What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy [Hardcover]

Larry Carbone (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195161963 | ISBN-13: 978-0195161960 | Publication Date: April 1, 2004 | Edition: 1

Larry Carbone, a veterinarian who is in charge of the lab animal welfare assurance program at a major research university, presents this scholarly history of animal rights. Biomedical researchers, and the less fanatical among the animal rights activists will find this book reasonable, humane, and novel in its perspective. It brings a novel, sociological perspective to an area that has been addressed largely from a philosophical perspective, or from the entrenched positions of highly committed advocates of a particular position in the debate.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

The one time I saw the inside of an animal laboratory, at a prestigious university, the veterinarian who showed me around was subsequently fired for that transgression. So it is little surprise that Larry Carbone, a laboratory animal veterinarian, gives us few peeks behind the door: the book has virtually no anecdotes. Instead he takes off the lab's roof to offer a bird's-eye view--distant, measured and worded with sometimes excruciating care--of the battles raging within. A veterinarian's oath binds her to "the benefit of society through the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge." It imposes contradictory tasks on the laboratory animal veterinarian. "So you keep them healthy until the scientists can make them sick," Carbone quotes a skeptic as saying. A lab animal vet can please no one, it seems--certainly not the animal lover, who suspects her split loyalties, nor the animal researcher, who resents her attempts to oversee not just animal care but also experimental practice. Carbone, who holds doctorates in veterinary medicine and in the history and philosophy of science, is a vet in the animal facility at the University of California at San Francisco. In early chapters of What Animals Want, he describes the unending philosophical debates over animal care and use, while in the more interesting later chapters he documents the jostling that determined the rather limited turf of the lab animal vet. Laboratories first hired veterinarians in the 1930s, he explains, to assuage public concern over animal care and indeed restricted their duties to keeping animals healthy until needed. With the passage of the Animal Welfare Act in 1966, and its several amendments, veterinarians came to play a more central role. Today they run animal facilities, answer to federal inspectors (most of whom are themselves veterinarians), and advise on anesthesia and other aspects of research. Even so, Carbone notes that supervising veterinarians often cannot keep track of animals once they leave an institution's central animal facility for research. And whereas only veterinarians are authorized to perform surgery on pets, surgery in the lab may be entrusted to an inadequately trained student or technician. And no one is charged with weighing the potential benefits of a research project against the cost, in pain, suffering and death, to the animals. Often the tug-of-war involves the question of what an animal feels. The chapter on mouse decapitation is fascinating, although I cannot recommend it as beachside (and certainly not bedside) reading. Many researchers prefer killing by decapitation, which contaminates tissues less than other methods do. Carbone details how a finding that brain waves in rats persist for up to half a minute after decapitation caused initial concern that the process entails intense pain. That interpretation was instantly smothered by a pile of papers pointing out that such brain waves could mean anything. Indeed, animals are assumed to feel pain in situations where a human would, and in this case we have no way of knowing. Revealingly, though, one paper argued that decapitation was "far too important a tool" to be rescinded on such a flimsy basis. In truth, animal welfare legislation and public concern are both more focused on pain than on death itself. Philosophically, the "cost" of death hinges on the worth of an animal's life. Anyone who has tried to stomp on a cockroach will have gained the impression that even such a lowly creature cherishes life. But how does one measure this value? The question has become critical with a recent explosion in the numbers of transgenic mice--close to 100 million are consumed a year in American labs alone. (In 1996 U.S. laboratories used around 20 million laboratory animals.) Three quarters of the mice are wasted, according to Andrew Rowan of the Humane Society of the United States: now that many institutions have their own breeding facilities, far more mice than needed are being born. The fact that mice are small and virtually indistinguishable compounds the problem: they have become a "standardized animal" to a medical researcher, in the same way that a molecule is a fundamental unit to a chemist. One observer describes scientists using and discarding mice with as much thought as if they were tissues, of the nose-blowing kind. Carbone pleads for treating each mouse as an individual--for assuming its life has some value or for tailoring the dose of an anesthetic to a specific creature's need rather than to the statistically defined response of a "standardized" mouse. His task is made even harder by a 2002 amendment that took birds, rats and mice out of the definition of "animal" in the Animal Welfare Act: these creatures are not protected by federal law. They are not even counted. Most scientists take pride in being caring and sensitive, Carbone notes. Oddly, that can have its downside: "Protecting their self-identification as someone who would not hurt animals could lead these people, ironically, to refuse to see that their animals might indeed be in pain." For such reasons, he argues, laboratory animals should have an in-house advocate--and who better than the veterinarian? One can only hope that such a metamorphosis in her role will come sooner, rather than billions of mice later.

Madhusree Mukerjee has covered the use of animals in laboratories for this magazine, where she was an editor for seven years. She is author of The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Review

"[The book] is the result of extensive research by the author, but this is no dry, academic treatment: with his decades of experience as a laboratory animal veterinarian, Larry Carbone knows at first hand what he's talking about. ...I would recommend the book to anyone who chooses to consider the responsibility we bear, as a society, for the millions of animals who, for our benefit, live and die in research establishments worldwide."--Animal Welfare

"Carbone's excellent new book, What Animals Want, is the fruit of extensive research he conducted to discover what determines how we view laboratory animals and why policies concerning their care have developed as they have."-- American Scientist

"What Animals Want is an outstanding contribution the field of animal welfare. Clearly written and engaging, it has something to offer both a general audience and those who are intimately involved in the issues under discussion-- animal protectionists, veterinarians and scientists, for whom it is a 'must read.' It is written by a realistic, knowledgable individual who daily weighs the cost and benefits of animal research"--American Scientist

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195161963
• ISBN-13: 978-0195161960
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #308,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The radical middle ground on animal welfare in laboratories, April 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy (Hardcover)

I loved this book. I have always been sympathetic to arguments made by the animal rights community about the plight of animals in laboratories. I've also always believed that the work scientists do in those laboratories makes long, healthy, human lives possible. I've never before known what to believe about what kinds of research scientists really need to use animals for, and what kinds of welfare concerns scientists actually heed. The arguments on this topic generate lots of heat and little light.
Until this book. Carbone is a veterinarian who has made a career taking care of animals in laboratories and fighting for their welfare. He does this because he thinks scientific research is important, but he also cares deeply about the animals used by the scientists. In this book, he straddles the "radical middle" on the topic. He argues that we can figure out what animals want, and not necessarily by listening to what scientific studies of pain and distress tell us they want. I found myself writing in the margins on every page, because the arguments are interesting and thought provoking all the way through. I'd highly recommend this for anyone interested in animal rights, animal research, or medical progress.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading, April 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy (Hardcover)

Dr. Carbone's beautifully written, engaging, and balanced analysis of laboratory animal welfare policy should be required reading for anybody interested in the multitude of ethical questions that arise from the care and use of animals for human needs. It should also be required reading for anybody not interested in these important issues as they will become interested after reading just the first chapter. This book is accessible to experts as well as the lay reader.

In his book, Dr. Carbone presents a clear, focused, and succinct history of laboratory animal welfare policy and in doing so raises fascinating questions throughout the book. The book focuses on a crucial question, simple and often overlooked: how do we know what animals want? Every chapter is superb. For example, his case studies on death by decapitation, dog exercise and primate psychological well-being illustrate fascinating connections between (animal welfare) science and policy and highlight the strengths and limitations of science in helping us determine (or rather, guess) what animals want.

Because Dr. Carbone's analysis is remarkably balanced for such a controversial and often polarized issue, his book will stimulate all those interested in debates about animal care and use - whether for scientific study or for food - to think more deeply about their own deeply held views.

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest and authoritative treatment of the vivisection question, January 6, 2012

By 

Joel Marks (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy (Hardcover)

What do animals want? Larry Carbone, a research laboratory animal veterinarian, makes no bones about it: They don't want to be there! He writes, "If voluntary consent were our standard for animal research, the whole business would end - not because we cannot understand what the animals are telling us, but because we can" (p.179). How, then, does Carbone justify vivisection, and his own career? In a sense he doesn't even try. The clue to his motivations, then, is to be found on the very first page of text, in the Acknowledgments:

"Two people's illness and death brought pain and sadness to my years of writing. My father, John Carbone, died of Alzheimer's disease at the start of this project, while my friend Joe DelPonte passed away midway through. They gave me love through the years, while their illnesses taught me that, no, I cannot call for an abolition to animal research, no matter my oath as a veterinarian to relieve animal suffering." (p.vii)

What, then, is the purpose of this book? I must admit to having been nonplussed. Actually, I wavered. On the one hand, there is a perfectly straightforward reading of it as a history of progress in providing welfare for lab animals. The author could then be conceived as a cross between Mother Theresa and Saint Francis, facing almost insurmountable odds as he struggles to do the best he can for such animals under their unfortunate circumstances. But on the other hand, the book could be read as a confession by someone who is complicit in all that he describes. Carbone writes, "I have presided over the deaths of thousands of laboratory animals and have seen more pain and suffering than I care to recall, yet I make no call to stop animal experimentation now, only to make it better" (p.239), and again: "I am not writing about whether animals should be in laboratories or whether people have a right to use them in experiments" (p.3). However, he also writes, "No one in my profession can talk about animal research without at least some nod to what I call the `big question': Do we have a right to use animals in research at all?" (p.18)

The easiest way to understand Carbone's position is that he defers to, and helps constitute "society's moral consensus" that "animal research is justifiable and allowable, while simultaneously animal welfare must be protected" (p.57). But in fact he does not consistently apply these ideas, for he writes, "I conclude that we may not have a right to experiment on animals, only a very pressing need" (p.19), and, for example, "That anesthetic drugs might interfere with data interpretation is a scientific explanation [of refraining from their use to alleviate animal pain], but explanation is only synonymous with justification if we grant that all scientific `needs' trump all animal interests" (p.185). This leaves open the possibility that some scientific needs would justify discounting animal interests (or needs), so "the devil is in the details" (p.46). But it is exceedingly difficult to pin Carbone down on which if any needs do justify animal suffering.

Indeed, Carbone makes the case against the sort of animal research to which he is committed in the most effective terms there could be. Not only is he able to testify as a witness of thirty years' standing, but he also knows how to skewer the sophistries that have been put forward in its defense. Carbone would do Socrates proud. To give you one of scores of examples: Carbone analyzes the fallacious methodology employed by scientific and veterinary `experts' to back up their recommendations for exercise standards for laboratory animals: "Rather than defend specific claims with their source in the scientific database, these experts line up their witnesses in extensive bibliographies, none of which is cited directly" (p.215). Thus, as Carbone points out, any skeptic would be hard put to refute them without undertaking a daunting task. Yet when Carbone himself attempts to do this scholarly spadework, he finds precious little authoritative support for the supposed experts' conclusions. Consider also the breathtaking cheat of concluding that cage size does not matter on the basis of experiments that compare an animal's behavior in small cages of slightly differing sizes, which does not allow the animal any opportunity to show off her clear preference for a much larger one (p.115).

Carbone is fully self-aware as an agent on the job and as an author. He is highly versed in the relevant philosophical, sociological, and historical literatures. One does not often come upon a book which devotes an entire chapter to the guillotining of rodents, but Carbone treats the subject as a case study in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and more. Another chapter devoted to cage sizes and exercise is at once a story of human comedy and animal tragedy. As a result, reading this book is both an ordeal and a pleasure, for the suffering it reveals and for the competence of its critique respectively. In the end, though, the experience is one of exasperation, since the book makes the reader want to cry out for an end to the practice it delineates, but the book itself does not cry out for an end to the practice. Instead the book advocates the path of painfully won (and lost) reforms that can never keep up with or even catch up with both the enduring and the ever-new horrors in store for these captive animals, while holding out a vague hope for some unspecified future when, due to public opinion or technological breakthrough, it will all be over.

What I see as the essential nut that this book cannot crack is the moral intuition that, no matter how much prevention of or relief from suffering or premature death is at stake, no one has the right to impose significant suffering or premature death on another who is innocent and non-threatening. No lab animal is causing or threatening harm to any human being, either intentionally or inadvertently. Therefore to remove this being from its natural habitat (not to mention breed it to be `unnatural', and sometimes painfully so) and house it in a cage for the rest of its life; to subject it to distressing and sometimes painful or crippling procedures; and finally to kill it, seems to me to have no viable justification. It's that stark and simple. Anything else strikes me as hand-waving.

But I do not accuse Carbone of hand-waving. He tells it like it is, and, far from being the admission of a guilty conscience, this book is more an unapologetic plea for minimizing the harm to other animals in the pursuit of our medical and other worthy goals. But that those goals take precedent over the well-being of the animals is for Carbone not in question. Let me suggest, then, that the only source of confusion for a reader of this book would lie in the assumption that it's a moral treatise.

Here's an analogy. One of my graduate school philosophy professors used to snicker at any mention of the Problem of Evil, which is a notorious argument against the existence of God. Basically it says, "Suffering exists, therefore an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God does not exist'. What amused my professor was not any weakness in the argument, but the traditional name of the argument; for the notion that suffering poses a `problem' could only be entertained by somebody who believed in the relevant God. But if you happen not to hold that fantastical belief in the first place, as he would say with outstretched palms and lifted shoulders, "What's the problem?" There is pain in the world. Why would anyone suppose there wouldn't be?

Similarly for the `problem' of vivisection. It is only if one supposed there were a right or wrong about the matter that a justification would need to be sought for it. If instead, vivisection is examined only sociologically or anthropologically, as a human practice, for example, then the only issue is how to account for it, given our natural empathy with the suffering of all living creatures. The explanation, in broad brush, is not difficult to come by: People who engage in or support vivisection are more moved by human suffering than by animal suffering. This does not reduce the latter to zero in their estimation or their feelings, but it definitely reduces its significance in the scheme of things and makes it the loser in a contest between the two. That, I think, dispels any air of mystery that would otherwise attach to this excellent book.

I admit that this reader's eyes are not unbiased, since I oppose research on animals in laboratories, and sympathize with Carbone's lament that "Antivivisectionists have the easy message" (p.73). I remain skeptical of his characterization of the research defender's message as "more complex and difficult" (ibid). Maybe instead, it is just trying to justify the unjustifiable? But any reader should finally judge the book for themselves. I recommend it in the highest terms. It is exhaustively researched and exquisitely written; and Carbone is eminently suited to write on the topic, having doctorates from Cornell in both veterinary medicine and the history and philosophy of science, as well as his subsequent distinguished career. Nor, certainly, could one find fault with Carbone for a failure to try to improve the lot of laboratory animals: he is a leading spokesman on their behalf. But one sees the same story here as in the farming industry - the pursuit of reform goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of animal exploitation. So while animals in labs are surely better off now than before the contemporary animal liberation movement began in the 1970s, Carbone estimates the number of animals in U.S. labs to have more than quadrupled between 1993 and 2001, and likely to increase. In an analogous way, factory farming, although under ever-mounting pressure from animal activists to reform, has... Read more ›