Societal Sentience

Introduction: Certified Knowledge and Animal Sentience

The use of nonhuman animals as models in research and drug testing is a key route through which contemporary scientific knowledge is certified. Indeed, animal research is arguably not just a method. It is the method of scientific inquiry. For example, Rupke (1987) argues that vivisection is what helped medicine turn from an art into a science because embracing vivisection meant embracing the experimental method. Modern animal research has moved away from the academic science of nineteenth century and is now big business (Peggs 2010), with some claiming that this equates to an “animal–industrial complex” (Twine 2013; building on Noske 1989). This interrelationship between animal research, medicine, and technoscience forms the backdrop to Elston’s (2006) insightful summary that the animal research debate has become “a vehicle for argument about what animal experiments have come to symbolize: the claims and power of modern science and a form of medicine that espouses and legitimates such science” (p. 165).

As has been frequently noted, the core “paradox” of animal research is that nonhuman animals (henceforth “animals”) are used as models because they are seen to lack certain (ethical) capacities but are used precisely because of their (biological) similarities to humans and their capacity to feel. This paradox helps explain the continued attraction of the 3Rs (see Kirk 2018; Hobson-West 2009). However, our starting point is that the very idea of reducing, refining, and replacing animals (Russell and Burch 1959) rests on a particular understanding of sentience or capacity to “feel.” Drawing on documentary analysis and qualitative interviews with laboratory practitioners, this paper shows how the concept of animal sentience is entangled with a particular imaginary of how society views animals. We call this societal sentience and argue that this concept potentially has purchase beyond the animal research field. We therefore contribute to lively debates in science and technology studies and beyond about how “life is made, valued, and ordered in science” (Druglitrø 2018, 3) and support a stream of work (e.g., Johnson 2015) which stresses the importance of the context around which the detail of human–nonhuman encounters occur.

The concept of sentience is important in law. Indeed, the term itself can be dated back to the 1990s when animal welfare groups successfully encouraged the European Parliament to have the rights of “sentient beings” included in the 1997 European Union (EU) constitution (Roe 2010). As we will show in this paper, the concept is also central to regulation of animal research. However, the precise meaning of sentience is contested in science and in philosophy but could be summarized as the ability to experience pleasure and pain (C. Brown 2015). Other definitions include the ability to experience sensation (Ryder 2012), or, more provocatively, having “feelings that matter” (Webster 2005). Sentience is usually considered to be more specific than the concept of consciousness, which combines sentience, intelligence, and self-awareness (C. Brown 2015).

Despite such definitional issues, demonstrating and measuring sentience is a key task of animal welfare science. ¹ This field assumes that the more science can evidence sentience of a particular species, the higher its ethical status, and the greater the likelihood of better treatment for members of that species (e.g., on fish, see C. Brown 2015). The question of whether sentience is an adequate or sufficient basis for ethics will be returned to in the conclusion, but the point for now is that sentience is intrinsically comparative. Indeed, sentience is foundational to the Aristotelian idea that species can be rated on a “unilinear, phylogenetic scale, a hierarchical representation of the animal kingdom where complexity determines presumed historical sequence and increases over time” (Knight et al. 2009, 466). As Knight and others (C. Brown 2015; Bekoff 2013) stress, this view does not fit with post–Darwinian ideas of evolution yet, crucially, is still widely accepted.

Having introduced the importance of animal research to contemporary science, and the conceptual importance of sentience, our next task is to consider how existing social scientific literature has understood the animal laboratory. The rest of the paper then uses empirical methods to explore how sentience is embedded in animal research regulation in the UK, and, relatedly, how key practitioners discursively manage the associated complexities.

From Discourses to Care Encounters in the Animal Laboratory

Since Lynch’s (1988) classic study of the laboratory and his influential account of how animals are transformed from naturalistic beings into data, social scientists have intensified their studies of what happens in the animal laboratory. In 2007, three authors from the US and the UK amalgamated their individual work into a book aptly named The Sacrifice (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007). The book has its flaws (Hobson-West 2008) but is still impressive for its analytical breadth, ranging from an historical account of the emergence of the mouse model to the training of biology students. Throughout, the book is concerned with the discursive strategies and identity construction of scientists and others in the debate, and the crucial role played by images of the public.

A decade on, the field now looks strikingly different. Authors studying animal research have been greatly influenced by STS (including actor network theory [ANT] methodologies) and by critical animal studies approaches, as ways of studying “marginalized actors of all kinds” (Johnson 2015, 297). Those inspired by Haraway (2008) and others (see Johnson 2015, for a longer review) have produced carefully crafted “multispecies ethnographies” (Kirksey and Helmrich 2010) of laboratories, exploring the detail of human/nonhuman encounters. In particular, by studying the coproduction of care in the lab, authors have proposed a situated ethics, which they relate to broader themes of affect and emotion. For example, Greenhough and Roe (2011) compare the use of human and animals in clinical trials by utilizing Acampora’s (2006) concept of “somatic sensibility.” This is the idea that sentient beings made of “animate flesh” share a sense of physical vulnerability and that this allows bodily gestures to be understood by others. Similarly, Davies (2012) applies Haraway’s concept of shared suffering to argue that “all animal experimentation develops entanglements between human and animal capacities” (p. 633).

It is analytically important to examine animal care issues in the lab, but recent work is identifying some risks of focusing too heavily on the situated human–animal interaction. ² For example, Nelson (2016) focuses on the practice of animal care but stresses the importance of wider jurisdictional conflicts between welfare and behavioral scientists. After examining the historical case of a beagle colony in the US, Giraud and Hollin (2016) argue that care was not a moment for ethical transformation (as implied by Haraway) but actually a mechanism to allow the science to progress unhindered. They also argue that insufficient understanding of the historical and contextual aspects of care would have missed crucial aspects of their case concerning, for example, the breeding of particular species for experimentation. This point is made even more dramatically by Johnson (2015) in her unsettling study of a researcher–lobster encounter. Johnson shows how a particular experimental moment can be understood as a messy, contingent interweaving of researcher and animal. However, to fully understood this encounter, she argues, it is necessary to bring in “broader categories of social analysis” (p. 297)—in her case, the US political and military landscape—which helps to explain how and why the lobster body has become known, and the wider shared terrain of human and animal violence. This is reminiscent of elements of Davies’s (2012) argument about the impact of international and disciplinary tensions on care encounters.

In this paper, we use some of this critique, together with previous work on discourses (Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007; Holmberg and Ideland 2010; McLeod and Hobson-West 2016), to justify our focus on the wider social and regulatory processes that may influence what goes on in laboratories. To be clear, then, our study does not analyze encounters as a way of exploring the coconstruction of human and animal corporeality or suffering. This theme is well developed by other authors (e.g., Greenhough and Roe 2011). Instead, our aim in this paper is to illustrate the importance to regulation and practice of a particular conception of how society views or feels about animals. We conclude that this can be understood as a kind of “societal sentience” and claim that this concept can add useful breadth to existing studies of laboratory animal science and beyond.

Methodological Approach

This paper reports findings from an empirical study of UK animal research. This study involved a close documentary analysis of law and gray literature, and a series of interviews with key actors in the laboratory, with the aim of exploring the construction of sentience.

The documentary analysis involved a critical reading of the law and guidance associated with laboratory animal use in the UK, namely, the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 known as ASPA. Given the role of law as a key human technology (Novotny 2014), a careful reading of legal documents can show how distinctions are “made to matter” (Mansfield 2003) and how metaphorical categories—such as human or animal—are “concretized” in the material world (Delaney 2001). As was recently shown by Asdal (2012), however, it is crucially important to look at the detail of all sections and subsections of an act in order to fully understand the relevance of wider social processes.

Phase 2 of the research involved semistructured interviews with laboratory personnel at one commercial company in the UK that uses a wide variety of species. More specifically, we studied the perspectives of those individuals classified by ASPA as “named persons” (ASPA was recently amended, as explained below). This legal nomenclature refers to people with codified responsibility for ensuring that laboratory practice conforms to the legislation. This paper focuses on two categories—Named Animal Care and Welfare Officers (NACWOs) and Named Veterinary Surgeons (NVSs). These individuals have statutory responsibilities for animal welfare, and their perspectives are therefore particularly salient for a study exploring how practitioners negotiate the complex implications around sentience.

NACWOs are usually, but not exclusively, an animal technician who has the added responsibilities of overseeing environmental controls and husbandry. There is interesting research work on junior animal technicians (see Greenhough and Roe 2011, 2018; Birke, Arluke, and Michael 2007), and a recent opinion piece that argues that NACWOs are chosen for their “strong characters” (Cruden 2012). However, the fact that the precise term NACWO is a relatively new regulatory category means that there is yet to be published work on this particular group.

Within each institution, the NACWO works closely with the NVS who has responsibility for the provision of veterinary cover and also participates in the ethical review process (Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons 2012). Veterinarians in the laboratory have been described as being “caught in the middle” (Smith 2006), between the aims of the scientists and the needs of the animals. In the US, Carbone (2004) claims that vets have become a “hot political resource” and have been used to defend experiments against criticisms from animal welfare groups. This key role is also implied by recent UK opinion polling, which claims to show that vets are the most trusted source of information on animal research (Ipsos MORI 2016). Given our interest in sentience and their underrepresentation in social scientific research more broadly (Hobson-West and Timmons 2015), this makes veterinarians a particularly interesting group to interview.

Access to staff was made via a key contact at the company. One-to-one interviews were carried out in a side room separate to the main activities of the lab, in 2013. Participants completed written consent forms and the project received ethical approval from the University of Nottingham. Using a semistructured interview agenda, twelve interviews were carried out, digitally recorded, and transcribed verbatim. It was subsequently decided to carry out full analysis on ten of these, as it emerged during interview that two had different roles under the Act. The interviews lasted up to forty-five minutes. Time was partly restricted by the practical demands of interviewees having to return to their day-to-day practice. Five participants were male and five were female. In the interest of preserving confidentiality, the extracts below will just use “NVS” or “NACWO” and a numeral as signifiers.

As with any study, this research design has limitations. For example, it is geographically limited in being focused on the UK. However, the UK has a particularly important role in the history and regulation of animal research internationally (McLeod and Hobson-West 2016). The UK also has the added dimension of a strand of so-called extremist campaign groups, a potentially unique national example of a literally and metaphorically threatening public (Welsh and Wynne 2013), and a social movement that is watched closely internationally (Hobson-West 2012). While our empirical focus is firmly on the UK, we have drawn on others’ work from other countries including Denmark (Koch and Svendsen 2015) and Sweden (Holmberg and Ideland 2010). Nevertheless, we do agree that more empirical studies across laboratories and across countries would be useful, given the international landscapes of animal research (Davies et al. 2016).

Secondly, this study is based on interviews rather than more ethnographic observation. We accept that the latter can provide more detailed insights into the day-to-day practice (Greenhough and Roe 2018) of care issues. However, to reiterate, exploring care encounters is covered well in existing literature and is not our objective in this particular paper. The argument now moves on to consider how animal sentience is constructed in law and by named persons. The subsequent section then reveals how crucial assumptions are simultaneously being made in both contexts about society’s attitudes to nonhuman animals.

The Construction of Animal Sentience

Sentience and the Entangled Public

Conclusion: Societal Sentience

Haraway (2008, 80) famously argued that “Try as we might to distance ourselves, there is no way of living that is not also a way of someone, not just something, else dying differentially.” This extract is primarily about the need to view the animal as subject, not object, but the provocative quote does raise the ethical question of exactly which someone has to die. This paper has shown that, in the case of animal research, the answer depends on constructions of sentience. This concept is ill-defined and much debated in the scientific literature but has become a defining point in law, so that animals with the lowest sentience are the preferred object of scientific experimentation. We also showed how this kind of hierarchy is challenged by some as speciesist. As neatly summarized by Ethologist Bekoff (2013), “There aren’t ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ animal species. We make that differentiation because it serves us well and makes life easier when deciding who lives and who dies” (p. 17). Crucially, however, this paper has also revealed another invented hierarchical ordering of the “other,”—this time based on perceived societal concern. Our analysis suggests that this dual ordering is evident in animal research regulation and reflected in the discourses of those charged with implementing this law.

So, in summary, we have revealed a close entanglement of assumptions about biological sensitivity in animals and assumptions about socioethical sensitivity in humans. We propose that the latter is termed societal sentience. Societal sentience tries to get at the imagined feelings of an abstract entity called the public or society who are, to quote Marris (2015) on another topic, “omnipresent as disembodied, imagined publics but absent as actual persons or organisations” (p. 90). Put crudely, if the ethics of animal research is primarily built on “reducing pain, suffering, distress and lasting harm” for nonhumans then, we argue, the same appears to be true for humans: that the aim is simultaneously to reduce societal pain, suffering, distress, and lasting harm potentially caused by laboratory animal science. This societal sentience is often implicit but is also sometimes explicit. For example, a recent advice note by the Home Office ³ explains how some project license applications are forwarded on to another committee (Animals in Science Committee [ASC]) for an additional layer of review. These include projects using specially protected species but also those “giving rise to societal concern” (Home Office 2015). Precisely, how the Home Office would identify these is not specified (whether via opinion polling, lay membership on the ASC, or some other mechanism). This again shows how animal sentience is closely entangled with assumptions about societal sentience. So what are the wider implications of this argument, for authors working on animal research or wider topics?

While this paper did not provide an ethnographic investigation into care encounters in the laboratory, our approach does challenge those authors who do so to be alert to the wider context within which microlevel encounters occur. In this sense, it supports the stream of work (e.g., Davies 2012; Johnson 2015; Nelson 2016; Giraud and Hollin 2016) that seeks to stand back to consider the wider social forces at play. In the case of the lobster, for example, Johnson (2015, 300) briefly notes that its experimental treatment would be unacceptable if it were a vertebrate; “lobsters can be made to not matter according to predominant ethical frameworks.” We agree, but our study shows that it is societal sentience and not just their biological sentience, that allows their discounting from legislation and moves them outside ethical boundaries. For the burgeoning field of work on animal research, the message is that societal sentience operates as an imaginary that has powerful impacts on regulation and on the translation of regulation into scientific practice. Those planning empirical work with others, beyond named vets and NACWOs, should therefore investigate the applicability of this concept. Indeed, a recent UK engagement exercise with stakeholders and social scientists across disciplines identified species and sentience as an important priority for further research (Davies et al. 2016). More specifically, it would be interesting to assess the extent to which attitudes to the use of certain species use differs across institutions (see Hawkins and Hobson-West 2017), and whether and how localized resistance is evident to these broader narratives of what “society” supposedly will and will not accept.

Theoretically, we also suggest that the proposed concept of societal sentience can add value to the substantial literature on imaginaries (see Jasanoff 2004) and expectations. The impact of imaginaries is highly political, but the term itself could be seen as usefully neutral. However, we propose that in some cases, using the more specific term of societal sentience could help focus greater attention not just on assumptions about future users of technologies (Borup et al. 2006) but on how present societal or public feelings or emotions are imagined. This represents one possible response to Welsh and Wynne’s (2013) call for more work on the “affective” dimension of public imaginaries (p. 546) and aligns with other work on how scientists and others manipulate public discourses (Davies 2006). Furthermore, given that the term “sentience” is more prominently associated with nonhumans, we also hope that the symmetry implied by the term “societal sentience” will appeal to those working in animal studies, for whom breaking down species barriers forms a key conceptual task. ⁴

Finally, we suggest that this paper has normative implications for those working to improve conditions for laboratory animals. As we noted at the start, one key narrative of animal welfare science is that a greater understanding of the biological sentience of animals will eventually lead to positive improvements in their living conditions via changes in policy (e.g., Jones 2013). This is based on a particular understanding of the relationship between science and policy and represents a kind of deficit model of the scientific understanding of politics. However, there is a broader problematic: is sentience the correct basis for ethics?

Within animal ethics, Burghardt (2009) provocatively argues that animal sentience and consciousness are “overvalued on the ethical ruler” (pp. 516-17). In short, those in power are prone to find other ways to differentiate and discriminate. As feminists have long argued, stressing similarities does not necessarily equate to better treatment. Continuing to focus solely on biological sentience, and discovering yet more impressive capacities of animals, has not led to greatly improved treatment of animals (Gruen 2013). Although rooted very differently, this is strikingly similar to one criticism of ANT, which is that revealing entanglements does not necessarily tell us how to act (see Barnett and Land 2007). Likewise, critics have also started to question whether the radical decentering of the human, and a focus on care encounters, will lead to greater opportunities for care innovation and improved conditions for animals (and humans). For example, Nelson (2016) questions Haraway’s optimism (shared by others, e.g., Druglitrø 2018) that moving beyond the objectification of animals will lead to “imaginative new practices of care” (p. 63). Likewise, Giraud and Hollin’s (2016) analysis suggests that care work can, despite appearances, be one step on the route to compliance and actually result in a foreclosing of responsibility.

In conclusion, while we welcome the increased social scientific attention to this contested area of technoscience, and can see the value in ethnographies of affect inside the laboratory, we suggest a greater focus on wider question of societal sentience. This concept demands more attention to, and critique of, how publics and society are imagined in regulation and in practice and how ethics is generated through such imaginaries. Surely, social scientists and humanities scholars are well placed to lead this agenda (Davies et al. 2016) and, at the very least, to move beyond the standard overreliance on opinion polls (see Hobson-West 2010). Ultimately, this more meta-level approach may represent a more fruitful way of understanding and improving the fate of humans and nonhumans in the production of certified knowledge.