Improvising care: Managing experimental animals at a Japanese laboratory

Abstract

Japanese scientists and technicians are expected to adhere to international standards of humane animal experimentation, but their understandings of human-animal relationships and their ways of caring for laboratory animals do not always fit neatly with global norms. Under the loose and eclectic regulations that govern animal testing in Japan, animal ethicists, scientists and technicians behave improvisationally to deal with tensions and discomfort. This article focuses on how these actors bring various ‘moves’ to this improvisational care, such as everyday eating and spiritual practices. I develop the concept of ‘chains of improvisation’. In contrast with the more commonly used notion of ‘tinkering’, this concept helps to articulate a case where care is continuously destabilized and remade through encounters with otherness. By paying attention to how members of this laboratory question what good care for laboratory animals entails, this case provides an opening for rethinking the cost-benefit logic that underlies global discourses around laboratory animal ethics.