ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the impact of neoliberalism on the creation of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986. Nonhuman laboratory animals are agentic beings and are enmeshed in a whole array of material–semiotic relations, both in and outside the laboratory. To theorise this relationship between law and nohuman animals of the lab, I draw on Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality. Governmnetality helps us to trace the historically contingent origins of contemporary experimental science. It allows us to reveal both the logic of rationality and material impact of power relations on nonhuman laboratory animals. First, in the way pastoral power operated in the review of the 1876 Act reveals the beginnings of the development of a rationality of animal welfare. Second, the transformation of this into an ‘art of governance’ in the formation of the ASPA 1986 helps to reveal its material impact and biopolitical nature. This chapter is an historical account of the intermingling of law and animal experimental science. I do this by demonstrating how law-making practices were not just based on a logic of rationality but also had implications for the very practice of animal-dependent science.
