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Model homes for model organisms: Intersections of animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience around the environment of the laboratory mouse

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Abstract

This article investigates the environment of the laboratory animal as a site where animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience intersect, creating opportunities for cross-pollinations between the concepts and practices of each field. Laboratory animal welfare is organized around a distinction between the care of animals and their use in experiments, and while best practices for animal handling and the management of animal housing may appear to fall firmly within the ambit of animal care, behavioral researchers’ own histories of work on ‘experimenter effects’ and ‘enriched environments’ complicate this distinction. Using historical and ethnographic data from animal behavioral neuroscience laboratories, this article examines how welfare professionals have drawn on behavioral science as a source of new data and techniques, and how researchers in turn employ concepts from animal welfare in their scientific thinking. This investigation provides insight into how changes in animal welfare oversight are changing scientific practice, but it also reveals one reason why taking seriously the idea of the animal as a situated, interactive being in laboratory practice remains difficult. Professional conflicts over the management of the animal’s environment and rhetorical troubles created by the association of gene-environment interaction research with welfare agendas complicate both the management and meaning of interaction in the animal behavioral neuroscience laboratory.

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Notes

  1. The names of the field sites and individuals interviewed for this paper are pseudonyms.

  2. See Carbone (2004) for a discussion of the numerous statutes and professional bodies involved in the regulation of animal welfare in the United States.

  3. Scientists’ histories such as Broom (2011) point to the early 1990s, when a consensus formed amongst animal welfare specialists that welfare was a measureable concept that could in principle be studied scientifically, as a key moment for the development of the discipline; but Kirk (2014) argues that transformation of diffuse notions of ‘well-being’ into concretized sets of practices was taking place in both laboratory and farm animal welfare from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

  4. For examples of this historical trope, see Schneider, Turczak and Przewłocki, 2006; Würbel and Garner, 2007.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kasia Tolwinski, Angie Boyce and Peter Dear for reading and commenting on this article, to Harald Kliems for his editorial assistance; and to Stephen Casper for his inspiring title suggestion. I also benefitted from feedback on early versions of this article presented at the Society for the Social Studies of Science; the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology; and the History of Science Society. Research for this article was funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (Award No. SES 0749635) and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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  1. Department of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 207 Bradley Memorial Building, 1225 Linden Drive, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Nicole Nelson

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Nelson, N. Model homes for model organisms: Intersections of animal welfare and behavioral neuroscience around the environment of the laboratory mouse. BioSocieties 11, 46–66 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.19

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