics of genocidal history are challenged from a multi-species perspective,
and in a way that enables generative engagements with biopolitics through multi-
layered creative practices.
For instance, into the scene sketched above is built a set of critical forms that
exceeds the moment of colonization that it depicts, perhaps most obviously in the
mention of the ‘legends’ relayed orally about how a lone Tuareg man escapes by
transforming into a waddan. Legend-spinning alludes to how the largely illiterate
tribal peoples extended ancient traditions of oral poetry recitation to create what
is now recognized as ‘the richest source of Libyan colonial history, especially the
history of the genocide’ (Ahmida, 2009, p. 169). Also important is the multiplicity
of the transformation’s translators (again ‘young men’, ‘wise oasis Sufis’ and other
‘people of the oasis’) for enacting a specifically Arabic narrative tradition in the
style of the hadīth literature that layers competing interpretations of what
happened into the story itself, enabling, for instance the ‘wretched creature’ to
whom the Sufis refer to be the herdsman, the waddan, and both at once. What is
more, what such a staging calls forth is a way of understanding the sequence’s
ambiguity as having its own aesthetic integrity, an intentional lack of closure that
both defies reduction to the analogical aesthetics of Euro-American literary
formalism as well as increasingly characterizes contemporary approaches to artistic
renderings of animal life (Baker, 2000, p. 156; 2013, p. 14).
Attention to the multi-layerings of creative practice additionally reveals how the

endangerment of singularly shared lives concerns the survival of Saharan
singularities in both Gold Dust and The Bleeding of the Stone. The plots again are
exemplary in this respect: The Bleeding of the Stone is the tale of a herdsman’s fatal
attempt to physically and spiritually protect the waddan and himself, amid the
period in which the mechanisms were set in place for the extermination of
gazelles, and Gold Dust tells the doomed (and, yes, platonic) love story of an exiled
man and his precious piebald camel, set at the twilight of the era in which camels
reigned as primary providers of desert transport and the dawning of an age in
which their transformation to meat animals signals the greatest threat to desert
biodiversity.
Traditional aesthetic practices not only figure into the novels’ execution but also
provide figures for their contents. Ancient visual art looms large even as it serves as
a powerful tool with which the novelist opens out multiple perspectives on the
transformative potentials of human-animal relations in precise locales. Both of the
gruesome denouements of the novels are set amid the ancient images of the Tassili
region at the border of eastern Algeria with Niger, Mali and Libya, a place that is
world-renowned for its elaborate and largely well-preserved prehistoric frescoes
and rock carvings that in often well-preserved detail depict humans, animals and
human-animal relationships. Visited by more transformations of men and sheep in
the novels, these ancient monuments enable al-Koni dynamically to locate shifting
meanings of human and animal sacrifice.
Ukhayyad, the protagonist of Gold Dust, briefly escapes the clutches of the
bounty hunters hot on his tail when his tracks are masked by ‘a huge ram’, in a
‘ghostly encounter’ made all the more uncanny by the millennia-old paintings of
waddan hunts that he had just been pondering on the cave walls of his refuge in
Tassili (al-Koni, 2008, pp. 156–7). Just as in The Bleeding of the Stone, the waddan
ram takes the place of the Tuareg man to offer a way out of a condition of ‘exile’
into the open desert and away from Italians who invaded the country, and again
with ambiguous results. To the hunters who shoot him, the ram becomes their
next meal, but to Ukhayyad, who links his own condition as the hunted with ‘the
exhausted [waddan] painted on the wall’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 157), the actual waddan
becomes a ‘divine messenger’, whose death brings more questions than answers:
‘Why did the innocent always fall at the hands of the most malevolent creatures?
Why do such people kill every messenger that is sent to them?’ (al-Koni, 2008, p.
158).
In its concluding scene of reverse transformation, The Bleeding of the Stone uses
many of the same elements to extend this inquiry. Through the vision of the meat-
crazed hunter Cain Adam, Asouf for one final time morphs not only into a waddan
but also ‘a sacrificial animal’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 133). And it is a vision rendered
more visualizable by the exact positioning of Asouf ’s body atop a rock carving, in
precise alignment with the ancient figure of a waddan in the process of being
sacrificed by a priest wearing a mask:
178 Susan McHugh
His body was thrust into the hollow of the rock, merging with the body of
the waddan painted there. The waddan’s horns were coiled around his own
neck like a snake. The masked priest’s hand … touched his shoulders, as if
blessing him with secret rites.
(al-Koni, 2002, p. 134)
Signalling history again in transformation, ‘the blood of the man crucified’ and
ultimately beheaded by the craven hunter is described as dripping onto a stone on
which is inscribed ‘in the mysterious Touareg alphabet’ the prophecy that the
bleeding of the sacred stone waddan will bring redemption in the form of a deluge
in the desert, just as ‘great drops of rain’ begin to fall at the end of the novel (al-
Koni, 2002, p. 135). Most readers see the passive Asouf as having sacrificed himself
here in order to secure the safety of the live, rare waddan, who have become
habituated to himself and his beloved goat herd, the animals all together who are
his chosen companions at Tassili. Read alongside the similarly staged conclusion of
Gold Dust, however, the scene raises further questions about how ‘the earth will be
cleansed’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 135) – and of what – through the carefully delineated
human-animal relationships of love and slaughter. What gives here, in Esposito’s
terms, to the norm of the potentiality of life’s becoming? Even as they spell out
many horrific ways to die, these stories also explain how the lives of desert dwellers
persist as singularities, perhaps most surprisingly, with love shared across species
lines.
Loving camels
The singularity of certain types of human-animal relations in these environs is
established earlier in both texts through sometimes bewildering, sometimes
revolting depictions of cross-species co-dependence that are fostered amid the
exceptionally harsh realities of dehydration to the point of death. Interwoven into
such scenes are aphoristic descriptions of ‘thirst’ as ‘the worst enemy one can have
in the greater Sahara’, and water as ‘the most potent source of protection in the
desert’ (al-Koni, 2008, pp. 44, 46). At particularly grim moments, for instance, when
characters lost in the desert resort to licking their own blood and tears, even animal
urine – worst of all, camel pee, a ‘thick, salty, and syrupy’ liquid (Irwin, 2010, p. 20)4
– these interactions are presented as signs not of debasement but rather enlight-
enment to the life-giving potentials for human-animal interconnection, which
often are articulated in terms of kinship.
Dangling with a precarious handhold on a cliff after his lone, failed, adolescent
attempt to rope a waddan ram, left entirely unable to get a foothold, Asouf fears
thirst more than exhaustion, and proceeds meticulously to lick his tears, then to
suck the blood from wounds on each hand in turn, and, ‘[w]hen there was nothing
left to suck, [finally to bite] into his hands with his teeth to suck more blood and
moisture’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 55). Thus, he manages to survive in a wavering zone
or ‘third condition’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 131) between life and death, until a rope
miraculously drops to let him pull himself up to safety, and consequently face-to-
face with:
[t]he same waddan. His victim and executioner. But which of them was the
victim, which the executioner? Which of them was human, which animal?
… Suddenly, in the dimness of the [dawn], he saw his father in the eyes of
the great, patient waddan. The sad, benevolent eyes of his father, who’d never
understood why man should harm his brother man, who’d fled to the desert,
choosing to die alone in the mountains rather than return to men.
(al-Koni, 2002, p. 61)
Through this multifaceted transformation – involving both a father who had

vowed to never teach his son to hunt the waddan, due to an eerily similar
experience, and again references to having fled the violence of colonial rule –
Asouf becomes unable to palate meat, and remains vegetarian for the rest of his life.
Ukhayyad is also profoundly altered through a perilous life-threatening situation
in which he is dehydrated to the point of being ‘perched between consciousness
and oblivion’, inhabiting ‘that interval between life and death’, and to live he must
lick the micturate dribbling down the thigh of his camel, a creature introduced as
no ordinary animal but rather as a rare thoroughbred or ‘mahri’ piebald, who has
been the man’s companion since childhood (al-Koni, 2002, p. 49). Lost together in
the open desert as a result of Ukhayyad’s efforts to heal his camel of a disfiguring
and possibly deadly skin condition, it is with a sense of relief that readers are told,
‘It had been divine inspiration to tie his hand to the camel’s tail’ and so to maintain
access to the liquid that he needs to live through this precarious episode (al-Koni,
2002, p. 49).
As in the first man-waddan transformation scene in The Bleeding of the Stone
addressed above, the human-camel fusion is presented as a possible pathway to
divinity, in this case leading to a more literal vision of heaven on earth. When the
camel finally leads the desperate man to a well, he reattaches himself by the foot to
the camel’s tail and plunges in, trusting the camel to ‘carr[y] out his unspoken
command’ and ‘pull … him out of that freshwater sea’ even as death approaches
with a vision of ‘the houris in paradise’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 51). In a scene that thus
blends references to Islamic and animist belief systems in a uniquely Tuareg way, the
‘unspoken command’ between human and animal is elaborated once again in terms
of cross-species kinship, only more directly, for they ‘spoke to one another as
brothers, by way of gesture’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 50). Vegetarianism and cross-species
brotherly love are immediate positive outcomes for the principal players, and lay
the groundwork for the novels’ broader biopolitical vision of cross-species
reciprocity and understanding as a hedge against the deadly dangers of desert life.
Yet these relations also engender new threats amid settlement life.
Such extreme forms of kinship bonding contribute to a deep unsettling of
conventional understandings of ‘domestication’ and other processes whereby, for
example, the human introduction of camels into the region proved crucial to the
180 Susan McHugh
de-centralized social structures of pastoralism. Conventionally portrayed in strictly

utilitarian terms – ‘the major source of transportation as well as a source of milk,
meat, and clothing’ (Ahmida, 2009, p. 18) – camels in recent years gain more
interest as having enabled flourishings of cultures in the region. Such a recognition
is challenging because the migrations away from droughts and ensuing famines, the
establishment of trade routes, the accompanying spread of Islam, and other
culturally complex conditions that could be credited to this human-animal
relationship are scrupulously written out of earlier histories that depict nomadism
riding camelback as a lawless intrusion on agricultural society, enabling Eurocentric
historians to ‘disparag[e] the precolonial period as “barbaric and stagnant”’
(Ahmida, 2009, p. 16).
What is more, recent transformations to the ways in which people and camels
live together inform the precarious futures for human-camel melding as depicted
in Gold Dust. Authors of the 2006 UN report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow
(Steinfeld, et al., 2006) point to semi-arid places – like the fragile valleys upon
which al-Koni’s human and animal nomads cling for life-giving vegetation – as the
environments most endangered by the soaring global markets for meat.
Exponentially expanding scales of traditional cattle, goat and sheep herding explain
one dimension of the problem. A more difficult aspect to grasp is the transfor-
mation of camels to primarily meat animals, which escalated quickly with the
normalization of Libyan-Chadian relations since the 1990s, where ‘overstocking
and overgrazing’ particularly has accelerated ‘desertification’ in the region depicted
by al-Koni (Meerpohl, 2009, p. 168).
Although, as extremely rarefied racing animals, a few special mahris continue a
tradition in which camel ownership signals prestige and political independence, the
status of the vast majority of camels has changed abruptly from the valuable ‘ships’
or ‘freighters of the desert’, powering the sort of caravans on which, even before
his vegetarian conversion, Asouf relies for trading his goats for supplies of barley
and wheat. Now overwhelmingly serving as commodities herded to market on
foot over East African deserts, often by ill-equipped young men who ‘lose their way
in the desert and perish together with their herds’ (Meerpohl, 2009, p. 174), camels
have become a ‘symbol of backwardness’ for the Arab Middle East, whose
governments remain actively interested in settling nomads within their region
(Irwin, 2010, pp. 173–4). This precarious, ancient-to-contemporary set of associ-
ations adds a special resonance to Ukhayyad’s declaration concerning his
near-death experience with the mahri: ‘The hardship we shared transformed us
from two creatures into one’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 105). Contexts are critical to
understanding what happens to the two together, and why.
Nonsexual, cross-species companionship is an affective bond through which
many organize their ordinary lives, and in urban-industrial environments some
additionally experience such intimacies in terms of a radical intervention into the
isolating and otherwise disempowering structures of normativity (McHugh, 2012).
In the struggle to articulate the difference between the generalized attempts
informed, for instance, by feminist care theory to empathize with animals and the
experience of shifting a sense of one’s own subjectivity across species lines, scholars
in human-animal studies identify the experience of ‘falling in love with a particular
animal’ as leveraging a critical shift, a singularity that is ‘not something that can
happen abstractly or universally, but only something that happens particularly’
(Rudy, 2011, pp. 35–6). Singularities in love may never simply be correctives to
genocidal or eco-cidal impulses, but al-Koni’s staging of affective bonding across
species lines as forged as if in a crucible of hostile environments offers some insight
as to their relevance for biopolitics.5
The love shared by Ukhayyad and his special camel is not shared by other
characters within the novel, who see the mahri as a piece of saleable property and
his poor owner’s love for his camel as the source of his downfall. Their bond gains
more legitimacy when compared across novels with the descriptions of Asouf ’s
father, who likewise cares with ‘great tenderness’ for a piebald that he too speaks
of as a ‘noble camel’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 43). Asouf scoffs at how his father ‘spoil[s]
his camel quite outrageously, even letting him drink from his own scarce supply of
water’, until schooled by his father on the survival and other advantages of shared
cross-species affection: ‘Always take the greatest care of your camel. If you don’t
love him, he won’t love you. If you don’t understand him, he won’t understand you
– and then he won’t save you when the going gets rough. Animals are more faithful
than people’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 44).
Lest readers are inclined to dismiss such statements as misanthropic, al-Koni
clarifies earlier that the source of the family’s social isolation was that the father had
‘lost his connections’ to people in the oases when ‘the Italians had invaded their
shores’, because where they came ‘they’d enter every tent’ and inflict the ‘shame’ of
imprisonment on whomever they caught (al-Koni, 2002, pp. 24–5). Again, the
death camps loom at the edges of these scenes, underscoring a context in which
love between species secures the survival of nomadic desert dwellers who are
otherwise isolated, in this case violently separated from kin and kind.
Whereas Asouf is simply left alone among animals following his parents’ death,
Ukhayyad cuts a fiery swath from his patrimony by marrying a poor woman, and
more. While his own father maintains to the end a ‘noble’ status among his and
other tribespeople for his leadership in ‘repelling foreign invaders from the Sahara’
(al-Koni, 2008, p. 14), eventually dying of thirst while leading the tribes’ last
coordinated stand against Italian colonization (al-Koni, 2008, p. 75), the social
outcast Ukhayyad is confronted with the ignoble fate of so many more landless
Maghrebi refugees to oasis communities, namely sharecropping while starving. If
his human family is seen as tying him to conditions surrounding a genocide as part
of which ‘a third of the total population – a half-million people – died in battle or
from disease, starvation, or thirst’, while a quarter-million more were forced into
exile (Ahmida, 2009, p. 1), then his nonhuman kin seem in contrast to provide a
mechanism of deliverance from doom. Reduced to destitution, Ukhayyad yields to
his wife’s pleading amid the ceaseless wailing of their starving infant son, and agrees
to try to sell his camel. Better than any of Ukhayyad’s human companions, the
camel proves his love by faithfully returning, again and again, only to be beaten
182 Susan McHugh
back by hired herders who nonetheless observe the intensity of the animal’s ‘pining’
when separated from his lifelong human companion, and conclude, ‘He’s a human
being in a camel’s skin’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 97).
Neither a substitute for human love nor a mere means of transport, Ukhayyad’s
mahri is carefully and mutually drawn together with the man as ‘companions’,
compelled by a shared desire to wander away from their inevitable separate miseries
in the oasis and to light out together to the open desert – or, in the novel’s terms,
fated to ‘depart together, and together … return to their original state, to what they
had been before birth’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 147). In such passages, the singularity of
human-camel ‘brothers’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 50) may exceed readers’ conceptual
limits, yet they also open up a space for thinking through enduring desert lifeways.
It is a sensibility depicted as barred, in Esposito’s (2008, p. 194) terms, by the
‘biojuridical node between life and norm’, and more ordinarily limited through
the trading of bodies for the titular metal. The man-camel idyll ends when
Ukhayyad is driven to a murderous rage by rumours that he has gained back his
camel plus gold by selling his wife and son to the cousin who offered refuge to the
latter, and his own final conversion to an outlaw with a price on his head closes
down the future of man and mahri. Commodification of life likewise informs a
range of far more exploitative human-camel relationships within the novel,
including the unremarkable plough-camels Ukhayyad is briefly hired to drive as
part of his sharecropping work, the meat camel bought and later killed for his
wedding feast, and last but not least the pair of riding camels to which the bounty
hunters horrifically bind Ukhayyad by hand and foot, in order to draw and quarter
him to death in the novel’s conclusion.
Because he has ‘plac[ed] his heart with the piebald’, Ukhayyad’s human hunters
eventually smoke him out of his mountain cave hiding place by burning, cutting
and otherwise torturing his beloved mahri (al-Koni, 2008, p. 162). As both novels
are at pains to elaborate, such affective responses are neither psychological
projections or substitutions, but reciprocated feelings that in better circumstances
guaranteed their mutual survival. Love between man and camel may be doomed,
but, as The Bleeding of the Stone makes even clearer, the fate of interspecies relations
also bears heavily on the threatened populations that sustain them, an
understanding that is hesitantly figured through an animal mother’s tale.
Slaughtering gazelles
More clearly fleshing out the perspective of Gold Dust’s ‘malevolent creatures’ who
kill the waddan – who is in the end and elsewhere aligned with the mahri as ‘a
messenger sent from on high’ (al-Koni, 2008, p. 157) – the second half of The
Bleeding of the Stone tells the story of Asouf ’s nemesis among the Tuareg, Cain Adam.
Like his Biblical namesakes, this character appears cursed from the very start,
orphaned as an infant only to be briefly step-parented by a couple who, in their
last act before dying of thirst in the open desert, feed newborn Cain Adam the
blood of a gazelle. How do they manage to kill a gazelle when they are too weak
to save themselves? In the lone chapter in which an animal speaks in these novels,
titled ‘The Covenant’, al-Koni offers a curious answer through an animal mother’s
tale of sacrifice.6 Telling her calf the story of how they gained protective magic, a
gazelle speaks of the death of her mother, who martyrs herself so that just such a
dying human baby might live.
In al-Koni’s presentation, through the daughter’s perspective, the mother’s act of
sacrifice becomes another transformation into cross-species kinship, as the daughter
explains to her own calf:
My poor mother! She did it for my sake and yours, so our progeny would
enjoy safety through all the generations. Her blood made a bond of
brotherhood between our kind and humankind. We and humankind, I say,
are brothers now. And this bond of safety was bought with cruel blood.
(al-Koni, 2002, p. 104)
The gazelle’s perspective mirrors that of Asouf ’s father, who along with promul-
gating man-camel love sees her kind as embodying the ‘magic’ and ‘spirit of the
desert’, a paradoxically ‘impossible … freedom’, hence his outrage at people for
gazelle hunting: ‘Why should this wicked creature man chase such an angel? …
Why should man be so hungry that he feels he has to spill the blood of this lovely
creature?’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 45). This particular mise en abyme thus pinpoints The
Bleeding of the Stone’s more ambitious biopolitical project, clarifying that
understanding as shared not simply between individuals but also at the species level.
Readers are informed earlier and often that Asouf ’s father is himself not
innocent. Providing for his family off the land means that he hunts and eats gazelles,
but he strictly limits his bag to one per hunt, not simply to conserve the numbers
but also as an act of faith. By exercising restraint, he is following the guidance of a
mystic who long ago convinced him that this is a beneficial practice to strengthen
‘the soul of the gazelle’, to protect it in combination with ‘the shield of the Quran’
along with ‘the talismans of magicians and amulets of soothsayers’ as well as ‘the
incantations of devout sages’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 37). Thus invoking the natural and
cultural practices integral to Tuareg belief systems, the self-exiled man shares with
his son a respectful vision of gazelle-human relations that both includes the
possibility of killing as well as legitimates the gazelle mother’s belief in reciprocity.
Thus the story envisions the possibilities for a balance of bios and politics, as it
were, and one based on the possibility of human self-restraint and animal self-
sacrifice as a basis of nonhuman kinship.
In this context, Asouf ’s choice to become vegetarian seems a logical next step,
against which the likewise desert-born but oasis-raised Cain Adam’s relentless
hunting strictly to feed his craving for meat appears to be a retrograde turn, as it
leads to the destruction of humans and animals, and along with them of
intrahuman and human-animal relationships. Chasing down the elderly Asouf at
Tassili, where he is told that the legendary man who transformed into a waddan
can be found, Cain Adam announces, ‘I’m proud to say I personally ate the last
184 Susan McHugh
gazelle in the northern desert’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 14). As his story unfolds, bloodlust
appears less and less a universal condition and, like Asouf ’s vegetarianism, a product
of diametrically opposite but no less colonially conditioned circumstance. As a
twice-orphaned infant in the desert, he was a foundling awash in the blood of the
self-martyred mother gazelle – who again is hard to read as anything but the self-
sacrificing mother in ‘The Covenant’ – alongside whose corpse are discovered
those of his foster parents, whom the gazelle appears to have been unable to save.
Raised henceforth amid the trappings of oasis life, the adult Cain Adam’s relentless
pursuit of gazelles attracts the attention of John Parker, an armchair-Orientalist
seeking enlightenment through the consumption of bushmeat, whose position as
an American colonel stationed to protect petroleum interests in Libya provides the
deadly access to the modern military resources that in Cain Abel’s hands spells
doom for gazelles, if not Asouf ’s rare waddans as well.
The prescience of this novel, published 20 years before the Libyan Civil War and
its present-day toll on already-beleaguered gazelle populations, is perhaps most
appreciable in the final discussion of Cain Adam and John Parker. Although each
points to the other as most responsible for rendering gazelles extinct – ‘the hateful
crime he’d committed against one of the loveliest of creatures’ (al-Koni, 2002, p.
111) – the novel clarifies that the military-industrial colonizer has the power to
withhold the tools, but chooses instead to let them be used for his own self-serving
greed. Only Cain Adam, onetime child of the desert and Tuareg by birth if not by
upbringing, appears capable of the transformation to loving kinship that might
prevent it.
Searching together by helicopter for the last gazelles who seek a final refuge in
the mountains – an unusual migration route that ‘according to the sages … [is] a
sign of doomsday’ (al-Koni, 2002, p. 117) – a mother and calf catch Cain’s eye. In
terms familiar from al-Koni’s other scenes of loving camels and sacrificing sheep,
they exchange looks that are ‘intelligent, speaking some unknown language’,
immediately after which Cain becomes aware that he has ‘seen a human in a
gazelle’s body’ and questions his own grip on reality: ‘How could he, Cain, have
held back from pressing the trigger, when a graceful gazelle stood there in front of
him? Had she really been a gazelle at all? And was he really Cain?’ (al-Koni, 2002,
p. 116). This time the transformation fails to result in love or sacrifice. Urged on
by his human companions, Cain looks away but nonetheless shoots, killing both
calf and mother, who shocks them with her last gesture, howling in protest over
her slaughtered child like a ‘wolf ’, yet no transformations, magic or otherwise, can
save them: in the end, Cain ‘didn’t just kill his sister. He ate her flesh too’ (al-Koni,
2002, p. 119).
Within the novel, this scene marks the tipping point in the modern hunters’
story towards the fatal pursuit of waddan, and consequently Asouf, at the same
place where cross-species love is even more spectacularly destroyed in Gold Dust.
For once again, al-Koni leaves us ultimately at Tassili, where the stones are
‘bleeding’ with representations of cross-species relations that are wounded, dying
alongside their referents. At a rare speaking engagement in the United States in
2011, al-Koni explained his relentless return to these monuments in his stories by
recounting his own journey to view the Tassili petroglyphs and paintings, which
though difficult to date are estimated to be at least 10,000 years old. Noting that
the artworks are supposedly protected as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site
and located nowhere near any modern battles, the novelist recalled asking at the
time why several of these ancient images obviously had been defaced by bullets,
only to learn that in recent years some of then-leader Muammar al-Qadhdhafi’s
soldiers had intentionally shot at them. To al-Koni, this kind of artistic defacement
is deeply disturbing, ‘destroying the heritage of mankind, a message from mankind
to mankind’ sent from the earliest times to the present, and in such a way that is
‘killing humanity’, and ‘not just humanity, but also plants, animals, and stones’ (al-
Koni, 2011). In Libya as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the United States and many
more sites worldwide, such defacements continue, and continue to become all too
difficult to separate from death on a massive scale.
The killing fields of people like al-Koni’s Tuareg remain doubly tragic for only
just now gaining scholarly and worldwide recognition as sites of a singularly
grotesque genocide, in which tens of thousands of people were forced to watch as
the animals they depended on for transport, food, even companionship in this
extreme environment perished of starvation first, fully aware that their own deaths
were sure to follow. For the novelist, the problem with such histories is not that
they are unrepresentable, as is so often claimed of genocides. Rather, it is that their
representation in strictly human terms only ever insufficiently accounts for the
more profound, ongoing threat co-constituted by the nomad and companionate
forms of desert species. In al-Koni’s fictions, the perseverance of Tuareg people is
not simply like but also intimately bound to that of the waddan, the gazelles, the
camels and all those adapted over the long durée to desert life together, a
perspective voiced by the ancient Tassili artists and continuing through his
storytelling that integrates their work along with other locally significant creative
practices.
Biopolitcizing aesthetics
If, as I suggested earlier, art provides an especially useful way of thinking differently
about the relations of endangered populations by using unfamiliar tools that lead
to surprising outcomes, then what might come of biopolitical engagement in this
work? More crassly put, what do al-Koni’s fantasied transformations, sacrifices,
loves, betrayals and slaughters have to do with the historical records of real peoples
and animals pushed together to the brink of oblivion? Although the complexity of
the stories defers any easy answers, reading these novels in the context of the
unexpected overlap amid recent debates in biopolitical and animal theory indicates
how fiction itself can serve as a mode of intervention.
Environmental philosopher and anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (2011, p.
133) illuminates the resiliency of traditionally nomadic Australian Aborigines as
rooted in storytelling, particularly ‘stories [that] constitute more-than-human
186 Susan McHugh
genealogies that enmesh people in cross-species transformations’. Just as al-Koni’s

stories of human-animal morphing reflect a ‘wild and crazy ethic’ that defies
Western rational sense at the same time that they instil a shared sense of
‘brotherhood’ and other forms of kinship shared across species lines, the stories that
she shares from the Yarralin and Lingara communities in the Northern Territories
at once reflect a system of values that enables life to go on in the face of genocide
and anthropogenic extinctions – an ethic that is rooted in love ‘as fierce as death’
and that in our current era of mass killings of humans and animals and of livestock
especially on ever-increasing scales is needed to counter the forces ‘drawing life out
of earth, unmaking the fabric of life, severing the bonds of connectivity’ (Rose,
2011, p. 145).
Likewise, in al-Koni’s vision, the cross-species relations on which nomadic
desert lifeways depend do not illuminate the crushing impossibility of subaltern
subjects so much as they pinpoint the struggle between the ideology of the modern
state, in which power is vested only ever in human subjects, and that of nomad
systems, which rely on the sort of shifting fields and forms of power envisioned
through these fictions of multi-species desert dwellers. By outlining the elements
that anchor these sensibilities in fiction, my point in part is to suggest how they
reveal the state to be at best merely the regulator of its subjects, its own forms of
power, and no safe protector or provider for endangered populations. As a
corrective both to the tendency in biopolitical discussions to focus on human
death as well as the emphasis on cross-species flourishing in companion species
theory, what is needed right now and so desperately by so many instead are creative
modellings that situate modern historical horrors amid ancient and ongoing
struggles to assert the validity and vigour of lives that continue to be shared on the
brink of nonexistence. After all, as another of al-Koni’s (2005, p. 172) aphorisms
asserts, ‘The desert is a paradise of nonexistence’.
Notes
1 See, for instance, the conclusions of Monfort, et al. (2011).
2 According to Donna Haraway (2003, pp. 15–17), ‘“Companion species” is a bigger and
more heterogeneous category than companion animal’, the former distinguished in her
formulation by ‘co-constitution, finitude, impurity, historicity, and complexity’, charac-
teristics that begin to account for how our shared stories ‘are much bigger than
ideologies’ and therefore embed ‘our hope’.
3 I thank Ali Abdullatif Ahmida for introducing me to al-Koni and his animal novels. On
his point about the counter-hegemonic value of literature broadly writ, see also
Barbara Christian’s (1990) early argument about storytelling as the preferred mode of
theorizing for women and traditional minorities.
4 Irwin (2010, p. 53) confirms that ‘drinking camel urine’ is a plausible way of surviving
without water in the desert.
5 Although not named by them as such, human-animal love thus conceivably instantiates
‘the encounter of singularities’ that, as Hardt and Negri (2009, pp. 181–6) argue, serves
as an ‘antidote’ to the ‘corrupt identitarian love’ that in contrast values sameness and
unity, motivating persecution of those unlike yourself and your kind and ultimately
exterminationism.
6 Sharif S. Elmusa (2013, p. 24) points to this story as evidence that ‘al-Koni continues a
tradition that goes back to Kalila wa-Dimna and Hesiod’ of ‘animal-told tales’. On the
modern literary history of animal mothers’ tales and their potential for biopolitical
critique, see Robert Ralston McKay (2016).
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INDEX
Aborigines 185–6 animal house: AO Laboratory for

actant, the 16 Experimental Surgery 92; importance
actor-network theory (ANT) 1, 15–17, 156 and prestige of 126
addicere 154 animal instincts 76
addiction 157 Animal Machines (Harrison) 76
aesthetics 185–6 animal mistreatment 69–70; from
Agamben, Giorgio 7 mistreatment to good treatment 71–3;
agency 13, 16 slaughter for food 73–4; travelling
Al-Haya Association for the Protection of animals 74–5
Wildlife 171 animal performance 78–80
al-Koni, Ibrahim 26, 172, 173, 174, 175–9, animal protection 71–3
180–5, 186 Animal Protection Act (1935) 71, 72, 72–3,
Allgöwer, Martin 88–9 73, 75, 76
Alpfahrt 93 Animal Protection Act (1974) 75, 77
al-Qadhdhafi, Muammar 185 animals: adaptivity 78–80; bad versus good
anatomopolitics 139 77; campaign against cruelty to 122;
animal biology 75–7 equal value of 73; experimental human
animal care: attendants becoming medicine 22–3; feeling pain 68–9, 70;
technicians 125; professionalization of irrational emotion 123; living space 72;
125; reconfiguration from unskilled ad new breeding regimes 125; as objects of
hoc practice into expertise 125, 126; see law 69; proximity and distance from
also animal welfare humans 89–91; sensing the environment
animal experiments: central function 101; 76; sentience 21–2, 68; serving a higher
Göttingen minipig sows 48–9; humane purpose and human ends 70; status and
techniques 120, 121, 127–31; legislation rights of 81; as subjects of law 68–70;
70; medical bacteriology 104–5; sufficient feed and care 72
pathological 101, 102; in physiology animal sensitivity 70–1
103–4; reformulation of 80; animal sentience 21–2
responsibility for 79; sheep 22–3; animal suffering: salmon 35–6
techniques 103; three R’s of 119, 120, Animal Technicians Association 125
132, 132–3; see also experimental animal-to-human diseases 139
animals; pain animal welfare: census population 126; EU
animal health workers 141 legislation 68; importance and prestige
190 Index
of the animal house 126; laboratory battery cages 76, 78

123–4; making a science of 121–3; Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the
reframing as health 125–6; scientific Domestication of a Fish (Lien) 30–1
discourse 125; sympathy 121; UFAW Bernal, J.D. 121–2
(Universities Federation for Animal Bernard Rose, Deborah 185–6
Welfare) 124; see also animal care Bewick swans 161, 162–3
animism 173, 174 biographical knowledge 54
anthrax 105, 108 biohistory 6
anthropomorphic objectivism 43 biomedical experiments 51
anthropomorphic subjectivism 42–3 biomedical knowledge 131–2
anthropomorphic teleology 43 biomedicine 119–20
anthropomorphism 19–22; modes of 42; biopolitical collective 66–8; animals as part
study of animals 42; undermining of 81–2; animals as sentient beings or
understanding of other species 36 subjects of law 68–70; animal sensitivity
antivivisectionists 123–4 versus the sensibility of humans 70–1;
AO Foundation 88–9 bad versus good animals 77; caring for
AO Laboratory for Experimental Surgery the animal’s biology 75–7;
89; animal house 92; de-flocking, caring domestication as the history of
and killing sheep 94–6; research herds improved animal performance 78–80;
94; tensions 97 from mistreatment to good treatment
AO Research Institute (ARI) 89; funding 71–3; including animals and expelling
system 93; policy of public sharing 93; groups of humans 73–5
sheep dipping 93 biopolitics 2; complex of men and things
apes 108, 113 157–8; definition 157
Arendt, Hannah 4 biopolitics, versions of 2–4; materiality and
Aristotle 152 the government of things 11–15;
Arlinghaus et al. 42 material semiotics and the government
Arluke, A. 50 of working things 15–18; post-humanist
artificial insemination 8 collective 4–11
Asdal, K. 70 biopower 6, 12; care as 123–7;
Asdal, K. and Druglitrø, T. 21–2 incorporating animals into 137;
Association for the Study of Internal recasting, for bird flu 139–40
Fixation (ASIF) 89 bios 7, 13
Association of Scientific Workers 124 biosecurity 142, 164
attached detachedness 56–8 bird flu 24, 136–7; census data 145; ethical
attachment 57 conduct and regimes of coexisting
attribution 1 142–4; farmers mistrust of government
attunement 54–6 officials and state veterinarians 144;
Atwood, Margaret 153 farmers reluctance to report poultry
augury 25, 154, 155, 156–7 illness 143; farmers withholding
Austin, J. L. 68 practices 146–7; immunity to 142;
avian influenza see bird flu intertwining of human and animal lives
Avian Influenza Wildbird Survey 165–6 140–1; interventions in Vietnam 141–2;
avian life: recording of 161–3 knowledge-power 140–1; linking of
avian surveillance 165 public and animal sectors 138; loss of
birds 138; multispecies activities and
bacteriological laboratory 110–14 unintended others 141–2; multispecies
bacteriology see medical bacteriology 23 biopower 140–4; One Health 138, 147,
Bacteriology and the End of 148; poultry outbreaks and human
Nineteenth-Century ‘Medical Theory’ fatalities 138; recasting biopower for
(Canguilhem) 101 139–40; separation of domestic life and
Barad, Karen 156; reading of Foucault wildlife 164–5; transferring expertise
11–12 across sectors 141; withholding and
bare life 7 stealing poultry 144–7; see also Highly
Index 191
Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) community 158

bird knowledge 25 companion species 186n2
bird ringing 163, 165 concentrated feeding operations (CAFOs)
birds see bird flu; knowing birds 8
bird survey 165–6 consciousness 129
bird watchers 159–60 Constable, Marianne 68
Bleeding of the Stone, The (al-Koni) 172, 175, contact zones 148
176, 179, 182–4 convergent mental evolution 38
Blue, G. and Rock, M. 86, 148 Cook et al. 136
body-snatching 155 Council of Europe Standing Committee
Boeck, Christine 68–9 for the Protection of Animals kept for
bone healing: experiments on dogs 89, 90; Farming Purposes 33
experiments on sheep 90 Cowper Powys, John 122–3
bone sheep: de-flocking, caring and killing culling 143
94–6; dissolving of herd instinct 95, 96; Cyon, Elias von 103
individualization of 95; living with
project groups 94; project selection 95; Daily Telegraph, The 37
returned to flock after surgery 93, 94; Davaine, Casimir Joseph 105
surgery on 92 decency 71
bovine tuberculosis 159 de-flocking 95
Bradley, Fred 87 dehydration 178, 179
Braithwaite et al. 38 de la Perriere, Guillaume 12
Braithwaite, Victoria 30 Deleuze, Gilles 172
Braun, B. 142 democratic element in natural science
Braun, B. and Whatmore, S. 14 research 97
Brave New World (Huxley) 122 Denkkollektiv 87
breeding 77, 125 Denkverkehr 87
British Medical Journal 127 Derrida, Jacques 164
British Science Guild 121 Despret, Vinciane 43, 54, 121
Brown, Steve 156 detachedness, attached 56–8
BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) detachment 57, 60
159 Dickens, Charles 172
Burch, Rex 23, 127 Directive on Biological Experiments on
Animals 79, 80
camels 178–82 disease(s): animal experiments 103; artificial
Campbell, T.C. and Sitze, A. 3; biohistory 6 111; bacteriological concept of 102;
Candea, M. 51, 52; attachment and causes of 102; core concept of 113;
detachment 57 experimental pathology of infectious
Canguilhem, Georges 101–2 diseases 105; knowledge of 104;
care 79; as biopower 123–7 measurement of 110; see also medical
care of the self 119, 129 bacteriology; pathology
case descriptions 62 disease surveillance 165
census, laboratory animal population 126 displacement 91
Chance, Michael 129 divinity 179
chronic stress 37 Do Fish Feel Pain? (Braithwaite) 30
Churchill, Frederick 107 dogs: as lab animals 89, 90
circulation 158 domestication 78–80, 179–80; practice
clinical knowledge 104 54–5
Cohnheim, Julius 105 drug trials 53, 54
Colam, John 122
collectivization 147 ear tagging 51
common lands (Allmende) 92 ecology 17
common use (Gemeinatzung) 92–3 elational anthropomorphism 19–22
communication 155 embodied practices 32–3
192 Index
emotional epistemology 89–91 Foucault, Michel 2, 3; analysis of power 12;

encounter value 55 biopolitics theorizing 5–6; biopower 6,
engagement 57 12, 139, 140; definition of government
environmental enrichment 129 12; disciplining of subjects and
Esposito, Roberto 6–7, 9, 158; biopolitical repressive techniques 5–6; genealogy of
reading of Deleuze 172–3; pregnancy in morals 66; governmentality 11;
mammals 159 government of life 5; influence on
ethical labour 132 animal studies 66–7; means and ends 18;
ethical practices 143 modern man 119, 120; moral action
ethical responsibility 129 132; new definition of government 17;
ethics 9–11 paradigmatic space of biopolitics 157–8;
ethological knowledge 75, 77 power 142–3; on things 13; on truth
EU (European Union): animal welfare and knowledge 119
strategy 67–8 foundational knowledge 130
eugenics 8 Fraser, A. 94
European Union Council Regulations 33 fur-farming industry 78
euthanasia 75
exceptionalism 5 gastric bypass (GBP) 48–9
exchange value 51 gazelles 171, 182–5
expanded community of the living 67 genealogy of morals 66
experimental animals: apes 108, 113; genocide 175–6
cultural apparatus 106; developing Gjesdal, Finn 79
models of diseases 107; guinea pigs 105, Gold Dust (al-Koni) 172, 174, 177, 178,
108, 109, 125; mice 111; naming of 50; 180–2, 184
rabbits 105, 108; relating to good science 120, 132
physiological animal experiments 102–3; Göttingen minipig sows see minipig sows
relating to technologies of the government: and biopolitics 157;
bacteriological laboratory 102; Foucauldian definition 17; Lemke on
responding to 59; selection/handling for 12–13; milieu, the 13, 14
medical bacteriology 103; varying governmentality 11
106–7; see also animal experiments government of life 5
experimental knowledge 128, 129, 130 government of things approach 13–14, 15
experimental physiology 71 Gradmann, Christoph 23
Experimentation in Animal Biology Greimas, A.J. and Courtés, J. 16
(Canguilhem) 102 guinea pigs 105, 108, 109, 125
factory farming 8, 76–7, 78 H5N1 vaccination 144

farm animals: fish-related killing practices H5N1 virus 143, 159, 164
33 Haave, Inger-Johanne Jebsen 76–7
farmed fish: regulations for 33 Hägglund, M. 9, 164
fish: feeling pain 30, 31–2, 36–7; human Haldane, J.B.S. 121–2
attributes 43; physiological stress 37 Haraway, Donna 18, 32, 50, 147, 158–9;
fish farming: choreographies of death 34–5; characterization of lab animals 87;
killing and slaughtering of 33–6 companion species 186n2; contact zones
fish sentience 20, 41–4; choreographies of 148; encounters between minipigs and
care 39–41; fluid sentience 30–3; killing people 51; ‘the open’ 97–8; responding
fish 30–1; in legal practice 33–6; pain to experimental animals 59
30, 31–2; practising sentience in the Hardt, Michael 173
production halls 39–41; in scientific Harrison, Ruth 76
practice 36–9 Hayward, Eva 25
Fleck, Ludwik 87–8, 97 Henle, Jacob 105
flock sheep 95 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI)
Flügge, Carl 103 24, 25, 141, 142; see also bird flu
food production systems 75–6, 76–7 Himsworth, Harold 124
Index 193
History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 6, 139 artificial diseases 111; choice of

Holocaust 8 experimental animal 107; development
hospitality 160, 164 of experimental techniques 105–6; early
Hueppe, Ferdinand 103, 115n8 studies 109–10; experimental
human-animal relations 68 reproduction 110–11; experimentation
human-avian intra-actions 160 on diversity of species 107–8; guinea
human biographies 57 pigs 108–9, 109; laboratory experiments
Human Condition, The (Arendt) 4 104; methodological-theoretical
humane experimental technique 127–31, reflection 114; pure cultures 105–6;
132–3 septic infections 111; series of animal
humane killing 74 experiments on tuberculosis 111–13;
human-fish relations 42 sick persons 113; varying experimental
humanitarianism 122 animals 106–7
humanness 123 Koch’s postulates 113, 114
humans: governed as things 13 kosher-related slaughtering 74
human speech 154
Hume, Charles 121, 122, 124 laboratories: animal housing and care
Huntingford et al. 37, 42 79–80; characterization of lab animals
hunting regulations 171 87; legalised painful experiments 70;
Huxley, Aldous 122 pathology of 110–14
Huxley, Julian 123, 161 laboratory animals: characterization of 90;
dogs 90; improved care of 125
immobilization 89 laboratory animal science 77
immune process 158, 159 Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine
immunitarian thinking 158 (LASM) 125; distinction from UFAW
Imperial Health Office 108 approach 126–7; framing welfare as
impersonal names 51 health 125–6
impersonal singularity 26 laboratory medicine 102
indigenous life 173 labour: pigs as experimental subjects 55; of
inoculation 8 pigs at different sites 63; variety of 63
intra-active engagements 156 Landrücken Tunnel 85
irrational emotion 123 Latour, Bruno 10, 18; on humans 17
law: animal mistreatment as decency issue
Joint UN-Government Programme 141, 71; animal protection 71–2; Animal
142 Protection Act (1935) 71, 72, 72–3, 73,
74, 75, 76; Animal Protection Act (1974)
killing fields 185 75, 77; animals as subjects of 68–70; and
Klebs, Edwin 105 animal sentience 21–2; and ethics 10;
knowing birds: avian sensitivities 155; EU animal welfare strategy 67–8; fish
consulting/observing 154; importance sentience 33–6; moral hierarchy 70, 73;
to ancient world 154; migrating birds as moral technology 69, 71, 75, 77;
159–60; perceptual ecology 159–63; positive obligation 72, 73; Slaughter Act
recording of avian life 161–3; sensing (1929) 74; stunning of salmon 34–5;
life 153–7; surveying life 163–7 veterinary jurisdiction 75
knowing human, the 120 Law Committee 78–9, 79, 80
knowing subject(s) 120, 127, 127–31 Law, John 34–5
knowing, ways of: pigs 53–4; post-surgical Law, John and Lien, Marianne 20–1
recovery times 62–3 Lazzarato, M. 7
knowledge: biographical 54; biomedical Lemke, Thomas 4, 158; account of Barad
131–2; experimental 129, 130; 11–12; government 12–13; government
foundational 130; objects of 130; and of things 13–14; life 14–15; material
truth 119 turn 11
Koch, Robert 103, 104; Lentzos, S. and Rose, N. 17–18
animal-experimental studies 106; Lewis, C.S. 122
194 Index
Libya 171 53; mutual trust with humans through

Libyan Civil War 171, 184 touch 55; as numbers in science 58–60;
Lien, M.E. 30–1 personalities 52, 55; prolonging human
life: bare 7; definition of 7; government of life 57; unique individuals 53, 55; value
5; Lemke on 14–15; political form of 7; of names 53
surveying 163–7 Ministry of Agriculture and Food 81;
Lingara community 186 Veterinary Directorate 79
liveliness 16 model organisms 107
Livestock’s Long Shadow (Steinfeld) 180 modern man 120
Livy 154 Mol, A. 51
Loeffler, Friedrich 113 moral action 132
logic, surplus 8 moral technologies 66; see also law
Lorenz, Konrad 54 more-than-human biopolitics 18
Lowe, C. 166 more-than-human condition 4
Lund et al. 38 mouflons 172
Müller, Johannes 103
MacKenzie, Donald 161 multispecies ethnography 50
mad cow disease 159 mutual attunement 54
mammals 33
Mann, Thomas 89, 91 naming 21; as a domestication practice
Marcus, G. 49 54–6; practicalities of 56–7; see also
mass culture 115n24 personal names
Massey, Doreen 166 National Institute of Public Health 80
materialism 14–15 Negri, Antonio 173
material semiotics 15–18 neocortexes 37
material turn 11 nervous system 152
McHugh, Susan 26 neuroanatomy 36–7
means and ends 17, 18 Njaa, T.B. 72
meat sheep 93 noise 154–5
Medawar, Peter 127 noisy sentience 157–9
medical bacteriology 23, 101, 102; animal nomadic peoples 171, 172, 174, 175, 180,
experiments 103, 104–5; animals chosen 181, 185, 186
for experiments 108; experimentation non-exclusive exclusion 158–9
on diversity of species 107–8; nonhuman animals 1
importance of animal experiments 113; non-memetic caring 32
laboratory experiments 104; non-memetic suffering 32
pathological anatomy of the The Normal and the Pathological
experimental animal 114 (Canguilhem) 101
Medical Research Council (MRC) 124 Norwegian Animal Welfare Act 33
medicine: history of 101; see also laboratory Norwegian Society for the Protection of
medicine Animals (NSPA) 73–4
meerkats 57 Norwegian Veterinary Association 75
Mejdell, Cecilie 37–8 numbers 20–1; distant relations 51; of
Methods in Physiological Experiments and experimental animals 50; learning to
Vivisections (Cyon) 103 engage with pigs as 58–60; objectivity
On Miasmas and Contagions (Henle) 105 51; post-surgical recovery times 62–3;
mice 111 unrecognisable mass 53; at work 61–2
migrating birds 159–60, 164 Nuwaiji, Saleh 171
milieu, the 13, 14
Milton, Kay 42 objectivist anthropomorphism 43
minipigs experiment 20–1 object rich 152, 166
minipig sows: animal testing 48–9; care for objects of knowledge 130
53–4; detachment and engagement 57; observant society 25
encounters with people 51; moods of observation 166
Index 195
‘official European position’ (EC) 68 practices 32–3

One Health initiative 24, 136, 147, 148 Principles of Humane Technique, The (Russell
ornithology 163–4 and Burch) 127, 128
orthopaedic surgery: sheep testing 86 proper/improper life 158, 159
osteosynthesis 89, 89–90 pseudarthrosis 89
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 172 public research funding 62
Overview of Hygiene (Flügge) 103 public slaughterhouses 74
publishing papers 62
pain: of animals 68–9; antivivisectionist pure cultures, bacterial 105–6, 115n24
objections 124; of fish 30, 31–2, 36–7;
legalised 70; measurement of 124; rabbits 105, 108
redefinition of painful experiments 80; rational intellect 123
re-imagined 124–5 reasoning 123
pandemic flu 138 Redgrove, Herbert Stanley 155
patents 93 reductionism 114
pathogens 102, 104, 113 religion: and science 121–2
pathology: animal experiments 101, 102; of REM sleep 94
the laboratory 110–14; see also disease response-abilities 59
penal code (1842) 69 responsibility 9–11
penal code (1902) (Norway) 69–70 revolutionary, personality type 128
personality type(s): authoritarian 128; Rewell, R.E. 131
healthy 128; revolutionary 128 Romulus 155
personal names: blurring boundaries Rose, James D. 36–7, 42
between pigs and humans 58–9; of Rouse, Joseph 12
experimental animals 50 Royal Commission on Vivisection 132
pharmaceutical enhancement 8 Royal Frederick University 71
Phillips, M.T. 50 ruminants 90, 92, 94
Philo, Chris 158 Russell, William 23, 127, 128, 129;
phylogenetics 38 biomedical knowledge 131–2; on
physiology: animal experiments 103–4 domesticated animals 130–1
pig research biographies 48–50; attached Rutherford, P. 12
detachedness 56–8; attunement 54–6;
data collection 53, 57, 59–60; differences salmon farming 34–6; suffering 35–6
in post-surgical recovery times 62–3; Salomonsen, Carl Julius 105
encounters 52–4; individual names 49, Schlünder, Martina 22–3
52; learning to engage with pigs as science: description of 122–3; divide
numbers in science 58–60; names and between scientists and research subjects
numbers 50–2, 53; naming as a 59; humane treatment of animals 128;
domestication practice 54–6; numbers at improving society 121; moral status of
work 61–2; pig personalities 52; treating 123; and religion 121–2; sympathy
pigs as human patients 61; trotting towards animals 122
across divides 63–4; unique individuals scientific hunger 94–6
53; see also minipig sows scientists: authoring and publishing papers
Pihl, Vibeke 20–1 62
polis 154 Scott, Peter 161, 162–3
politics: materiality of 15; selective breeding 8
re-problematization of 15 self, technology of 129
populations 157 semiotics 15–18
Porter, Natalie 24–5 sensing 152
positive obligation 72, 73 sensitivity: of animals and humans 70–1
positivism 4 sensorium, swan 161–3
power: Foucauldian notion of 142–3; sensory biopolitics 152–3
Foucault’s analysis of 12 sentience 20, 152; animal 21–2; fish see fish
power relations 131, 132 sentience; noisy 157–9
196 Index
sentient subjects see knowing subject(s) 120, 127–8, 132, 132–3

septic infections 111 tracking technologies, birds 163
Serres, Michel 24–5, 152; birds 154; noise traffic of thinking 87–8, 97
of birds 154–5; re-learning augury transbiopolitics 86, 148
lessons 156–7; sensing and knowing 154; transhumance 92–4
surveillance 166, 167 trauma surgery: sheep testing 85–6
shechita 74 travelling animals 74
sheep: bone healing experiments 90; Trenn, Thaddeus J. 87
digestive systems 94; experimental truth: and knowledge 119
human medicine 22–3; from livestock Tuareg tribe 174–5, 176, 183, 185
to lab animal 86; naming of 90; tuberculosis 89, 104; animal
remoteness from humans 90; sacrificing experimentation 105; different forms of
174–8; tensions 97; testing for trauma 109; experimental reproduction 110–11;
surgery 85–6; wiring of 91–2; see also Koch’s animal experiments on 111–13;
bone sheep; meat sheep; wired sheep spontaneous pulmonary 113; studies on
sheep multiple 86 108
sheep traffic 92–4
sick persons 113 UFAW Handbook on the Care and
Silco, Lesley Marmon 173 Management of Laboratory Animals 124,
Singer, Peter 122 125, 126, 127, 131
singularity 173 UFAW (Universities Federation for Animal
situated practices 32–3 Welfare) 122, 123–4; animal welfare,
Slaughter Act (1929) 74 promotion of 124; distinction from
slaughterhouses 74 LASM approach 126–7; humane
slaughter methods 73–4 experimental technique 127–31; new
slavery 122 field of study 130; scientific discourse
Slimbridge 161 125
Slow Wave Sleep 94 unconditional hospitality 9
sovereign power 6 UNESCO World Heritage site 185
speech 4 United States Agency for International
speech acts 68, 154 Development (USAID) 143
spontaneous pulmonary tuberculosis 113 Universities Federation for Animal Welfare
stress: of fish 37 (UFAW) see UFAW (Universities
Strong, L.C. 126 Federation for Animal Welfare)
stunning 33, 34; salmon farming 34–5
style of thinking 87 vaccinations 144–5
subjectivist anthropomorphism 42–3 vaccine production 80
suffering: necessary and unnecessary 79 vagabonds 74–5
surplus logic 8 valuation work 67
surveillance 166, 167 value-added encounters 51
swan sensorium 161–3 vegetarianism 179
symmetrical approach 62 veterinarians: corruption of 145;
sympathy 121, 122 interaction with farmers 145–6; low
symptomotology 113 status in Vietnam 141; private 144–5
Veterinary Directorate 79
tattooing 51 veterinary jurisdiction 75
teleological anthropomorphism 43 Vietnam: bird flu see bird flu; collectivization
Teubner, Gunther 10, 22, 81 of means of production 147
Thacker, E. 157 Vietnam Integrated National Plan for
That Hideous Strength (Lewis) 122 Avian and Human Influenza 140
things: humans as 13–14; words and 15–18 Villemin, Jean Antoine 105, 115n9
thinking collectives 22, 87, 88, 97 vivisections 70, 71, 123–4
thinking, traffic of 87–8, 97
three R’s of animal experimentation 119, Watson, R.H.J. 130
Index 197
Webster, John 42 words: and things 15–18

Wells, G.P. 123 wound infections 111
Wells, H.G. 123
wetlands 160 Yarralin community 186
Wilberforce, William 122
Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWT) 160 Zangwill, Oliver 130
winter migration, birds 159–60 zoe 7
wired sheep 91–2 zoonoses 136, 139, 140
Wolfe, Cary 4, 5, 158; biopolitics 7–8, 10;
biopower 6–7, 12; equal value of
animals 73; expanded community of the
living 67; surplus logic 8–9
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HUMANS, ANIMALS AND

Tone Druglitrø is Postdoctoral Fellow at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation

Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography,

Multispecies Encounters provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion,

Anthropology and Cryptozoology: Researching Encounters with

Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The more-than-human condition

Forthcoming titles in this series

Edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-4724-4865-1 (hbk)

List of figures vii

1 Introduction: the ‘more-than-human’ condition: sentient

2 The practices of fishy sentience 30

3 Making pig research biographies: names and numbers 48

4 Modifying the biopolitical collective: the law as a moral

5 Pastorale: sheep traffic in modern trauma surgery 85

6 The measure of the disease: the pathological animal experiment

7 Knowing sentient subjects: humane experimental technique

8 One health, many species: towards a multispecies investigation

9 Sensory biopolitics: knowing birds and a politics of life 152

10 Loving camels, sacrificing sheep, slaughtering gazelles:

3.1 Nimbly – a female minipig – standing below a poster containing

Christoph Gradmann is Professor in History of Medicine at the University of

Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography in the College of Life and

Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of

Natalie Porter is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre

Martina Schlünder is a historian of science and medicine at the Max Planck

Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe

shared fragility and precarity remind us of the instability of a clear boundary

Versions of biopolitics and ‘biopolitics collectives’

Versions of biopolitics I: The post-humanist collective

an invitation and resource for opening up the biopolitics collective towards

the exponential expansion and routinization of mechanisms and logics that

A turn to ethics and responsibility

instead focus on contributions that emphasize the methodological potential of

Versions of biopolitics II: The turn to materiality and the

The things government must be concerned about, de la Perriere says, are

Versions of biopolitics III: Material semiotics and the government

requires that human practices remain primary compared to material arrangements

version of biopolitics that is less concerned with biopolitics as a philosophical

Issues and chapter outline

to how developing ‘the humane’ relied on encounters with nonhuman animals.

Towards a multispecies, livelier, affirmative biopolitics

‘surveillant society’, with the former sensitive to differences in ways of living. An

more-than-human condition for speech that depends on the act of sensing.

John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien

is twenty kilometers from the nearest road, so we need to carry in everything

Fish sentience in legal practice

Earlier EU legislation was picked up in the 2006 Norwegian regulations on

2. Imagining suffering on the farm

and identify welfare issues, improvement potential and – relate it to the

Sentient fish in scientific practice

complex behaviours indicative of advanced cognitive skills.

Driving a wedge between hard-wired and therefore automatic reactions to

An understanding of animal emotion and cognition therefore does not come

To summarize, the collage patching up fish as sentient beings notes the

Choreographies of care: Practising sentience in the production

Considered ‘worn down’ by their previous labour as test subjects in trials of

in experimental research with pigs. More specifically, by following pigs’ travels

Names and numbers in experimental encounters