Regulating for a Culture of Care: British Animal Research Legislation in the 1980s

‘Laboratory animals’ and the infrastructure that sustained them were an integral part of the development of the twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences. Until 1986, in Britain, the scientific use of animals was governed by the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. For 110 years—during a period of rapid techno-scientific change and exponential expansion of the biomedical sciences—a core part of twentieth-century scientific activity was shaped by Victorian legislation. This paper charts the reform of animal research governance in late twentieth-century Britain, exploring the social and scientific factors that shaped new legislation culminating in the 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act (ASPA). Intended to balance the interests of scientific organisations, professional bodies, and animal welfare advocates, ASPA was driven by a combination of scientific recognition of the importance of standards of animal care and a societal re-invigoration of animal advocacy politics. By drawing on oral history interviews with animal technologists and veterinarians, as well as the recently opened Home Office records, we chart how ASPA contributed to the ‘professionalization’ of care, examining how emergent knowledges and practices of animal care informed the new legislation and were subsequently transformed by it. In doing so, we explain why veterinarians and ‘animal technologists’, absent in the original 1876 legislation, were ascribed prominent roles within ASPA as adjudicators of the needs of science and those of animal welfare. In conclusion, our paper reveals the conditions which allowed care to operate within the experimental sciences to productively align scientific and societal values.