Social reproduction crisis of laboratory animals

Abstract

This article analyzes the social reproduction crisis of laboratory animals subjected to the vivisection industrial complex. To do so, it adopts a critical perspective from radical anthropology and abolitionism, which allows the interpretation of political economy concepts and the work of social scientists. This approach makes it possible to understand the extraction of value and the instrumentalization of these individuals within the scientific production system by proposing value frameworks. In addition, two new concepts are introduced to help contextualize current animal-related issues. Through a critical lens, the inconsistencies between the legal recognition of animal sentience and their differential treatment-based on their assigned use value between laboratory animals and companion animals-are examined, highlighting the contradictions in Laws 17/2021 and 7/2023. The concealment-representation dialectic in the corporate communication of the aforementioned complex is analyzed through case studies, demonstrating how mediated images legitimize experimentation by aestheticizing captivity and applying Russell and Burch's (1959) third R (refinement), thereby obscuring the inherent suffering of the process. Finally, the article reflects on the role of governments and regulations in perpetuating the animal experimentation model, as well as the economic and political interdependence between the vivisection industrial complex and the animal industrial complex. It concludes that the discursive construction of animal welfare in experimentation is part of a speciesist strategy to perpetuate the exploitation of laboratory animals while ignoring ethical and scientific alternatives.