


































To Love and To Kill: Everyday Moralities in the Parallel Lives of Human 

and Non-human Laboratory Animals 

Reviewed by Carrie Friese

Sharp, Lesley A. (2019) Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in 

Experimental Lab Science. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Lesley Sharp opens her book on the moralities of animal life and death in laboratory science 

with John Berger’s famous question that entitles his essay: “Why look at animals?” Berger’s 

answer to this question is: because of the ways in which human and animal lives are both 

similar and dissimilar, a parallelism that only converges at death. It is this moment of 

convergence, of death broadly speaking, that Sharp focuses her attention upon, providing a 

thorough analysis of what it means to systematically kill another today. And lest anyone think 

that this systematic killing is a sign of uncaringness at best or wonton cruelty at worst, there 

is another useful quote from John Berger’s essay that Sharp’s analysis similarly rotates 

around: “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is 

significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements 

in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but” (Berger (1980) 2009). Sharp’s 

analysis hinges upon the parallel fact that, in science, animal technicians and scientists are 



both fond of and even love the laboratory animals in their care as sentient subjects and as 

objectified units of data, which requires that the animals they care for will potentially suffer 

and almost certainly die (see in particular Sharp, 2019: 217-218).

Sharp draws on more than two decades of ethnographic research conducted largely in the US 

but also in the UK in order to consider the everyday moralities that make this and possible. 

Sharp (2019: 15) points out that “human ‘pre-eminence’ is a foundational principle of lab 

research, where experimental animals are used specifically to avoid causing undue harm to 

(more highly valued) human subjects” but that this is never the sole logic shaping life in the 

lab. Sharp argues the reason for this is because lab animals are “multiple” (Mol, 2002); any 

animal in question may be a generic source of valuable and transferrable data while also 

being many other things, including a favourite, named individual (Sharp, 2019: 18, chapter 

14). By exploring the multiplicity of laboratory animals, Sharp is able to see and name the 

everyday moralities engendered in science, which she probes through three themes that 

structure the book: intimacy, sacrifice and animal exceptionalism.

Sharp delineates, what she refers to as, the sentimental structure of laboratories as an 

entanglement of notions regarding species proximity developed through evolutionary 

thinking (e.g., humans as most closely related primates) with personal histories (e.g., prior 

relationships with pets or working animals) that create particular forms of animal favouritism 

(Sharp, 2019: 41). This animal favouritism is patterned without being deterministic, shaping 

the kinds of interspecies intimacies created (or not) in the doing of science. One person’s 

favourite species to work with is, for another person, the species that they absolutely will not 

work with. Dogs are iconic in this sense, as pets that, as a result, some people enjoying 

working with while others categorically will not; rodents are, in turn, often viewed as an 



entry point to animal experimentation, one that many novices plan to ‘move on’ or ‘move up’ 

from. And it is within this sentimental structure that Sharp explores the common practice of 

using television not only as a research tool but also to give primates some ‘downtime’ and 

‘enrich’ their laboratory life. Being ‘close’ to humans, sentimental structure here becomes 

entangled with the human hierarchies of lab labour – where caring for monkeys and caring 

for animal technicians (as another and as self) becomes blurred in a manner that creates yet 

another kind of interspecies intimacy.

Through anthropological attention to the details of language use, Sharp highlights how the 

simultaneous pervasiveness and muteness around animal death – the fact that ‘killing’ is so 

rarely spoken of in favour of euphemisms that range from euthanising to ‘sac-ing’ --  denotes 

the “inherent contradiction” (Sharp, 2019: 108) of experimental life science research. 

Sacrifice is the major trope used by both scientists and social scientists to articulate the 

meaning of this inherent contradiction, and Sharp here extends this analysis in order to ask 

when and how ‘sacrifice’ is used within experimental science and the kinds of work it does. 

By opening ‘sacrifice’ up in this way to critical consideration, Sharp is able to show that the 

inherent contradiction of experimental science, one that is also embodied by Berger’s farmer, 

is disproportionately shoulder by the animal technician, who represent the invisible labour of 

experimental science. Killing well -- that is killing animals without them experiencing pain or 

stress -- is a key tool for doing ‘humane’ experimental research and remaining ‘human’ in this 

context.

With ‘exceptionalism,’ Sharp turns the theme of human exceptionalism that is central to 

animal experimentation on its head, looking instead at when and how a generic laboratory 

animal becomes an exceptional individual and the practices that result. These practices 



include ‘rescuing’ a laboratory animal from death, through rehoming and adoption for 

instance but also reuse. But these practices also include memorializing the life and death of 

particular laboratory animals as individuals or laboratory animals as a general class. While 

the memorialized animal can and does stand as a trophy, demonstrating human skill and thus 

reproducing ideas of human dominance, the memorialized animal is often also, or can instead 

be a totem.

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. But this book will also be of great interest to a more general readership, including 

animal rights activists and the full range of professionals involved in working with laboratory 

animal (e.g., animal technicians, veterinarians and scientists). Animal rights activists may, for 

example, be interested in seeing how their ideologies of care overlap with those of animal 

technicians (Sharp, 2019: 160) – raising the potential for new kinds of practices. Those 

working with laboratory animals would find interest in the clear set of recommendations for 

practice that Sharp makes in the Conclusion, which clearly build upon her years of empirical 

research. For example, there is currently a move to create ‘cultures of care’ in experimental 

science, at least within the UK, which includes caring for both animals and people; Sharp’s 

recommendations provide further evidence and support for this type of organizational reform.

Bibliography

Mol A (2002) The body multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham and London: Duke 
University.

Sharp LA (2019) Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental 
Lab Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.



Carrie Friese is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and 
Political Science. Her research is in science, technology and medicine studies, with a focus 
on human and nonhuman animal reproduction. She has explored ageing and human 
reproduction, cloning and endangered animal reproduction and is currently conducting a 
situational analysis of laboratory animals in the United Kingdom using mixed methods. 

© 2021 Carrie Friese


