Multispecies Choreographies of Animal Experimentation

In this paper, I examine how historical accounts of experimentation on nonhuman animals can be written in a way that does justice to tested animals as agentic and response-able living beings. In accordance with recent calls to decenter the human, nonhuman animals are given center stage, not because they affect human history, but because they are seen as subjects worthy of investigation in their own right. Several scholars have used the term choreography to write about interactions between humans and other animals. I propose multispecies choreography as a useful concept for writing about animal experimentation non-anthropocentrically. Thinking of these practices as multispecies choreographies, draws attention to all animals involved as embodied individuals, interacting within and across species as well as with their shared physical environment. Based on two empirical case studies about experiments on monkeys and mice, it is argued that these interaction often reproduce, but sometimes also challenge species boundaries. Analyzing how these multispecies choreographies change over time, necessitates examining micro-macro interactions to understand how the worlds of tested nonhuman animals are affected by developments in law, policy, et cetera. Finally, thinking of experimentation practices as choreographies can als show the workings of power, when considering not only movements included in the choreography, but also those movements that are excluded due to constraining species hierarchies within the lab and within wider society.