ABSTRACT

This chapter adopts a historical perspective to explain how material infrastructures have structured human-animal relationships within the biomedical "animal house", c.1945 to the present. It reveals how multispecies sociocultural relations performatively shape and are shaped by the physical infrastructures that make up lived relations and shared labor in the animal house and laboratory. The chapter explores how multiple and often conflicting values and concerns centered on animal care have taken form within specific moral economies, become materialized within physical infrastructures of the animal house, and thereby constituted new values and concerns. It presents how, why, and to what consequence a specific understanding of laboratory animal care, which prioritized animal health, was enacted through practices that came to be instantiated within the macro architectural infrastructure of the laboratory animal house and the micro infrastructure of the animal cage. The chapter also discusses the implications of the historical entanglement of material infrastructures and care practices.