Reviews
"This book is crucial for anyone seeking to understand how researchers and lab technicians think about what they are doing when they work with animals fated to die at the end of their usefulness in producing data."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"This book will be of clear substantive interest to social science and humanities scholars of experimental science and laboratory animals, while also being of general interest to anthropologists as well as medical sociologists of emotions, invisible work as well as death and dying."—Anthropology Book Forum
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Animal Ethos is a much-needed intervention in how we think about the ethics of laboratory animals. Focusing on everyday ethics in labs and animal houses across the US and the UK, Lesley A. Sharp unpacks the ambiguities and paradoxes that arise when caring and killing are entangled. What results is a superb analysis of the intimate relations that emerge between laboratory animals, animal technicians, and research scientists—relations that are all too often left, painfully, silent." —Carrie Friese, Professor of Sociology at London School of Economics and Political Science
“Opening the door to animal laboratories with Lesley A. Sharp, we discover a complex and nuanced landscape of moral thinking and experimentation. This superbly written, analytically sharp, and ethnographically rich book recasts common sense understandings of animals, sacrifice, and welfare. Generous to both laboratory animals and the humans who care for them,
Animal Ethos is a lively intervention into central debates in moral anthropology, science studies, and animal welfare studies” —Mette N. Svendsen, Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
“Lesley A. Sharp brings an anthropological approach to ordinary, everyday moral experience as a means of understanding the ethical issues in biomedical laboratory research with animals. Is care of laboratory animals in experiments at all related to care as an ethical category in the way we care, say, for pets? Or for human subjects? What relations of a moral kind do researchers have with their animal subjects in experiments? Balanced, sensitive to ambiguities, and concerned with laboratory life as a moral practice, Sharp opens new ground for anthropological study." —Arthur Kleinman, author of What Really Matters
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