Care and the Cowboy Boot: Interspecies Responsibility and the Wobbly Boundaries of Lab Animal Personhood

Abstract

Of what relevance is a cowboy boot to understandings of the moral underpinnings of lab animal care, value, and personhood? I trace the movement of chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries, wherein associated forms of care in the latter expose efforts to foster emergent chimpanzee personhood. Staff of one sanctuary view chimps’ former lives as constrained by standardized, impersonal forms of care: as lab subjects, they were confined to small quarters and valued primarily as sources of scientific data. In contrast, sanctuary care entails efforts to individualize animals through quirky, creative strategies that jostle interspecies boundaries. In one instance, a pair of cowboy boots embodies associated challenges and triumphs. I argue that attentiveness to the values assigned to nonhuman ways of being, interspecies encounters, and inanimate things together uncover otherwise hidden efforts to redirect entrenched notions of professional responsibility, compassion, and the morality of care. I ask, if anthropological definitions of personhood are anchored in forms of human sociality, under what conditions can practices, objects, and other creatures rattle, alter, or redirect premises of personhood to incorporate interspecies understandings? How might the wobbly boundaries of sanctuary life loop back to transform, rather than denigrate, the works and lives of laboratory staff?