Abstract
This article argues that the movement of dogs from pounds to medical laboratories played a critically important role in debates over the use of animals in science and medicine in the United States in the twentieth century, not least by drawing the scientific community into every greater engagement with bureaucratic political governance. If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers. We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory. Our analysis is consistent with, and draws upon, scholarship which has established the productive power of public agencies and civil society on the periphery of the American state.
Highlights
Giving evidence to the 1966 Californian State Fact Finding Commission on the release of unclaimed, impounded animals for use in scientific research, the prominent antivivisectionist Larry Andrews warned that the National Society of Medical Research (NSMR) had “no compunction at all about converting havens of mercy, built by the contributions of people who oppose cruelty—many of them antivivisectionists—into collection depots for the vivisection laboratories” (Stiern, 1966: p. 114)
If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers
We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory
Summary
Giving evidence to the 1966 Californian State Fact Finding Commission on the release of unclaimed, impounded animals for use in scientific research, the prominent antivivisectionist Larry Andrews warned that the National Society of Medical Research (NSMR) had “no compunction at all about converting havens of mercy, built by the contributions of people who oppose cruelty—many of them antivivisectionists—into collection depots for the vivisection laboratories” (Stiern, 1966: p. 114). The Californian State Fact Finding Commission had been convened to gather evidence on the need for a state law compelling animal shelters, or, as the scientific community preferred to call them, the municipal or city pound, to make unclaimed animals available for medical research In this wide ranging and vociferous conflict even the naming of the institutions mattered. As such, allowing laboratories to establish a “rational agreement with the neighboring dog pound” would benefit science, society, and the national health This 1917 attempt to secure state pound release legislation for California was one prominent example of a renewed phase in the animal experimentation debate. Whipple reframed the ownerless dog as a (currently wasted) public resource of value to scientific research and the national health Harnessing this resource required an efficient and rational approach to animal control in the modern urban environment. Events in California were widely reported within the antivivisectionist press, offering the movement a new credibility and a rare opportunity to celebrate that “anti-vivisection forces were victorious, in spite of the most determined and powerful influences our opponents could command from the legal, political, educational, state and medical authorities” (Anon, 1921: p. 75)
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