Animal ethos the morality of human animal encounters in experimental lab science first edition lesle
Animal Ethos The Morality of Human Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science First Edition Lesley A. Sharp
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The Diversity of Animal Reproduction First Edition
The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science
lesley a. sharp
University of California Press
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press Oakland, California
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014111
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In loving memory of my wonderful brother Erik Rodman Sharp, E# — A Great Tree of a Man — December 5, 1958–February 6, 2016 Checkmate
Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice
The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters
3. The Lives and Deaths of Laboratory Animals 107
Animal Erasures
Beyond the Trope of Sacrifice
Managed Suffering and Humane Care
Reimagining Moral Frameworks of Care
Conclusion: The Limitations of Humane Death
4. Science and Salvation
The Politics of Animal Suffering
Specialized Practices of Animal Welfare
Eclectic Forms of Animal Exceptionalism
Conclusion: Totemic Creatures
5. The Animal Commons 195
The Ethos of Sharing
Uncommon Creatures
The Animal Commons
Conclusion: Other Animals’ Fates
Illustrations
1. “Hydrophobia—M. Pasteur’s Experiments,” illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1884 22
2. Monument to the Little Brown Dog, Battersea Park, London 25
3. “Scene at a dog dealer’s compound, 1966,” photograph by Stan Wayman for Life 44
4. “Angered by the disappearance of their family pets in Clarke County, Va., Mrs. William Mitchell and her neighbors put up signs to discourage thieves,” photograph by Stan Wayman for Life 44
5. Edinburgh Zoo chimpanzees responding to “Apes as Family,” part of Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema series 103
6. “Who would you RAT/HER see live?” billboard produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research 110
7. “Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer,” poster produced by the Foundation for Biomedical Research 114
8. “Help the Horse to Save the Soldier,” World War I Blue Cross poster illustrated by Fortunino Matania 117
9. Animals in War Memorial, Hyde Park, London, by artist David Backhouse 118
10. Laika, the Soviet space dog, mural of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Moscow 118
11. Monument to Laboratory Rats and Mice, Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, Russia, by sculptor Andrew Kharkevich 119
12. “We Take Care of Our Animals . . .,” advertisement produced by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science Foundation 144
13. “This Won’t Hurt a Bit . . .,” billboard produced by Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania 165
14. Laboratory animal memorial mural at an East Coast medical school by artist Frank Giorgini 184
15. “May We Never Forget . . .,” commemorative card for a memorial to a colony of research macaques lost during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 185
16. The terrier Callie in an MRI scanner 230
17. Volunteer with her dog, Kady, after completing a scan session 230
18. Mouse Grimace Scale poster for assessing pain, produced by the U.K.-based National Center for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research 234
19 Crossing Over, sculpture of three mice in a boat, by sculptor Steve Worthington 238
20 Natty sculpture on a lab window ledge, by sculptor Steve Worthington 239
21. Sprightly sculpture on a ledge near a staircase, by sculptor Steve Worthington 240
Acknowledgments
The first expedition that initiated this research project began with an unanticipated foray during a delightful summer residence in 2010 at the University of Cambridge. For this I have philosopher Michael Banner to blame. At the time, I was making steady progress on a previous work, The Transplant Imaginary, a project concerned with the embodied consequences of non-human forms of organ replacement from the stance of associated inventors, immunologists, and others whose attentiveness to animals surprised me. During this residency, Michael and I collaborated on a smallscale ethnographic project on moral thinking in animal science, which began with the joint supervision of a student assistant. My curiosity was sparked, and I found firsthand engagement irresistible. The ensuing journey has been extraordinary, and I owe it all to Michael for handing me that first ticket, opening the train door, and nudging me off the platform and straight on board.
Research on the moral underpinnings of animal science is not a project for the faint of heart. As I demonstrate throughout Animal Ethos, the determination to advance scientific knowledge and practices that could alleviate future suffering in both human and animal patients is laden with moral challenges. My indebtedness to those who have helped me understand this runs deep. Throughout this research I encountered a host of remarkable people, whose generosity of time, patience with anthropological probing, and openness as interviewees have left deep impressions. The rigorous requirements of anthropology’s code of ethics, undergirded by confidentiality, prevent me from identifying individuals and institutions by name. I nevertheless wish to thank the many lab researchers, animal care technicians, veterinarians, animal activists, and bioethicists who participated in this research initially in England and, subsequently, the United
States. Their willingness to engage in sometimes difficult conversations; allow me to shadow them in their labs; and invite me to attend closed training sessions, professional workshops, and specialized conferences have proved invaluable to me. In retrospect, I realize how fortunate I was to conduct ethnographic research in academic labs that adhere to high standards of animal welfare, where humane care and associated innovative enrichment strategies were considered essential aspects of daily lab regimens. This enabled me—and, I believe, research participants too—to partake in complex discussions of, say, the meaning and challenges of quality care rather than lapses in or disregard for animal life. The polarization of animal research and activism nevertheless loomed large as a significant— and important—challenge throughout this project. In this light, I am grateful to every individual—including the institutional gatekeepers—who trusted my assertions of moral neutrality as a professional anthropologist and who let me in the door, introduced me to relevant parties, and granted me permission to duplicate the images that pepper the pages of this book. This book would not have been possible without ongoing financial and associated forms of support. I am forever grateful to my friends, colleagues, and administrators at Barnard College and Columbia University for their wide range of contributions. Funding through several faculty minigrants, alongside annual support associated with an Ann Whitney Olin Chair and, more recently, the Barbara Chamberlain and Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’ 30 Professorship in Anthropology, have done much to sustain this project from its initial phase to its completion. I would not be writing these words now were it not for the generosity of a year-long residency in 2015–2016 as the Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. I am in awe of Judy Vichniac and her staff’s extraordinary gifts in assembling, year after year, a diverse, interdisciplinary array of scholars while fostering community too. (My mother, an alumna, would be thrilled to know Radcliffe lives on in such a vital form.) I am especially grateful to Tina Duhaime, Robert Huber, Raj Pandit, Michael Pollan, Steve Takasugi, and Reiko Yamada, whose work with—or thinking through— animals (and, sometimes, in science) inspired me think more carefully and deeply about my own. I thank, too, Karole Armitage, Maryanne Kowaleski, Mitchell Luskin, Scott Milner, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Athina Tsangari, Sharon Weinberger, and especially Shane Bobrycki, Brenda Chalfin, and Alice Lyons for being sounding boards or just plain good company. I will never forget the kindness of Joyce and Ty Bell, who came to my aid when I was in need. Ashton Macfarlane proved to be a truly gifted Research Partner throughout my Radcliffe fellowship; he has left his mark everywhere in this book.
Throughout the year, the warm invitations I received from Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Erica James, and Michael Fisher to participate in their very lively joint Harvard-MIT Friday seminar in medical anthropology offered a steady supply of inspiration and a strong sense of community. Additional support the following year, in the form of an intensive Exploratory Seminar called “Beyond the Trope of Sacrifice” through Radcliffe’s Academic Ventures initiative, served as a lovely reminder of how precious time at Radcliffe can be. I do hope those who joined this event found that our two days together inspired their work as much as theirs has inspired mine.
On assorted home fronts, many others have sustained and nourished me. I am fortunate to have wonderful colleagues and friends in my life, whose insights, friendly nudges, and general support have sparked both my tinkering with and my overhauling of ideas. Very special thanks are due to those at Barnard and Columbia, including Paige West, Sev Fowles, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Linda Bell, Jennifer Hirsch, Kim Hopper, and Carole Vance, and still other fellow anthropologists and animal experts elsewhere, including Nancy Chen, Stephen Foster, Linda Green, Anja Jensen, Lisa Jones-Engel, Katie Kilroy-Marac, Lene Koch, Mary Beth Mills, Lynn Morgan, Lisa Moses, Todd Nicewonger, Mette Svendsen, Janelle Taylor, and Jen Van Tiem. A host of students—too numerous to count—offered stimulating and provocative readings of much related material over recent years; I am especially thankful to my senior thesis advisees and to others enrolled in my Barnard and Columbia courses “Absent Bodies,” “Animal Matters,” “Animal Ethos,” and “The Medical Imaginary,” alongside a cohort of remarkable Fishkill students from the Bard Prison Initiative, for challenging and destabilizing many of my own assumptions. In turn, still others remind me all the time how dear their friendships are to me, especially Susie Blalock and Al Lyon, Maureen Hickey and Michael Grider, Lucy Painter and Malaga Baldi, Karin and Bill Tuttle, Heather Altfeld and Troy Jollymore, Paula Rubel and Abe Rosman, Zoë Strother and Jonathan Reynolds, The Monkeeys, Erika Doss, Inderpal Grewal, Tovah Klein, Vinita Seghal, Lisa Tiersten, Vanessa Uelman, and Maxine Weisgrau. I punctuate this account with a special set of callouts to the neighbors and strangers who rushed to my aid when I busted my collarbone; to my dear friend Karin who rescued me (and soon thereafter, alongside Mr. Bill, Ms. Zookie); and to Sev Fowles, Fabiola Lafontant, and Miranda Hansen-Hunt, alongside a wonderful orthopedist and a skilled pair of PT experts who together relieved, sustained, and bolstered me as I healed. At UC Press, I am deeply thankful to Naomi Schneider, a wonderful editor who sets the gold standard for the field; to her assistant, Benjy Malings, who has consistently kept this project on track; to my production editor,
Nicholle Robertson; and to Sarah Hudgens, a talented copy editor who strikes the perfect balance between revision and refinement. I also thank Carrie Friese and two anonymous readers who provided invaluable comments on an early draft. Any errors or missteps detected here are my own.
To return once again to the book’s core, as the ensuing chapters reveal, sacrifice, death, and loss are potent sites of moral thought and action, whether one works with or advocates for the rights of lab animals. Related themes reverberate in my own life, and as I sought to complete this work, I lost three people very dear to me. As I drafted this work, my wonderful younger brother, Erik, died suddenly and without warning; the sole blessing amid this terrible tragedy was that I was nearby when it happened. I dedicate this book to him as a tiny acknowledgment of how his love, quixotic sense of humor, and fortitude continue to inspire me each and every day. I am so very blessed to have been part of his extraordinary life. Elizabeth Colson, yet another truly remarkable person, passed too. Upon my arrival in 1983 at the University of California, Berkeley, as a fledgling graduate student, I asked to work with her; during our first encounter she made it very clear she would guide me for only one year because she was intent on retiring. Colson, nevertheless, broke her pledge, tracking my progress and offering bold, unsolicited comments on nearly every bit of scholarship I have produced, thus mentoring me for more than three decades. She died in Zambia in 2016, sitting on her veranda and listening to birdsong, just shy of her hundredth birthday. She, too, defines a significant presence here, most especially as a trustworthy moral compass of ethnographic engagement. A third blow came when a dear, dear mentor, colleague, friend, and surrogate kinswoman, Paula Rubel, died unexpectedly in May 2018. As all who know her can attest, she was a formidable presence at Barnard, Columbia, and beyond. Paula has shaped my professional and personal life profoundly for the last twenty-four years, and without her prodding, guidance, and unwavering support I would not be where I am today. Her warmth, determination, and brilliance have always been, and will remain, reminders of all I would ever hope to be.
Finally, at the beginning and end of every day, I am moved by the love of two lively characters in my life. First and most of all, my son, Alex, who has grown into a strong and remarkable man and whose skills, insights, and empathy inspire both delight and awe within me. And then, trotting alongside us or ricocheting back and forth along the mountain hiking path, is Ms. Zookie, a tenacious and beloved companion who inevitably insists on following her own moral code.
Introduction
Moral Entanglements in Experimental Animal Science
“Why look at animals?” The critic, painter, and poet John Berger, widely celebrated for his attentiveness to seeing as a way of knowing, famously posed this question while pondering captive zoo and other creatures. Animals “are both like and unlike” humans, wrote Berger, and our encounters with them entail an exchanged gaze. Whereas the animal “does not reserve a special look for man . . . man becomes aware of himself returning the look” (1990, 13, 25). Across this “abyss of non-comprehension . . . [the animal’s] common language, its silence, guarantees its distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man” and “because of this distinctness . . . an animal’s life, never to be confused with a man’s, can be seen to run parallel to his. Only in death do the two parallel lines converge and after death, perhaps cross over to become parallel again” (14–15).
Experimental laboratory science necessitates specialized, interspecies encounters marked simultaneously by distance and intimacy, difference and similarity, and by distinct confrontations between humans and animals during those moments when animals die for science. As experimental subjects, lab animals occupy “parallel” lives in Berger’s sense; the intimacy of human-animal encounters in labs fosters troubling entanglements too. The premise that lab animals are simultaneously “like and unlike” us justifies their experimental use, yet the intimacy of quotidian lab encounters troubles the human ability to maintain boundaries of interspecies distance and distinctness. This premise springs from animals’ roles as research subjects: as proxies, animals endure procedures deemed too painful or dangerous for human subjects and, as such, animals are distinct from us. These same conditions elide human and animal bodies, the animal “model” approximating the human body and its associated physiological processes. Laboratory death further disrupts efforts to guard interspecies distinctness: many
experiments conclude with the “sacrifice” or killing of the animal, a foregone conclusion that may stimulate moral thought and action among the humans who labor with and alongside lab-bound creatures.
Animal Ethos is an anthropological investigation of the moral complexities of and associated responses to interspecies cohabitation in experimental medico-scientific research. As such, it is neither a study of animals per se nor a critique of lab animal care. Instead, like Berger, I employ humananimal encounters analytically, arguing that through animals one may access the workings of an otherwise obscured scientific morality. In other words, what do lab personnel “see” when they “look at animals” under their care, and how do these ways of seeing translate to moral ways of knowing and reimagining interspecies work? Of key concern to this ethnographic project are the informal and private understandings of the moral use of animals as research subjects among a range of lab personnel—including lab directors (known as principal investigators or PIs), their students and research staff, animal care technicians, and lab veterinarians. The counterpoint voiced by animal rights activists also informs this work.
Much has been written on codified, bioethical frameworks that shape laboratory practices. In an attempt to offset the paucity of other perspectives, Animal Ethos addresses the equally rich, yet poorly understood, realm of “ordinary” or “everyday” ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010) in science, where serendipitous, creative, unorthodox, and self-reflexive thought and action evidence efforts to transform laboratories into moral scientific worlds. Of special concern to me are moments of ambivalence, where relatively clear-cut, standardized frameworks fail to answer deeper and more personal moral questions. I argue that ambivalence may stimulate introspection, shift perceptions of animals, and inspire lab personnel to reconfigure their behavior and that of their coworkers, too. These moral shifts are evident in their personal stories about, and their comportment and behavior with, research animals. In light of this, throughout this work I ask: What does the ethnographic tracking of quotidian— and, often, mundane—human action and thought tell us about how lab personnel remake their moral worlds? How might such an approach uncover hidden aspects of human-animal relations in science?
The ethics of care—manifest in human thought and action—is a daily preoccupation in experimental lab science. Within a bioethical framework of “animal welfare,” lab personnel must adhere to strict rules of conduct that mandate the humane treatment of animals. All lab personnel I encountered during this project were well versed in and carefully followed regulated, species-specific principles of animal lab use. Animal Ethos, though, is not a study
of research compliance. Rather, I am most intrigued by the contrast between regulated ethical behavior and the informal, serendipitous, and creative strategies that involved humans employ to bring lab animals into personalized, and humanized, moral spheres. To paraphrase Eduardo Kohn, of what significance are animals in shaping a moral life in science (2014, 460)? As I demonstrate throughout this book, all sorts of lab personnel engage in practices that reveal elaborate sentimental associations between humans and animals. Such practices transform animals from expendable research subjects or “data points” or “things” into prized and, sometimes, beloved creatures. Scientific discipline, the reframing of “matters of care” within a lab’s labor hierarchy (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011), and species preference all figure in this “remaking” (Lowe 2004) of animals for science. Whereas the field of bioethics might lack the tools to identify, uncover, and analyze associated unorthodox practices, quotidian morality defines a longstanding interest within anthropology. Thus, I seek in part to broaden the scope of bioethics—alongside interspecies concerns within science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology—by incorporating new understandings of the morality of care in animal experimentation. How, then, to transpose ongoing anthropological concern about ethical thinking within human moral spheres onto those whose very existence hinges on everyday encounters with other species?
A finding that unifies this work is that the affective power of animals— especially mammals—figures prominently in the reshaping of moral worlds in experimental science. Within this framework, ethics of care, interspecies intimacy, and empathy are significant anchors. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (although writing of how to redirect theory, and not of laboratory worlds) offers important insights on the significance of “care” as an analytical category. As she explains, attentiveness to “care” enlivens considerations of what might be possible, how things could be, and how one might make a difference. As I elaborate throughout this work, how humans engage in their work with animals “involves not only detecting what is there, what is given in the thing [or, in this instance, the animal] . . ., but also [thinking about] what is not included in it and about what this thing [or creature] could become” (2011, 96). For Puig de la Bellacasa, “care” signifies “an affective stage, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (9). In lab contexts, any, some, or all of these modes of response are possible. To such assertions, I nevertheless add this caveat: when set within an experiential framework, care is also—and always—a moral enterprise (see Kleinman 2006, 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Tronto 2009).
If, then, we embrace Puig de la Bellacasa’s assertion that attentiveness to “care” and “caring” bears possibilities of “re-affecting objectified worlds”
(97), the character and quirkiness of human-animal cohabitation in labs necessitate that the anthropologist be cognizant of the practices, ideas, and innovations that inform—or demonstrate—the vastly varied ways that “care” and “caring” are imagined in science. The polyvalent and elusive qualities of these terms figure in my efforts to detect moral thought and action. Intimate encounters with animals foster a host of responses: empathy, for instance, might just as easily redirect research design (Berns 2017; Berns, Brooks, and Spivak 2012) as one’s professional trajectory (Gluck 2016). Still other prominent possibilities fall beneath the aegis of welfare, manifested in enrichment practices where one strives to think like a monkey or a fish, sometimes, but not always, engendering a sense of transpecies kindredness (Franklin 2007; Haraway 2008). In other instances, the “reaffecting” of animals reconfirms the self as a moral being, defining notions of self-worth (see, for instance, Buckmaster 2015a) or demonstrating pride in one’s mastery of specialized skills, even in contexts that necessitate killing (Friese and Clarke 2012).
With these complex configurations in mind, Animal Ethos is organized around three analytical themes: human-animal intimacy, the dominant trope of “sacrifice” (the most commonly employed term for euthanizing animals), and serendipitous practices that uncover forms of animal preference and exceptionalism. One goal of this three-pronged approach is to avoid the polemics of asserting what is right or wrong, just or criminal, or kind or cruel, as typifies works that set activists’ condemnations of animal use against scientific assertions that animal experimentation spares and saves human lives. On such fronts I strive to remain neutral (and readers who seek guidance on how best to behave, respond, act, or think will be sorely disappointed). My stance springs in large part from the ethics of ethnographic engagement, informed by an understanding that suspending one’s judgment generates richer data and fosters deeper understanding. Throughout this work I found myself wrestling with an overarching question best phrased as follows: How do scientists think in moral terms about their work with animals when they go home at the end of the day? (Or, as activists might phrase it, How do they live with themselves, knowing what they do?) As such, my purpose is neither to justify nor to condemn animal experimentation. Instead, I focus on unscripted, personal, and often private understandings across a range of professional fields (from researcher and student, to animal technician and veterinarian, to activist) as a means to uncover and decipher the complex logic that informs, shapes, and transforms intimate, interspecies encounters.
As I demonstrate throughout this work, these sorts of moral entanglements have complex histories. In preparation for what follows in subsequent
chapters, this introductory chapter covers a wide swath of terrain, and so I pause here to provide readers with a rudimentary roadmap. This chapter comprises four overarching sections. First, in “Accessing Animal Science,” I offer a brief history of the project and the premises that inform it. In the second section, “Everyday Morality in Laboratory Practice,” I consider anthropology’s longstanding interest in morality as informing my own efforts to study quotidian thought, word, and practice in experimental science. Third, in “The Boundaries of Interspecies Encounters,” I situate my work on human-animal encounters in science within the broader field of animal studies (Waldau 2013); I then turn to the paired themes of animal care and welfare, which, I argue, are informed by the entwined histories of scientific research and animal activism. The final section, “The Parameters of Ethnographic Engagement,” includes an overview of the methodological approaches from which data were derived and concludes with a chapter-bychapter summary of the book’s organization and scope.
accessing animal science
Animal Ethos marks my most recent ethnographic engagement with moral realms of science. Initiated formally in 2010, Animal Ethos builds on two previous projects: the first, Strange Harvest (Sharp 2006b), spanned thirteen years of research (1991–2004) and addressed the sociomoral consequences of cadaveric organ transplantation (or the human-to-human transfer of viable organs, technically known as allotransplantation) in the United States. The second—based within five anglophone countries1—involved a decade (2003–2013) of comparative research in two competing realms of highly experimental transplant science, xenotransplant (henceforth, xeno) science and bioengineering. Practitioners within each are intent on alleviating the chronic shortage of human organs and associated human suffering, and imagined solutions include deriving parts from animals for human use or fabricating “artificial” or mechanical devices (most notably for the heart) in ways that might one day augment or fully replace the need for parts of human origin (Sharp 2007).
As an ethnographer, I am fascinated by how quotidian processes within domains of science evidence moral thought and action. For instance, midway through the first project I was struck by the preponderance of widespread, contradictory, and often unspoken moral premises that pervade transplant medicine, in which organs extracted from the dead are valued for their capacity to rejuvenate sick and dying patients struggling with organ failure. Transplanted organs—though widely regarded by involved parties
as precious goods—are never openly commodified but, instead, are reconstituted through rhetorical refashioning as gifts that require no reciprocation. Whereas these transfers of much-needed body parts entail loss, intense grief, sorrow, and suffering, such sentiments—and talk of them—are obscured, silenced, and denied relevance by a host of involved parties who celebrate such body transfers as forms of rebirth.
I initially conceived the second project as an investigation of how xeno experts and bioengineers imagined the remaking of the human form. As I soon learned, specialists in each field had relatively little experience with human patients, which informed their respective imaginaries. I learned, too, that the day-to-day lives of experts in both fields were heavily populated with research animals. Animals figured prominently not only in research design, purpose, and outcome, but in how xeno scientists and bioengineers framed their work in distinctive historical, social, and promissory terms. Here, species mattered. Within xeno science, for example, simian and, more recently, porcine subjects proliferate, and the values assigned to each category of animal hinge on a species’ perceived proximity to us as appropriate human models or proxies. Bioengineers, on the other hand, have long relied on ruminants (especially ewes and male calves). The presence of these animals in laboratories shapes an altogether different moral trajectory.2 Baby bulls dominate engineers’ accounts of their profession’s history, how they imagine the field’s promissory future, and their own personal life narratives too. In essence, prized calves map out a temporalized progression of a profession’s mandate to eliminate human suffering and death. Together, these two previous projects define the substrata upon which Animal Ethos rests.
Boundary Work
This arc of anthropological engagement with clinical medicine and science has taught me to be alert to boundaries because it is at such sites that professional and personal dilemmas are likely to surface and, thus, where moral imaginaries proliferate (Beidelman 1993; DelVecchio Good 2007; Tronto 2009). Of longstanding interest to me are the border zones that demarcate the living from the dead, where sanctioned thoughts, words, and deeds contradict others that are (often deliberately) obscured, silenced, or rendered taboo, and, most recently, exist in research domains marked by an entanglement of humans with animals. Whereas my first project was anchored by transplanted organs and my second was framed by inventive non-human alternatives, Animal Ethos is moored to the moral possibilities engendered by the human-animal divide that typifies experimental laboratory space. Three boundaries specifically frame this current project, as reflected in the
book’s three main parts: interspecies difference and intimacy, care and death (or “sacrifice”), and animal generics and exceptionalism.
In light of these foci, several premises inform this study. First, if—as Joan Tronto (2009) asserts—boundaries are sites where moral dilemmas proliferate, then one must also be alert to obscured aspects of everyday life. I maintain that ethnographic engagement, in which associated methodologies are designed to uncover the deeper structures of quotidian life, is especially effective in such contexts. An investigation of scientific morality presents special challenges because, as noted above, experimental lab science (not unlike organ transplantation and still other realms of clinical medicine) lays claim to a specialized lexicon that can effectively erase competing sources of knowledge. For example, whereas emotional attachment may be an inevitable outcome of human-animal encounters in research, one learns early in one’s career that affective responses are discouraged and, even, taboo. Death presents still other quandaries: although research animals die or are killed at the end of many experiments, death talk is strangely absent from laboratory contexts. In turn, whereas research procedures may be physically or emotionally painful for animals, these realities inevitably fall under the rubric of animal welfare but not suffering. These examples do not simply define unquestioned regimes of practice; as I demonstrate throughout this work, they also expose moral quandaries and spark moral action. In light of this, I follow the lead of Monica Casper and Lisa Moore: Animal Ethos strives to be an ethnography “of that which is not always observable” (2009, 10), and of the entangled themes of absence and presence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010) that pervade lab personnel’s efforts to wrestle privately with moral principles, thought, and sentiment.
A second premise concerns a disciplinary boundary, involving an important distinction I make elsewhere (see Sharp 2013, 3–9, 15–19) between (bio) ethics and morality. As I am often told by lab-based researchers, codified, bioethical principles determine what can or should be done (or not done) in animal science; in contrast, “morality” does not belong within the scientific lexicon but instead is regarded as the purview of philosophy and religion. As a result, morality defines an elusive category of analysis. As I demonstrate, moral thought and action—manifested as personal, private, informal, and serendipitous—nevertheless proliferate in science. Whereas much has been written on the ethics of animal welfare, we know very little of quotidian moral thought in science. Animal Ethos is an effort to rectify this discrepancy. This distinction between ethics and morality informs a third key premise. As my previous research demonstrates (Sharp 2009a, 2011b), highly experimental realms prove to be especially productive sites for investigating
morality precisely because associated thought and action have yet to be schematized under the regulatory apparati of bioethics. As such, the quotidian dimensions of morality expose what otherwise remains a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997) of sorts in lab science. This stems from a lack of sanctioned vocabulary and concepts for speaking in moral terms about one’s research endeavors. In essence, codified frameworks bear the power to dominate, obscure, and devalue informal, private struggles and concerns. Yet the presence of animals in laboratories—mammals especially, I maintain— frustrate blanket acceptance of ethical codes of conduct. Animal Ethos illuminates the productive power of interspecies encounters to provoke moral thought, introspection, and reflexivity.
everyday morality in laboratory practice
The local stops at many stations; it is the slow train. It does not race above ground but moves along it.
As it crosses the terrain it slows our gaze and concentrates our attention.
It allows us to see what is in-between.
michael lambek, “Catching the Local”
Morality, as an analytical category, has long preoccupied anthropologists, where localized, ethnographic research is driven by the desire to decipher the deeper meanings and structures of human thought and action.3 The discipline has, nevertheless, witnessed an effervescent revival or “renewed vigor” (Keane 2014, 3) of theoretical interest in morality, especially within the last fifteen years or so.4 Animal Ethos falls within a growing canon of specifically ethnographic projects that address what is variously known as “local,” “everyday,” or “ordinary” moralities and ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Lambek 2010, 2011; Zigon 2008), in which analyses focus most keenly on contexts marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, or incongruity. The goal is not to find resolution based on widely accepted, sanctioned principles of conduct within a circumscribed community (as would be the objective, for instance, of a bioethics consultant). Rather, associated scholarship posits that quotidian experience invigorates moral responses. Indeed, resolution may not be possible nor, even, be an immediate goal, a situation Thomas Beidelman identified as the “moral imaginary” (1993) and Cheryl Mattingly, more recently, termed the “moral laboratories” of daily life (2014). An important point here, in the context of my own work at least, is not that resolution remains out of reach but that the wrestling associated
with moral conundrums is context specific, temporal, ever evolving (and, thus, rarely static) and, often, open-ended. These processes entail questioning, struggle, and self-examination, evidenced in quotidian life.
Throughout this work I draw a sharp distinction between “ethics” and “morality.” In medico-scientific contexts, I have found it helpful to situate the former within the field of bioethics, whereas the latter involves special forms of imaginative introspection. In the United States, bioethical behavior is informed by mandated training and regular (re)certification, and it is subject to inspection and oversight by regulatory bodies. (In animal research, this often involves the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, which inspects laboratories, and USDA-mandated Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, or IACUCs, which are institution-specific ethics review boards). For the purposes of this study, bioethics defines the parameters of what one may and may not do in a lab (or to a lab animal). In contrast, moral behavior, I maintain, is creative and serendipitous, encompassing existential realms of experience (Jackson 2012) whose effects may loop back (Hacking 1995) and inform subsequent deeds and ideas. And whereas bioethical principles unquestionably define the boundaries and bedrock of professional behavior, throughout this book I am most interested in the quirkier realm of morality, where one encounters evidence of how a range of personnel within a lab’s labor hierarchy grapple with the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of “everyday” or “ordinary” practices that comprise experimental animal use.
This focus on the “ordinary” entails, by way of Michael Lambek’s metaphor, taking “the slow train” as a means to perceive the “in-between.” Ethnographic engagement necessitates sustained attention to the localized, quotidian, and mundane aspects of life in order to discern how people make sense of their worlds. Attentiveness to the mundane is especially well suited to the study of science, as exemplified by ethnographically inspired sustained engagement within the field of science and technology studies (STS) as championed by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, John Law, and others (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010).5 Latour exemplifies this approach in his essay “Circulating Reference,” within which he pays meticulous attention to the various ways that members of an interdisciplinary research team engage in studying a swath of Amazonian terrain, driven by a shared desire to determine whether the savannah or the forest is retreating. Together, they map out their findings not merely on, say, pieces of paper and grids of soil samples, but by transforming a café—along with its tables and chairs—into a map of the domain under study. In the end, their shared assessments hinge on a lowly earthworm whose subterranean
activities alter the soil and make it conducive to forest growth (Latour 1999). One encounters the same meticulous quality in Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis as evidencing a “body multiple” (2002) and, again, in Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch’s work in a Danish research lab, where their attentiveness to a range of quotidian practices reveals how premature piglets are sometimes vulnerable baby animals and at other times research objects, proxies for human neonates, data points, or deceased creatures ready for necropsy. Such painstaking approaches to detail expose otherwise obscured domains of scientific practice, such that laboratories emerge as complex, ontological projects whose entwined categories of knowledge and meaning are always evolving. In short, labs are moral worlds.
STS similarly exemplifies the power of being alert not only to people and their actions, but to things. This approach derives from early ethnographic studies. To realize this, one need only consult the canonical works on Trobriand society by Bronislaw Malinowski (considered the foundational ancestor of sustained ethnographic engagement) on the making of a canoe, the circulating items and trade partnerships that comprise kula exchange networks, or horticultural practices and associated magic (1922, 1935).6 Nevertheless, a shift in recent years—unquestionably inspired by STS scholarship—has resulted in a new level of absorbed attention to material objects not merely as artifacts (made or designed by humans, for instance) but also as “actants” (whereby innovative action and associated, often emergent, knowledge are evidenced in networks that include both persons and things) (Latour 1987; Law and Hassard 1999). Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the “biography” of things (1986) further enriches these methodological concerns. Taken together, such approaches enhance anthropological studies of science, where the “in-between” might encompass mundane practices, moral principles, techne, and animals, all of which might then transform analyses of everyday worlds of science.
“Figure and Ground” in Studies of the Everyday
In her essay “On Space and Depth,” Marilyn Strathern proposes the “commonplace technique . . . of figure-ground reversal” as an effective mode of anthropological analysis (and, I would argue, ethnographic engagement). According to Strathern, this approach “by itself simply draws on habits of perception. It may, however, be combined with certain conceptions of the act of interpretation itself. The result is then an oscillation between perspectives that appear to summon quite different approaches to the world” (2002, 88). As she explains (in ways reminiscent of Lambek’s slow train), “If interpretation ‘stops’ movement in the attention to the movement around it,
then in that attention the world also appears full of stopped, singular . . . ‘things’ or ‘events’ or ‘relations,’ ” thereby “bringing entities, human or abstract, into play with one another” (2002, 92). This attentiveness to the “quotidian oscillation” of ground and figure fosters an analytical stance that is alert to “either depth or surface” (109).
The effectiveness of “localized” attention to figure-ground reversal is beautifully realized in Veena Das’s essay “Ordinary Ethics,” in which she tracks everyday evidence of the vagaries of human vulnerability (2012, 133). As Das explains, “In the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi . . . I came to recognize the delicacy of maintaining regard for others through the minutest of gestures” (135). An especially poignant example involves a woman leaving an upturned stool on a “threshold as a sign that she intended to resume [a neighborhood quarrel] . . . the next day,” once the men of their households left for work in the morning, because “it did not seem right to many women to confront a tired man who had braved the heat and dust of the streets to be confronted with an atmosphere of discord.” As Das underscores, women’s efforts to protect the serenity of home life were informed by an array of other moral principles (including deference to patriarchal household structure and the threat of domestic violence).
When Das foregrounds, in Strathern’s sense, the moral relevance of an ordinary, upturned stool, she proffers an important intervention pertinent to my own project. As she explains, “The possibility of speaking of ordinary ethics allows us also to think of the unethical as growing with the forms of life that people inhabit—it is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions” (2012, 135–36). These “ordinary” “forms of life” are methodologically discerned through silent gestures, speech, and personal narration (136; see also Das 1997). As Jarrett Zigon, in turn, asserts, “special attention to forms of everyday language-use is essential to anthropological studies of local moralities” precisely because language “allows for the enactment of a certain range of possible moral worlds” (2008, 152). As we shall see, Animal Ethos is in many ways a study of how people talk about the everyday aspects of their work-related lives.
Sanctioned Speech and Lab Labor Hierarchies
The analytical challenges associated with this “quotidian oscillation” (Strathern 2002, 107) between figure and ground, or “view . . . and counterview” (89) of the “ordinary” (Das 2012; Lambek 2010), are soon realized in
the ways lab personnel talk about the worlds they inhabit. A sanctioned lexicon and associated taboo terms and topics together present a case in point. Sole attention to the former would effectively erase any evidence of the latter, and herein lies a conundrum that troubles my current study. Throughout Animal Ethos I strive to counteract this phenomenon by recognizing the synergistic relationship between absence and presence (Bille, Sørensen, and Hastrup 2010; Casper and Moore 2009; Leder 1990), paired with the understanding of “entities, human or abstract” as potentially “multiple” (Mol 2002). Rephrased, sanctioned words and actions might signal still others that are absent or prohibited. Alongside the linguistic and behavioral tropes of quotidian laboratory life, attention to the animals and objects that populate and clutter such worlds similarly reveals complexities of meaning and value that might otherwise be overlooked and, thus, obscured.
For instance, and as noted earlier, death talk is carefully monitored in labs. Many laboratory experiments are designed as “terminal,” entailing the killing of the animal in anticipation of necropsy. Detailed protocols mandate how, when, and by whom such procedures are performed, and they fall under the rubric of animal welfare laws, regulations, and guidelines at national, state, local, institutional, and disciplinary levels. How one speaks of and describes an animal’s death is likewise circumscribed by a fixed lexicon of permissible terms. One never speaks of “killing” animals; instead, they are “culled,” “sacrificed,” “euthanized,” or “terminated.” These terms can be context specific: one “culls” a “batch” of newborns, “sacrifices” or “euthanizes” a research subject, and “terminates” an undervalued animal. One’s station within a lab’s labor hierarchy might also direct word choice: in the course of my project, researchers generally preferred “sacrifice,” whereas animal technicians and veterinarians more typically spoke of “euthanizing” animals. Finally, the values assigned to particular animals or species affects one’s phrasing: one might speak of “terminating” many mice, but one would never apply this term to a favorite research macaque. This “quotidian oscillation” of specialized language reflects otherwise hidden moral understandings. As Das reminds us, too, taboos associated with various terms expose the “unethical,” where sanctioned and unsanctioned speech, when taken together, enable the anthropologist to access morality “with the help of a vocabulary of rules and infringement” (Das 2012, 134, italics added).
Fieldwork entails mastering key terms and associated vocabulary, and I soon found that speech registers varied as I moved within and across labor hierarchies. In response, I regularly asked interviewees to describe how and
when they used various terms for animals, procedures, and other aspects of their daily work. Death talk aside, a term that proved particularly thorny was “experiment(al).” As I describe later in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, animal activism looms large as a serious social threat to lab researchers, and lab personnel are cognizant of and resistant to the visual and rhetorical tropes employed by activists to sway public opinion. Like “kill,” “experimental” exemplifies a moral flashpoint of discourse because of its association with vivisection (a term that connotes the heartless employment of live animals in science).7 Lab personnel are passionate about their work, and animal technicians (also known as “animal care technicians,” “caretakers,” or, far less frequently, “caregivers”) are especially outspoken in this regard. Some animal caretakers I interviewed loathed the term “experimental” and urged me to speak instead of “research” animals to foreground human-animal partnerships. Research scientists, however, regarded “experimental” as a neutral term that describes the essence of their daily activities and highlights the workings of a rigorous, scientific method.
Such terms might well be thought of as “deadly words” (Favret-Saada 1980) because when enacted in speech, they signal troubled moral domains. Throughout the course of writing this book, I have faced my own moral struggles over how best to describe what I witnessed. Word choice matters in a domain as politically charged and volatile as animal research. Within this book, the terms used are context specific in order to reflect the sentiments of the speaker. There are a few exceptions, however. First, animal death emerged as a pervasive theme in how lab personnel frame their activities in moral terms, and so I have chosen not to shy away from death talk. Second, in an effort to find some middle ground, I interchange “research” and “experimental,” with the understanding that I employ the latter term not as an accusation (akin to the activist’s stance) but in deference to the descriptive, or more neutral, connotations that researchers associate with this word.
Finally, labor hierarchies inform rhetorical practices because laboratory research entails both scientific methods and emotional or affective labor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Hochschild 1983; Livingston 2012; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Pols 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Wendland 2010). Although activists assume that scientific studies are predicated on the objectification of animals, my lab-based research taught me early on to be attentive to the affective dimensions of human-animal encounters. Lab researchers, regardless of station, think of many sorts of animals in individual terms. As I discuss at length in subsequent chapters, naming practices
abound. A more rudimentary practice involves the use of pronouns. I rarely heard lab personnel describe an animal as an “it”; instead, gendered pronouns were the norm, even where large populations of what I reference as “generic” creatures were concerned (such as sprawling colonies of mice). I adopt this same practice throughout this book, referring to individual animals as “he” or “she.”
Finally, it is important to note that lab research is hard work, not merely because of the repetitive quality of many experiments or the long hours that animal feeding and cage cleaning entail, but because such activities so often require sustained, intimate contact across the species divide. Furthermore, labs are sites where care, and not merely welfare, is central to one’s daily work. A widespread understanding is that no one survives very long in a laboratory if he or she finds no joy in working with animals. Additionally, lab work can be a lonely experience because of the social stigma associated with animal experiments, and thus work dedication is crucial. These principles were taken seriously by staff and guided their quotidian practices in all of the labs where I was fortunate to conduct my own research.
the boundaries of interspecies encounters
Three broad categories—animals, morality, and affect—are of special analytical significance throughout this work; here I detail an associated overarching framework. In this section I first consider the question, What is a laboratory animal? I then show that this query is informed by historical processes pertaining to the use of animals as experimental proxies and associated lab animal welfare legislation. Although my project is firmly rooted in the United States, I briefly address relevant activities in the United Kingdom when they inform developments in the States. Finally, I consider the analytical significance of “suffering” with specific reference to regulatory concerns for animal “welfare” and consider how this concept is translated into practices of “care” through quotidian laboratory labor.
Testing Human-Animal Boundaries
In his edited volume What Is an Animal? anthropologist Tim Ingold urges readers to question the “capacities” we assign to our own species (such as tool making, symbolic and abstract thought, purposive action, or selfconsciousness) in our efforts to assert our own “pre-eminence” in the world. As Ingold explains, “though humans differ but little from other animal species, no more than the latter differ from one another, that difference
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I had fastened a cluster of large water-buttercups into my bodice, and I thoroughly appreciated the widow's kindness in looking at them, and taking no notice of my blushes. She was talking on in a pleasant, rambling way, and I was gradually getting cool again, when the page threw open the door and announced Mr. Greystock.
William Greystock came in, dark, bland, inscrutable as he always was. He had black eyes, deep-set, and black hair, closely cropped, that lay in thick ripples over his head. As he wore no moustache, there was nothing to veil the hard outline of his thin lips and prominent chin; and I thought then (as I think now) that his was the strongest and most cruel profile I had ever seen in all my life.
He talked well and fluently; admired Lady Waterville's flowers, and even deigned to praise my humble buttercups. I told him that I had bought them of a little girl in the street, just because they reminded me of my old home; and then he asked me if I had not lately written some verses about the country.
My cheeks grew hot again. Lady Waterville looked with an amused glance from William Greystock's face to mine.
"I did not know that Miss Coverdale ever wrote poetry," she said to him. "Pray, how did you find it out?"
"Through Ronald," he replied, with one of his peculiar smiles. "I went into his room last night and found him as usual with his beloved guitar. He was setting some lines to music; I asked who had written them, and he told me."
"Does he always tell you everything?" I inquired, trying to speak playfully, and succeeding very badly.
"Yes," was the quiet answer.
"He has inherited his love of the guitar from his Aunt Inez," said Lady Waterville, not looking at me. "She had quite an unreasonable fondness for her guitar, poor woman! I used to see her sometimes when she was first married to Colonel Greystock, and I always thought her a most extraordinary person. Ronald's mother, her own sister, was not like her in the least."
"I have often looked at those two portraits in the diningroom," said I. "Mrs. Hepburne was not nearly as handsome as her sister, but I like her face better."
"Ronald is exactly like his aunt," Mr. Greystock remarked.
"As I was saying," went on Lady Waterville, "I always thought Inez a most extraordinary person. She expected too much happiness and never got any at all. Poor thing! She was a disappointed woman from beginning to end. Any one with a genius for scribbling might make a novel out of her history."
"I should like to hear it," I said.
Lady Waterville was rather fond of storytelling, and she had been, as I soon discovered, more than commonly interested in Inez Greystock.
"Inez and Estella Winton," she began, "were the daughters of Captain Winton, an English naval officer who had married a Spanish lady. The mother died when the children were young; the father was often at sea, and they were left a good deal to their own devices. Inez was beautiful, and had, of course, a train of admirers; but she cared for no one save a young soldier, who was known in those days as Lieutenant Greystock. He liked her well
enough, Louie, but not half as well as she liked him. She lavished gold, you see, and got only silver in return."
"My uncle was a matter-of-fact man," put in William, in his quiet voice. "There never could have been an atom of romance in his nature."
"Just so," said Lady Waterville. "Inez was a fool to expect too much from him. He was not rich enough to marry, nor patient enough to bear with her exacting ways, and the affair ended, as such affairs often do, in a quarrel and a parting."
"What a pity," I cried, regretfully.
"I don't know that it was a pity, Louie. They would have gone wrangling through their youth together. But Inez, foolish girl, could never forget Greystock, although she married the richest man of her acquaintance, a Mr. Wendall. He was a diamond merchant, and after their marriage, he brought her to this very house, and invited Estella to come and live with them."
"He was a good husband, I believe," said William.
Inez
"He must have had the patience of Job," Lady Waterville replied. "After enduring his wife's irritable temper for seven years, he died, and left her handsomely provided for. And then, for two years more she lived here in peace and quietness with Estella and the guitar."
"No wonder that she chose to be painted playing on it," William Greystock remarked. "Her fondness for the thing must have amounted to a positive mania. It had belonged to her mother, had it not?"
"To her mother and grandmother. It was never far from her side, and she would compose airs and set words to them, just as Ronald does now-a-days. That portrait in the dining-room is Inez herself; there she sits as she did in life, her great Spanish eyes looking into space, and her guitar resting on her knees. It is a fine picture."
"It is beautiful," I said, "but very sad. And her second marriage—how did that come to pass?"
"It came to pass through Colonel Greystock's need of money," answered Lady Waterville, with her usual frankness. "William knows that I am telling an unvarnished tale. His uncle returned from India on leave, and sought out his old love, and Inez fancied, no doubt, that she had found her lost youth again. Captain Hepburne was Colonel Greystock's friend, and he happened to fall in love with Estella. On the same day the two sisters were married, very quietly, in St. George's Church, and the two husbands took their wives back with them to India."
"Then Inez was happy in her last days?" said I.
But Lady Waterville shook her head.
CHAPTER III.
INEZ.
WILLIAM GREYSTOCK was looking at me with a quiet, provoking smile.
"Miss Coverdale will be disappointed in the story," he said. "It is only in the fairy-tales that the prince and princess, when they are brought together, 'live happily ever afterwards.' For my part, I think a woman is sincerely to be pitied if she marries the hero of her first love-dream."
I knew that he was talking at me. From the very beginning of my intercourse with Ronald Hepburne, he had been watching me silently, and reading this tell-tale face of mine until I had often wished desperately for Mokanna's silver veil to hide my burning cheeks. They did not burn when he was not present; it was that quiet, persistent scrutiny which made me intolerably self-conscious, and deprived me of all ease and freedom. I disliked William Greystock heartily, and I was unwise enough to show my
aversion. If I had been a woman of the world, I should have concealed it under a pleasant manner and a sweet smile; but even then I could hardly have helped making an enemy of him.
For, if he had found out my secret, I had discovered his. Strange and incredible as it may seem, he had actually fallen in love with Lady Waterville's companion, the simple little girl fresh from the country. And with him, and with those like him, love merely means a strong desire for possession, not a willingness for self-sacrifice. It was the sort of love that will strike because it is forbidden to caress, and longs to wound the thing that will have none of its kisses. I do not think that a love of this kind is very common now-a-days; strong feelings have gone out of fashion, and men and women usually accept their disappointments with admirable coolness and good sense. But here and there we do occasionally find a fierce heart beating under everyday broadcloth, and then we are wise if we avoid, as much as possible, all intimate association with its owner.
I would not take any notice of Mr. Greystock's remark, and did my best to look as if it had made no impression upon my mind. But Lady Waterville could not let it pass; and I fancied that she, too, felt it was aimed at me.
"I really believe William is right," she said, thoughtfully. "There is nothing in life so sad as disillusion, and nothing that so embitters a woman's nature. Well, I must tell you the end of my story, Louie; it is nearly finished now."
"You left Inez and Estella in India," said I, a little impatiently.
"Yes; they went to India, and the elder sister had the satisfaction of seeing the happiness of the younger. This was the only joy that poor Inez could ever have known, her own wedded life was a bitter disappointment; she had been married—not for the old love's sake, but for the money's sake."
"Yet she might have been happy if she could have been content with a moderate affection," put in William, with his detestable smile.
"She could be content with nothing that fell short of her expectations," Lady Waterville went on. "There are children who refuse the crust because they cannot get the cake; Inez was only a passionate, grown-up child. She had quarrels with her husband: and Estella made peace between the pair more than once. But the peace-maker was soon removed; her health failed after the baby Ronald was born, and Captain Hepburne sent his wife and child home to England."
My eyes filled with tears, and I drew back into the shade to shelter my face from William's glances. From Ronald I had heard how his father had fallen at the taking of Delhi, and I hoped that Lady Waterville would pass quickly over the last parting of the husband and wife. Perhaps she divined my thoughts; moreover, it was the story of Inez Greystock, and not the story of Estella Hepburne that she had volunteered to tell.
"After Estella's departure," she continued, "the breach widened between Colonel Greystock and Inez. She left off her tantrums, and ceased to make bitter speeches—indeed I think her stock of bitter speeches must have been quite exhausted—but she cared less and less for her husband's society, and loved to shut herself up alone with the guitar.
She had no children; she made no friends; other women could not break through the impenetrable barrier of reserve which she had built up around her. I daresay a great many people pitied Colonel Greystock; but I don't think he concerned himself very much about his melancholy wife. He went his way, and left her strumming on the guitar and brooding over her miseries. You are angry with him, Louie, I see."
"He is just the kind of man I could hate!" cried I.
"Nonsense, my dear. He was moral and highly respectable, quite an ornament, as people said, to his profession. A heart, you know, is a most unfortunate thing for any one to possess; it is sure to retard one's advancement in life. Colonel Greystock was a lucky man; he had no heart, and he got on very well indeed. In fact, he seemed always to escape the disasters that overtook others, and when the mutiny broke out at Meerut, he happened to be away from the place."
"It was there that his wife met her death," said William Greystock.
"Yes, but the particulars have never been fully known. It was on a Sunday that the Sepoys rose, and most of the ladies of Meerut were in church. Inez, poor soul, was at home in her own house, and was killed there. It was said afterwards that a native soldier tried vainly to save her life, and that she had begged him with her last breath to take care of her guitar. A most incredible story, it seems to me."
"I don't know that it is incredible," William remarked. "She was either quite mad, or there really was a mysterious reason for preserving her guitar. Ronald, you know, has always inclined to the latter belief. He thinks that if the
guitar could be found, those missing jewels of hers would be found also."
"That story of the missing jewels is a mere fiction," Lady Waterville answered, contemptuously. "Surely, William, you are not romantic enough to believe in such a wild tale! No one ever saw those wonderful jewels; even Colonel Greystock declared that his wife had never mentioned them to him. The only person who ever spoke of their existence was Estella Hepburne, and her account of them was of the vaguest kind."
"But she believed in them," said William, "and I fancy she must have had some substantial reason for her belief. They were chiefly diamonds, I think; and had been left, of course, to Inez Greystock by her first husband, Wendall, the diamond merchant."
Lady Waterville was so astonished at Mr. Greystock's absurdity that she became almost excited.
"It was just because Wendall happened to be a diamond merchant that somebody started that fable," she cried. "If Inez had ever possessed any diamonds, she would have flung them at your uncle's feet in the excess of her devotion. Why, she was perfectly infatuated about him! The moment he returned to her, all her old love revived, and she gave him everything she had."
"Excepting this old house," said William.
"Excepting this house. This was intended to be the home of the Hepburnes and their son. Inez never meant to live in it again; she always said that when the Colonel had done with India, she should persuade him to go to some quiet country place. I think she had a dream of growing old
with her husband, and of finding him a lover to the very last."
"But the guitar, was it never found?" I asked.
"My dear Louie, is it likely that such a thing would ever be found? Imagine all the destruction and confusion of that terrible time! No, don't imagine it, for if you do you will not get a moment's sleep to-night."
I had no desire to picture the horrors of the mutiny, and I said so. Yet I secretly resolved that the next time Ronald and I were alone together, I would lead him on to talk of the lost guitar.
It was now time to dress for our usual drive before dinner. Mr. Greystock, who was well acquainted with Lady Waterville's habits, rose to depart, but lingered, standing, to say a few last words to me.
"Hereditary traits are an interesting study, Miss Coverdale; don't you think so?" asked he.
"I suppose they are," I replied, carelessly. "It is clear that Ronald has inherited his aunt's passion for the guitar," he went on.
"He is a happier fellow than I am."
"Indeed!" I said, with an air of incredulity.
"Well, he is young, to begin with. And he has gifts, and I have none; do you wonder that I envy him a little?"
"Yes, I do wonder," I answered. "I thought you were very well satisfied with yourself and your lot."
"Lately I have become dissatisfied. Mine is an empty life, and I'm beginning to grow disgusted with it. As to Ronald, he gets all the good things that he wants."
I only said: "Does he?"
"I am sure you know that he does. I am no judge of such matters, but I have heard it said that he has a way which no woman can resist. It must have been his Aunt Inez who gave him those tragic, musing eyes, and that look of unfathomable sorrow which he puts on sometimes. It is all very effective."
I gathered up my energies and succeeded, I believe, in preserving a tolerably calm face.
"Good-bye," he said. Then stepping back, he added, in an easy tone: "We were speaking of hereditary traits; by the way, there is one trait which Ronald has inherited from his father."
"What is that?" I foolishly asked.
"A love of gambling."
William went his way in quiet triumph, and left me with a dull ache in my heart. I ran quickly upstairs to dress for the drive; and then, finding that Lady Waterville was not quite ready, I went down to the dining-room and stood gazing at the portrait of Inez.
It was painted by a master's hand, and showed a beautiful brunette, wearing a gown of dark-red velvet, and holding the guitar upon her lap. The face, perfectly oval in shape, was thrown a little forward, as if listening; and the wonderful eyes, large, luminous, heavily fringed with black lashes, were so full of passion and sorrow that their gaze
thrilled me with pain. Ronald's eyes were not so splendid as these, yet they had a little of this unfathomable melancholy; and the shape of his face was like hers. There was a strong likeness between this ill-fated Inez and the nephew who had never known her.
Hearing Lady Waterville's slow footstep on the stairs, I turned away from the picture and went out into the hall.
"You look rather sad, Louie," she said, as I joined her.
CHAPTER IV.
RONALD.
I LIVED two years with Lady Waterville; and to outside observers, mine must have seemed the most peaceful and uneventful of lives.
But any one who could have seen beneath the surface would have found impatience, anxiety, and heartache always going on within me; and yet I was neither impatient
nor anxious about myself. It was for Ronald that I suffered. Until he entered my life, I had been contented with little joys; pleased with trifles; easily moved to gladness; but he came, and shadows came with him. It was a very common love-story after all; and I know that many a girl who reads these pages will pause and say to herself: "This is my experience."
He loved me deeply and truly, all the more because I was not only his love but his friend. To me were confided embarrassments, worries, even mistakes, and there was never any fear of being repulsed or misunderstood. I was a mere country girl; but I had thought and read and studied in my uncle's quiet cottage, and I found the hero of my real life-story not so very much unlike some of the heroes of fiction. My knowledge of human nature was only secondhand, but affection turned it to good account, and made the best of it.
Moreover, I had always possessed that useful power of assimilation which makes it a positive delight to be confided in. In old days, when boys came to stay at the rectory, I had seldom failed to adapt myself readily to such themes as interested them. I learned the names of their schoolfellows and masters in a trice, and never confused identities, and I would talk with them for hours about people I had never seen, and games I had never played. To this very day, I retain the parting tokens of their boyish friendship—a formidable knife with several blades, some marbles, and a pocket telescope, through which I have never yet been able to discern a single object, near or far.
And now that Ronald Hepburne came to me for sympathy, I seemed to live, move, and have my being in him and his concerns. Outwardly I belonged to Lady Waterville, but I scarcely gave her a thought; I could think
only of Ronald and the difficulties that beset his path, and made it impossible for us to walk side by side.
Later on, I learned that William Greystock had pretended to remove those difficulties. To him, as to an elder brother, Ronald had naturally confided his desire to increase his income and marry. Mr. Greystock had acquired a reputation for keen sagacity; he was acquainted with city men, and even Lady Waterville spoke with respect of his abilities for business. With his knowledge and influence it seemed easy for him to obtain a post for Ronald, but somehow that post was never found, and once or twice when the poor fellow, had thought himself almost sure of a situation, there had been a mysterious obstacle placed in his way.
Yet his belief in William remained unshaken. Ronald himself was constitutionally delicate, and seemed to have a natural incapacity to push through the crowd of fortuneseekers and gain his end. But William, who had never known a day's illness, seldom failed in getting anything he wanted, and yet he was always so cool and deliberate in his actions, that his object was attained without apparent effort or fuss. He was an energetic man, and Ronald was an indolent one.
Impartial observers, looking at the two men, invariably decided that William Greystock was a far better and grander character than Ronald Hepburne. William had added to his income by shrewd and cautious money-making; he gave liberally to public charities, he bestowed advice on frivolous bachelor friends, and was regarded by them as a model counsellor. Lady Waterville quoted his wise sayings continually, and was often heard to wish that Ronald—"poor, foolish, fascinating Ronald—" would put himself completely under the guidance of Mr. Greystock.
"Do you think Mr. Hepburne fascinating?" I said, one day.
"Yes," she answered, "and so do you, Louie. I admire that soft, languid manner of his; and you are in love with his melancholy face and manifold misfortunes. It does not matter to you that he brought a good many of those misfortunes on himself; like all women of your type, you are willing to heal wounds without inquiring how they were gained. In my opinion, you are a ridiculous girl, and I won't waste any more sound advice upon you!"
These words were said in her usual good-humoured way, and accompanied by a caressing pat on the shoulder. I had not then acknowledged that Ronald was my lover, and in Lady Waterville's presence we met only as friends. But I think she suspected that there was something more than friendship between us.
"I grant that your advice is always sound," I said, "yet if I followed it, I don't believe I should be happy. It is quite possible for some natures to be uncomfortable in the midst of comfort."
"Perfectly true," she replied. "As for you, Louie, you could not rest without wearing yourself out for another's sake. Your life is not worth living unless it is lived for somebody else. For me, and for thousands of other women, self is sufficient. It is not sufficient for you; but you are as heaven made you."
I knew that if I married Ronald, Lady Waterville would persist in regarding me as an interesting martyr to the end of her days. I knew that she would speak of me to her friends as a perfectly unselfish girl who had thrown herself away on a good-for-nothing man. But was Ronald really
good-for-nothing? I was a better judge of his character than any one else could possibly be. A true love is never blind; it is keener-sighted even than hate, it makes itself acquainted with all the weak places in the loved one's nature that it may mount guard over the undefended spots. And my insight into Ronald's inner self revealed to me a wealth of unsuspected good.
Knowing that I understood him far better than she did, I permitted Lady Waterville to say what she liked; but she could not delude me into the belief that I was a heroine. Nor could she even persuade me to alter my opinion of Mr. Greystock.
It was Lady Waterville's custom to leave town in the beginning of August, and stay away until the first of October; and when I first came to live with her, this autumn holiday had seemed very pleasant to me. I enjoyed the life one leads at a gay watering-place, and found that military bands, stylish costumes, and casual acquaintance were much to my liking. But the second autumn was not half as delightful as the first. I did not want to leave London, and felt listless and bored at the seaside. Straitened means had condemned Ronald to do penance in town till through the hot weather; and what were sea-breezes to me? It was a joyful day when my term of banishment was ended, and we returned to the old house in Hanover Square.
It was afternoon when we found ourselves in George Street again—a dim, quiet afternoon, made cheerful by some last gleams of autumn sunshine. The cab stopped at our door, and I got out with such a beaming face that the parlour-maid congratulated me on my appearance. It was the last time that I ever heard that cheery phrase:
"How well you are looking, miss, to be sure!"
In the days that came and went afterwards, most people surveyed me with a silence that was more eloquent than words. Miss Coverdale, the petted companion of Lady Waterville, with her rounded cheeks and smiling lips, was soon destined to become a creature of the past.
We lingered long over our afternoon tea, and were still sitting with the cups and the little table between us, when Ronald came in. He was looking noticeably worn and sad— so sad, that after one glance at his face all my gay spirits deserted me.
"We have been enjoying ourselves immensely," said Lady Waterville, in a mischievous tone. "Louie got through a good deal of flirting; it's astonishing to see the progress that she has made in the art! Last year she was a mere beginner, but now—"
"Now she is more disgusted with flirtation than she ever was in her life!" I interrupted, with impatience. "Why do you misrepresent Louie, Lady Waterville? You know she is sick of the band, and the pier, and all the seaside nonsense, and heartily glad to be at home again!"
Lady Waterville gave a sleepy little laugh, and sank back upon the cushions of her chair. In the next minute, she was snoring audibly; and Ronald and I were as much left to ourselves as if she had been in another room.
He drew nearer to my side as I sat in the glow of the firelight. There was a shaded lamp on a distant table, and the drawing-room was but dimly illuminated that evening. But the flickering flames revealed the lines on his face, and lit up the melancholy eyes that sought mine with a troubled gaze.
"I have been very lonely, Louie."
Is there any woman who can hear this confession from a man, and refrain from pitying him? Women are themselves accustomed to loneliness, and to many of them it is only another word for peace. We are not, as a rule, so sociably inclined as men; we can be content with a soft chair, a book, and the unfailing cup of tea, when a man will pine for companionship, and go out of doors, in rain or wind, to seek the face of a friend. I had learnt from Ronald's letters that he had missed me, but when we came face to face again, I knew, for the first time, that his yearning had become an absolute pain.
I could not find words to say to him at that moment; but involuntarily my hand touched his, and was seized and held in a close clasp. My eyes were fixed upon the fire; but they saw visions of an Eden, sunlit and glorious, full of granted desires and realised dreams. Perhaps he, too, saw the same vision, and rebelled all the more fiercely against his cramped and fettered life.
"Are we never to be happy together?" he whispered, passionately. "Are we to wait on and on, and let the best part of our lives go by? I have only a poor home to offer you, Louie; but I will work for you, dear. Will you come to me?"
Lady Waterville still slumbered peacefully; the large tabby cat kept up a drowsy purr on the hearth-rug at my feet, and there was no one near to utter a word of caution. Yet, in my own heart, a stern voice failed not to make itself heard above all love's fervent pleadings; and for an instant I paused, and listened to that inward warning. Then Ronald's eyes met mine, and the bright vision of an Eden came back at once; I should have been more than woman if I could have resisted its spell.
"I will come to you," I said, softly. And a brilliant flame shot suddenly up from the neglected fire, and showed me all the joy and triumph in his face.
CHAPTER V.
RECOVERY.
IF we had been wise, we should have waited till my nurse could give us rooms under her roof. But we would not wait. And so it came to pass that we were married, one grey autumn morning, in St. George's Church, and took up our quarters among strangers. Lady Waterville was seriously angry. She even went so far as to say some cutting things that I could not easily forget. I parted with her coldly, and left the old house with a firm determination not to enter it again unless I was sent for.
