A Mouse in a Cage

Questions the treatment of laboratory animals in biomedical research

Laboratory animals are often used to develop medical treatments: vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants have all relied upon animal testing to ensure safety and success for human benefit. Yet the relationship between the scientific community's dependence on laboratory animals and the recognition of the need to treat these animals with respect and compassion has given rise to a profound tension.
As animals are increasingly understood to have rights and autonomy, Carrie Friese posits that, while care and compassion for a distant other who suffers are central to humanitarianism, the idea of a distant other itself, which has shaped work with laboratory animals both historically and today, has enacted forms of highly problematic paternalism, creating a double bind. Focusing on the lives of laboratory mice and rats in the United Kingdom, and on the people who take care of, and often kill, these animals, Friese gives the name of “more-than-human humanitarianism” to contradictory practices of suffering and compassion, killing and sacrifice, and compassion and consent that she witnessed in a variety of animal facilities and laboratories.

Friese proposes a new approach to the treatment of laboratory animals that recognizes the interconnectedness of all species and how human actions impact the welfare of other species and the planet as a whole. A Mouse in a Cage is an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about the ethical treatment of animals.

Carrie Friese is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals.Carrie Friese is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity, and the Future of Endangered Animals.

This ground-breaking book makes visible how mice bred, modified, nurtured and killed for biomedical research have become central actors in progressing human health and society. By situating thick description of actual mouse lives alongside the people involved in the care and death of these animals, the book’s major contribution is to unpick the political, economic, scientific, ethical, moral and social entanglements underpinning the dependence of science on backgrounding the animals that make animal models possible. Specifically, Friese brilliantly reveals how humanitarian ethics had to change and develop for the creation and use of these ‘lab’ animals to become possible at the international scale it is today. This work is huge in scope and unique – no other study has helped us see so clearly all that we owe to - and how much we depend upon and even demand of - these mice. A Mouse in a Cage is a tour de force.

In this study from a renowned scholar of animals in science, Carrie Friese offers astute and imaginative observations regarding the limitations and possibilities of care in UK laboratories, wherein a ‘more-than-human humanitarianism’ analytical anchor advances refreshing challenges to human-centered understandings of interspecies responsibility. Friese’s noteworthy decision to interweave ethnographic knowledge with works of fiction opens up new terrain for troubling the boundaries of gender, race, and class in science.. This book is a must read for any scholar interested in the quotidian complexities of laboratory worlds.

A Mouse in a Cage takes us into the practices and meanings of nonhuman humanitarianism, not as an abstract concept, but as existentially lived in animal technicians’ relationships with animals, colleagues, the visiting sociologist, and the world. By innovatively juxtaposing rich ethnography and fiction, Carrie Friese complicates and deepens our understanding of what it means and takes to care in hierarchical relationships. From the very first pages, we want to stay in her universe and view the world through her careful descriptions and intriguing analytical takes. A Mouse in a Cage crafts new language for the complexity of interspecies relations and care.