Abstract
This article examines the practice of animal cloning in relation to discourses of care and responsibility, in particular a common cultural interpretation of care theorized by Michel Foucault. This interpretation figures care as a “pastoral” relation premised in essential differences between carers and objects of care, and its interspecies implications are increasingly drawing the attention of theorists in animal studies. This article argues that, perhaps despite appearances, animal welfare in the form of pastoral care and abstract conceptualizations of animals that are dominant in discourses of animal biotechnology are not mutually exclusive, but rather in practice may be operating in conjunction with each other, discursively working together to naturalize ethics of biotechnology and animal welfare that reinforce rather than question human dominance and superiority. Specifically, mapping the normative framework of pastoral care onto the existing scientific orientation to acquiring knowledge of animal bodies produces a definition of care that is presumed to be both finite and perfectible. Ultimately, critical analysis of biotechnological manifestations of care and responsibility enables both a theorization of the industry’s performance of responsibility independently of its care-related claims about its own practices, and the elucidation of an alternative framework for assessing interspecies ethics that maintains a critical distance from the supposed “naturalness” or “unnaturalness” of interspecies relationships such as cloning.
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Notes
It should be noted that the scientists who created Dolly reject the conclusion that Dolly’s early-onset arthritis is traceable to having been cloned. They do acknowledge, however, that they “found evidence from structures in her cells called telomeres that Dolly’s biology was older than her years—her telomeres were shorter than expected and more typical of an older sheep” (Wilmut and Highfield 2006, p. 30). However, there is debate concerning the status of this characteristic as an instance of animal suffering: Vajta and Gjerres note in their review of the research on cloned animals that interpretations of varying telomere length in cloned animals are not conclusive, and that some cloned animals have lived longer lives than average (2006).
For instance, Rollin emphasizes this interpretation of religious proscriptions of cloning in his overview of scientific ethics: “arguments about the intrinsic wrongness of cloning are (1) meaningless or (2) may have meaning within a given religious tradition but are not subject to secular translation or (3) evolve into points about the likely and significant dangers that cloning must inevitably engender” (2006, p. 191).
In an earlier book about the experience of creating Dolly, the claim is slightly different, but carries a similar message: “In the twenty-first century and beyond, human ambition will be bound only by the laws of physics, the rules of logic, and our descendants’ own sense of right and wrong” (Wilmut, Campbell, and Tudge qtd. in Franklin 2006, p. 32).
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Carey, J.L.W. Taking Responsibility for Cloning: Discourses of Care and Knowledge in Biotechnological Approaches to Nonhuman Life. J Agric Environ Ethics 28, 589–599 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9544-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9544-0