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New York (US): New York University Press ; 2025. Contents Search term < Prev Next > Chapter 6 Consent A mouse does not consent to participating in research. 1 The presumption of a rational, individuated human actor who can consent to research or therapeutic intervention upon their body and self means that extending the theme of consent to laboratory animals is, seemingly, questionable at best. But if we understand consent as a relational process, this extension of consent can, indeed, be helpful—not least for addressing the many dilemmas that consent gives rise to within biomedicine itself and in the relationships that are enacted between differently situated humans. 2 Indeed, the question of consent in animals can be seen as a long-standing concern among ethologists, and was a crucial question that Gregory Bateson ([1972]2000) posed in “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” Within the context of play, Bateson asked not how a monkey says “yes,” but rather how a monkey says “Don’t” in a manner that is heard and acted upon by another. Inspired by Bateson, this chapter recounts how I witnessed an animal technician hear a mouse say “Don’t.” 3 I contend that the question of how to hear a “Don’t” is crucial to discussions about consent, as coercion can occur when a nonlinguistic “Don’t” is ignored in the context of a linguistic yes. Consent is also crucial to social research, including my own. Joanna Latimer and I conducted ethnographic research alongside one another at the Institute, wherein I spent time in the animal facility and various laboratories using the mice and Latimer spent time in laboratories using “insentient” organisms such as yeast, flies, or worms. When gaining entrée into the Institute as a field site for conducting ethnographic research, one of the questions that arose was how we would gain consent from the individual scientists and technicians we were shadowing. Scientists in Britain are often skeptical of allowing social scientists into their workplaces, and concern over the violent tactics used by animal rights activists from the 1970s through the 1990s is often the rationale for this. However, individual scientists and scientific organizations also understand the importance of being open and transparent about their work. On the one hand, because taxpayers are funding much of the basic scientific research that is conducted, scientists are increasingly required to engage with the public as a condition for receiving this funding. Many scientists, however, would also like to present their work and how they care for animals to outside audiences. In a context where the organization felt compelled to work with two social scientists and some individual scientists were also compelled, how would we ensure that those scientists who didn’t want to participate in our research were also left out? How would we recognize and leave out scientists who didn’t want to be in the research? We worked with the Institute and our respective institutions’ research ethics committees to address these questions. Going through these consultative and bureaucratic processes was crucial. 4 But the question of research ethics always also exceeded these formal ethical procedures ( Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa 2013 ). This chapter examines one of the ethical excesses, focusing on how we hear another say “Don’t” without language. Informed consent is foundational to biomedicine as practiced with humans, both in medical/therapeutic and scientific/research practices. Informed consent ensures that a person is not coerced into receiving treatment or being researched upon without express permission. As important as informed consent is, the practice has been critiqued extensively for a range of reasons, including the fact that it takes an individualized approach to what is often a social process ( Fox and Swazey 1984 ; Corrigan 2003 ; West-McGruer 2020 ; Prainsack 2018 ). The question of consent is also present but more tendentious in the context of humanitarianism. In his history of Euro–American humanitarianism, Michael Barnett (2011) asserts that paternalism is a potentially necessary but nonetheless problematic characteristic of the relationship between givers and receivers of aid. 5 Humanitarian aid often presumes that the receiver of that aid wants help, and that consent is therefore implied ( Stevenson 2014 ). In this context, I suggest that one of the key benefits of more-than-human humanitarianism is in making consent an ever-present question. How more-than-human humanitarianism seeks to hear nonverbal articulations of “Don’t”—a skill that must be cultivated over time and through the development of intimate knowledge—is an important lesson for humanitarianism and social science researchers alike. Vignette The animal technician who I am following today is cleaning cages. Sarah has been doing this type of work for over 40 years, most of her adult life. She explained that she grew up close to an animal facility and started doing this kind of work when she was young. And so here she is—working in a different animal facility but doing the same type of work decades later. As a result, Sarah has worked with almost every kind of laboratory animal across her career. Sarah takes a metal cart and puts four cages on the bottom and four on the top shelves. She pushes the cart to the hood. Sarah disinfects her gloved hands, takes a cage, and places it within a rectangular metal device for opening the cage. She takes off the cover of the cage, observes the mice, and quietly talks to the mice. She then apologizes: “I’m sorry I talk to my mice. I know they can’t understand me, but I can’t stop. I think it calms them also, as it is stressful for them to be disrupted like this.” Mariam Motamedi Fraser (2015) has made words a distinctly sociological object of inquiry, asking what is done with words in interaction and what can be learned by probing nonlinguistic word relations. Sarah’s talk with the mice is a place where words flourish in a “non-discursive assemblage,” mirroring those explored by Fraser (2019 , 131). It is not the content of what Sarah is saying to the mice that matters. Indeed, this is why she apologizes to me for talking to the mice, indicating a possible sense of embarrassment. 6 Rather, making the sound of words with one’s mouth while physically handling the mice was a bodily, sensorial, and affective experience that I suspect Sarah found relaxing herself. I know that I found it relaxing to watch and listen to her work. Sarah walks away to get a clean cage with preprepared sawdust and bedding. She disinfects her hands. I watch the mice run around the cage, somewhat surprised that they do not try to escape with the lid being open. They don’t, which Sarah clearly knows. One by one, Sarah moves the mice to the clean cage, inspecting their bellies along the way, bringing some old bedding and older wood chips into the clean cage and the red tunnel. She also includes some fresh food and sunflower seeds as a treat. While Sarah noted that cage cleaning is stressful for the mice, it also seemed to me that she used the cage cleaning as an opportunity for play and a time for the mice to explore as they move from one cage to the other. Stress is not necessarily bad and can be highly productive and necessary; deep play for children is an example of a productive type of stress. For mice living in a cage for so long, some stress is probably necessary, and cage cleaning seems like a good opportunity for this play. Sarah carefully recovers the clean cage, places it on the metal cart, puts the dirty cage on another rack, and begins the process again. She turns to me at one point and says, “Are you sure you won’t get bored?” I tell her I won’t, that there is something relaxing about her work. Her talk with the mice is part of what makes watching this work relaxing: the repetition of movement that has a kind of grace combined with words spoken for their sound rather than their content. There was something meditative about watching Sarah work, which was like watching a dance. Like any job rooted in movement, animal technicians’ work is physical labor, but the grace of it can make this easy to forget. It is physically hard to be on one’s feet all day, to bend up and down repeatedly to get cages, and to fit one’s body within the hood all day long. Sarah’s shoulders are a bit hunched forward, and I wonder if this is age- or work-related. Her body looks perfectly fitted within the hood as if her work has shaped her body to fit its parameters. But the animal technician’s work is not only physical labor. It certainly cannot be automated in the way that this animal facility has automated the cleaning of the physical cages with robotics. The rhythm and routine are ruptured at key moments. At one point, for example, Sarah suddenly turned the light off over the hood before moving a cage to it. She quietly said that one of the mice seemed about “to fit.” 7 She was going to do this cage quickly. I was quiet and allowed Sarah to focus on cleaning the cage. After it was done, I asked how she knew the mouse would fit. Sarah responded that after all these years, she knew the visual cues, the bodily freezing, and when an animal was about to fit. Sarah knows through patterns, habits, and similarities, such that when things are different she also knows there is a problem (see chapter 2 ). So, Sarah got the new cage ready and moved the mice as quickly as possible, as this was not a time for play for these mice. Sarah is habituated to the signs of productive versus unproductive stress among mice. She knows when a mouse is intimating “don’t.” How Do Animals Say "Don’t"? Sarah’s use of play and her ability to hear mice say “Don’t” as part of that play is a social accomplishment. Gregory Bateson ([1972]2000) famously found it curious that monkeys act as if they are fighting while playing and bite each other as if fighting without producing pain or animosity. Bateson ponders: “What I encountered at the zoo was a phenomenon well known to everybody: I saw two young monkeys playing , i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat” ( Bateson [1972]2000 , 179). It is through Bateson that I came to understood Sarah’s work in both allowing mice to play and hearing mice say “Don’t” to that play as significant and in need of appreciation. To further understand Sarah’s work as a site of consent, I note that Eduardo Kohn (2013) has developed Bateson’s analysis of the metalinguistics of play. Kohn has done this to develop his more-than-human model of thinking, a relational model of thought not located in the brain but in interpretive and embodied interactions that always include other-than-humans. Kohn extends Bateson’s analysis of monkey play to the dog play he witnessed as part of his ethnographic research. For Kohn, the key question is how monkeys or dogs can say “Don’t” in the context of play. Kohn (2013 , 147) states: Whereas negation is relatively simply to communicate in a symbolic register, it is quite difficult to do so in the indexical communicative modalities typical of nonhuman communication. . . . Saying “don’t” symbolically is simple. . . . But how do you say “don’t” indexically? The only way to do so is to re-create the “indexical” sign but this time without its indexical effect. The only way to indexically convey the pragmatic negative canine imperative, “Don’t bite” . . . . Is to reproduce the act of biting but in a way that is detached from its usual indexical associations. Drawing on Bateson and Kohn, I argue that the fact that Sarah can hear the mouse say “Don’t” indexically must be considered an accomplishment in the context of this scholarship on language and communication. 8 And being able to hear “Don’t” instead of a “yes” or a “no” seems crucial for consent to not become coercion. A mouse fitting during a cage cleaning is not the same kind of conundrum as a dog biting another dog during a play fight. When a dog or a monkey bites another in an intraspecies encounter, “Don’t” is expressed by the indexical sign of acting out the thing that is not wanted; this is what distinguishes it as play. On the other hand, a mouse fitting is interpreted as a “Don’t” in the context of an interspecies encounter. A mouse fitting is a more stable signifier of “Don’t” to Sarah than a dog play-biting another dog. “Don’t” is expressed by the mouse to Sarah, but not by making the indexical sign of that which is not wanted as in the case of the dog biting another dog during play. Nonetheless, being able to say and hear “Don’t” during play is at the heart of both Bateson’s and Kohn’s conundrum and Sarah’s work. As Bateson said, the very proposition of play requires that the animals in question are “capable of some degree of meta-communication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘this is play’” (Bateson 1987 in Motamedi Fraser 2019 , 133). To understand Sarah’s work—in giving the mice a space to play during the cage cleaning while also allowing them to say “no” to that play—I believe we need to understand words as productive beyond their meaning. On the one hand, this is shown in Sarah’s use of words as calming to say aloud, regardless of their content. But equally this is shown when the word “Don’t” is expressed without language. Miriam Motamedi Fraser’s (2015) analysis of words beyond language, and her extension of this analysis to dog words (2019), helps me to understand how animal technicians and mice communicate with one another. I therefore describe Motamedi Fraser’s theory of more-than-human and more-than-linguistic word relations in order to better understand how Sarah listens to the mice, and communicates with them without language. * * * In developing dog words conceptually, Motamedi Fraser’s (2019) primary interlocutor is the dog trainer Vicki Hearne and her notion of dog gestures. In developing dog gestures, Hearne interprets Bandit’s gestures as communicating beyond a stimulus–response model, wherein sit = biscuit. 9 Rather, Hearne shows how a sit can mean different things within a particular milieu or interaction, such that a sit could mean “I want to work,” “I need to go out,” or “I want to eat.” Motamedi Fraser extends this to argue that these actions are not only dog gestures but also dog words, in that a dog sitting is a signifier to which no stable signified is attached. Motamedi Fraser emphasizes the physicality of making a word, whether it be with one’s mouth or hand (which we associate with humans) or with one’s body (which here we associate with dogs): A dog makes a dog word by shaping her or his body into a particular position, or by moving her or his body in a particular way (in the way of a retriever for example), just as a spoken word is made by the sound that is shaped by the face, mouth, larynx, etc. and a written word is made by the movement of the hand and the marker. A dog makes a word with her or his body, and this is all that the dog makes, no more and no less than a word. ( Motamedi Fraser 2019 , 137) A dog sitting makes an image, and that image is interpreted and acted upon by others rather than having a stable signified attached. Motamedi Fraser makes this argument by showing how her dog uses his body near the refrigerator to intimate that it is time to eat. She articulates this understanding of their communication as follows: I am not suggesting that a dog word has no meaning, or that a dog does not mean what she or he says. On the contrary, the conceptual dimension of the sign is suspended only until the dog word arrives at its meaning by way of the relations that constitute it . These relations are not with other words—to be blunt: Monk uses words, but he does not make sentences—but with close-to-hand and familiar resources that enable a dog to intimate. “To intimate,” Berlant writes, “is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity” (Berlant, 1998, p. 281). (Motamedi Fraser 2019, 137) Building upon Motamedi Fraser’s argument, we could similarly say that the mouse fitting is a mouse word. The mouse’s body speaks a word when it starts to fit. This word is interpreted by Sarah as the mouse saying “Don’t” to the playtime of cage cleaning. The mouse fitting intimates “Don’t” through the relations that constitute it, including Sarah’s previous encounters with mice. Sarah hears this “don’t,” and her habit shifts; the play stops as this would not be productive play for the mouse. The cage is cleaned as quickly as possible, so the disruption of the cage cleaning is minimized. By cleaning quickly, Sarah says, “Don’t fit” to the mouse. What is important here is that to hear a dog word or a mouse word, wherein bodily words are signifiers to which there is no stable signified is attached, an intimate relationship is required. Motamedi Fraser states: A dog’s gesture can be understood as a word, if a word is understood as part of an “associative complex” or encounter. Inventing associative complexes or participating in word encounters is a way of making and using words (non-referentially), and also a way of thinking (concretely). In an associative complex, meaning is generated when any number of ostensibly “disconnected” entities are brought together on the basis of “perceived similarities, commonalities, or relationships.” While the bonds that define such relationships will necessarily be many and varied (Monk and I, for instance, especially with our different umwelts , identify similarities very differently), they will always be situational, and specific. It is for this reason, I wager, they will also intimate. (Motamedi Fraser 2019, 139) Dog words and mouse words are not located in the individual animal but in the “intimate entanglements” (Latimer and Lopez Gomez 2019a) through which those bodily signs make (or don’t make) worlds. There is a real danger in the fact that these words can be ignored because they take so much embodied knowledge to hear. “The stakes in a word encounter are thus very high, for failing to acknowledge or respond to potential meaning is likely to lead to the profound injustice of stifling thinking” (Motamedi Fraser 2019, 143). Word relations make dog worlds, and I would add mouse worlds. Word relations are relationships of power that make the world but are also made of the world. Word relations are constrained by the conditions of possibility for listening well, not only through the interpretation that is based on previous representations of the world but also by the conditions of possibility for responding. As Greenhough and Roe (2019, 374) make clear: “If we learn anything from the ATs [animal technicians] . . . it is that the infrastructure imposes an inability to escape animal exploitation, and AT attunement to animals is part and parcel of that.” 10 With a relational understanding of mind as distributed across bodies rather than located in brains through Kohn, combined with attention to power relations through Motamedi Fraser, it needs to be emphasized that Sarah does still clean the cage, even if she hears the mouse as saying “don’t.” Sarah must abide by the law and the terms of her employment. Sarah cannot respond to the mouse’s word by not cleaning the cage even if she wishes to. She can only react by cleaning the cage entirely differently, shifting from what looked like a “playful” encounter to a calm but quick encounter. The start of a fit in a mouse, bodily freezing as a sign, could significantly stand for “Don’t play” to Sarah; “Don’t clean,” however, was not an option. Amplifying Consent Animals do not figure significantly in Edugyan’s novel Washington Black (2018) , except for one scene. This scene is, nonetheless, important in marking a key transition of protagonist Wash’s attachments. Wash moves from a period of detachment and isolation, of “bitter self-sufficiency” after being abandoned by Titch, to turning toward Tanna as a love interest. Turning toward Tanna necessitates attachment to Tanna’s white father, Goff. Tanna asks Wash to dive, in her place, for a living octopus that will become a dead specimen for her naturalist father to bring back to Britain for display. Tanna cannot dive because of a broken wrist. While Wash does not “like to feel ill-used” by Goff, he nonetheless finds himself doing the dive as it allows him to be close to Tanna. He consents, but that consent is sticky. Diving was a dangerous practice, and its danger was overdetermined by racism and colonialism. Goff tells Wash, “Well, the main thing is to try not to die. I shall give you some advice on how best to bring that about” ( Edugyan 2018 , 270). Free diving is a long-standing practice in many parts of the coastal world but became an exploitative and deadly practice in the context of the British Empire. In Coral Empire (2019), Ann Elias shows how aquatic environments were racialized and coastal people subordinated as part of British colonialism in both the Bahamas and Australia through fishing as part of industry, collecting as part of natural science, and filming underwater as part of entertainment. The fact that Goff uses his mixed-race daughter in the first instance to dive, and asks Wash to dive in Tanna’s place, must be read in the context of this racist and colonial history. Wash succeeds in collecting a female octopus during his dive, and he does this by engaging with the octopus and getting her “to like him.” The octopus arranged itself in a smatter of algae, its body hanging blackly before me. When I came forward to touch it, it sent out a surge of dark ink. We paused, watching each other, the grey rag of ink hanging between us. Then it shot off through the water, stopping short to radiate like a cloth set afire, its arms unfurling and vibrating. There was something playful in the pause, as if it expected me to ink it back. I held my hands out towards it, gently; the creature hovered in the dark waters, almost totally still. Then, shyly, it began to pulse towards me, stopping just inches away, its small gelatinous eyes taking me in. Then it swam directly into my hands. ( Edugyan 2018 , 271) Wash’s meeting with the octopus is not an instance of animalization, which would create an equivalence between Wash as a racialized person and the octopus as an objectified animal. Rather, the fact of Wash and the octopus being together—underwater, at that moment alongside one another—is embroiled in the history of racialization and colonization that made “animalization” possible. Wash’s compassion for the octopus is what makes collecting her possible. Edugyan here creates an “image” ( Stevenson 2014 ) of Hannah Arendt’s provocation that compassion creates inequality and Mary Douglas’s proclamation that compassion is repression. Both Arendt and Douglas were famously critical of compassion as an emotion that cements inequalities through a pretense of helping another. Here, we see how compassion can be instrumentalized in coercion, which looks like consent. Wash first comes up with the invention of the aquarium during this dive, and in response to the octopus. “When I thought of Goff killing her to crate up as a specimen for his exhibition, a twist of nausea went through me. How wrong it all felt. Could she not, I thought, be brought to England alive to be seen as the breathing miracle she was?” ( Edugyan 2018 , 271). Here, Wash imagines the aquarium, an institution that developed in parallel with colonialism; the objectification of marine life parallels the objectification of colonized people ( Elias 2019 ). Nigel Rothfels (2008) has shown how immersive zoo exhibits were derived from the practice of exhibiting people in ways that contributed to their racialization. Rothfels argues that the illusion of personal freedom generated support for these exhibits among professional anthropologists and the general public, even though these people were treated as property, as servants and slaves. Wash does not picture the aquarium as making the octopus potentially free, but rather as at least allowing the octopus to stay alive. But we are left to wonder: Would staying alive be better for this octopus than her imminent death? Wash is a survivor, and for him, the answer to the vexed question—is this a life worth living—is always clear: staying alive is better. However, the reader is left to ask what Wash himself is complicit in as he imagines the aquarium while in this moment of being alongside this octopus. 11 Vignette I am having lunch with a group of scientists who all work in the immunology lab, where I have observed research on aging and vaccine uptake. They are all either PhD students or postdocs and are relatively junior within the hierarchy of science. We are sitting outside on a picnic bench in the shade created by the animal facility. I feel somewhat self-conscious at this lunch. Our picnic bench is below a window I have looked out of before while having lunch with an animal technician. I know that this is the kitchen window for the section of the animal facility where I have spent much time conducting fieldwork. I felt strange having my lunch outside and below this window with the scientists who used the mice these technicians cared for and eventually killed. It was a sunny day, and I felt guilty for having lunch outside while the technicians were having their lunch indoors. This feeling of being in the shadow of the animal facility takes on new meaning as the scientists begin to discuss the possible uses of the green landscape that surrounds us. They wonder why this park-like setting isn’t being used for recreation and start considering the different sports that could be played here. One suggests croquette, and someone else jokes that they could use the mice as the balls. They are clearly referencing Alice in Wonderland ([1865]1993) here, replacing the hedgehog balls used in the game of croquette with laboratory mice. Everyone laughs. I am smiling, too, thinking that Derrida also turned to Alice in Wonderland in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008). One of the more senior scientists in the group sees me smile at this moment, and maybe she even sees me thinking. I see her see me smile. I also see her shift quickly in affect from relaxation to seriousness. She says to the group, “As said in front of the visiting sociologist.” Everyone stops laughing; the topic is changed. I believe that this scientist was worried about me telling this story because it could convey the wrong impression: that these scientists don’t care about their animals and are even possibly cruel to animals. I agree with her that this would be the wrong interpretation—if this is what she was thinking. I am certain that these scientists do care about animals. My research to date has shown scientists by and large care for and about animals above and beyond regulatory requirements, not least in order to be a good scientist. I think the joke here represents the kind of humor that Lesley Sharp (2019, 131–32) has shown occurs routinely in clinical medicine, scientific laboratories, and research animal facilities where young professionals must learn how to become accustomed to suffering and death. 12 These scientists will be with suffering and death, day in and day out, for the whole of their careers. Young professionals must learn to live in the daily presence of painful emotions that these events give rise to. A macabre humor is a long-standing way for young scientists and clinicians to express their ambivalences and discomforts within this challenging milieu. The joke does not indicate an uncaring attitude but rather a very real personal and professional struggle that occurs when one is hoping to do good, and that requires doing some real harm. I interpreted the scientist as telling me: “Don’t tell this story.” It is a “Don’t” that I have listened to, and I have deleted this section of the book many times only to put it back in. My dilemma is that I did not interpret their jokes as indicating an uncaring attitude. I am listening to this scientist, responding to the “Don’t” I heard in her affect by telling the story differently. But is this the right decision? None of this would fall under the rubric of formal consent, as I received informed consent to do this research ethically. But this is the kind of ethical practice that informed consent as a process necessitates, particularly in the context of ethnographic work conducted in an organization where people consented to allow me to shadow them for the day and opted out by not talking with me while I was shadowing someone else in their laboratory (see Plankey-Videla 2012 ). I cannot know if this is what she was actually thinking, just as I am certain she did not know that I was thinking about Derrida and his analysis of hedgehogs when I heard her say, without words, “Don’t tell this story.” And maybe I am wrong. Maybe she, too, knows that Lewis Carroll was an antivivisectionist who saw secularization, science, vivisection, and selfishness as one and the same ( Collingwood 1898 , 167–70). She worries that I will make too big a thing out of this joking reference to Alice in Wonderland as part of the playfulness that is necessary for interpretive analysis. Ethics and Poetics I would like to suggest that these scientists turning to Lewis Carroll, just as Derrida turned to Lewis Carroll, may help extend the more-than-human theory of knowing and of hearing dissent without words. To understand what it takes to hear “Don’t”, we need to understand it as poetic: the impossible double bind of hearing a “Don’t” as part of the visceral experience of presence. Presence defies language, but nonetheless somehow needs to be put into language. I will start with how the hedgehog helps us to understand poesis through Derrida before turning to what this means for hearing “don’t.”. In The Animal That Therefore I Am , Derrida has this to say about Alice in Wonderland and the hedgehogs: Although I don’t have time to do so, I would of course have liked to inscribe my whole talk within a reading of Lewis Carroll. In fact you can’t be certain that I am not doing that, for better or for worse, silently, unconsciously, or without your knowing. You can’t be certain that I didn’t already do it one day when, ten years ago, I let speak or let pass a little hedgehog, a suckling hedgehog perhaps, before the question ‘What is poetry?’ For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. ( Derrida 2008 , 7) Derrida provides a genealogy for his thinking on animals for philosophy by tracing hedgehogs in Alice in Wonderland —a story that both resists and reproduces the Cartesian duality of mind/body and human/animal—to his use of hedgehogs to think poetics. For Derrida, hedgehogs provide a way through the difficulty of grasping, linguistically, the metalinguistic. Hedgehogs did for Derrida what monkeys playing did for Bateson. One of the important elements of the hedgehog is that it challenges binary thinking about wholes and parts. In this sense, this genealogy also resonates with the concept of “partial connections” ( Strathern 2004 ) and “being alongside” ( Latimer 2013a ). Timothy Clark (1993 , 46) notes that Derrida is not the first to reference “the lowly hedgehog” in reflecting on poetics. By choosing to relate the poetic in terms of the fable of the hedgehog, Derrida is engaged with one of the best known of the Athenaeum Fragments (1798), no.206. Friedrich Schlegel writes there of the fragment form in relation to the idea of a transcendental poetry, a poetry that will have no empirical referent but would exist as the essential or the absolute poetic creativity (poesis) itself. A fragment, in relation to such an ideal, would be paradoxically ‘like a miniature work of art’, ‘entirely isolated from the surrounding world and . . . complete in itself like a hedgehog.’ For Schlegel the hedgehog-fragment, in its isolation, its would-be perfect closure upon itself, figures the Ideal of the Romantic text as unconditioned, i.e. absolved of relation to anything but itself— ab-solute . ( Clark 1993 , 46) There is a whole, in the sense of complete and isolated, definition of poesis that Derrida critiques by reclaiming the hedgehog. To be both whole and isolated is a romantic ideal. As a side note, this is also the romantic ideal that David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace is motivated by and that the novel itself critiques. However, Derrida argues that the hedgehog only rolls up into a whole in relation to another who is perceived as dangerous. According to Derrida, this exposure to distress, to finitude, is poetic experience. Clark analyses Derrida as follows: Correspondingly to hearken to the poetic is to attend to something, both in and beyond language, which is not ‘just as it is’ but whose identity is unstable, wild, impatient of definition: a mode of alterity not of sameness. It thus cannot be known: knowledge as such must be renounced if one is to perceive this creature that, unexpectedly, crosses the thoroughfares of communication, from one side to the other. The poetic moves or disturbs obliquely; its space is one in which the language of identification and exchange is traversed by what cannot be simply said or thought. ( Clark 1993 , 50) Derrida thus reclaims the hedgehog by challenging that it is not an idealized whole that is pure knowledge, for it cannot be whole without relation, and this relation exceeds the linguistic. What does the double bind Derrida focuses on through the hedgehog mean when attending to hearing another say “Don’t” without language? Clark’s description of the poetic articulates how I felt in the presence of Sarah as she quickly dimmed the light of the hood in which a cage of mice was positioned, or the senior scientist as I thought I heard her intimate ‘don’t tell this story’. Sarah doesn’t know what the mice are thinking, nor do I. I don’t know what Sarah or the postdoc were thinking. The postdoctoral scientist didn’t know I was thinking about Derrida. I was moved, though, and I have tried to put that movement into language. It is a needed but equally impossible task. Playfulness is my interpretative strategy, allowing me to link Derrida’s hedgehog with Bateson’s monkey and Kohn’s and Fraser’s dogs. Timothy Clark analyses Derrida’s meditation on poesis through the hedgehog as an ode, an address or an appeal that speaks to a future that may never be, a future that language anticipates. “The ode may thus work performatively, giving itself as an act of dedication, worship or supplication” ( Clark 1993 , 53). To value the work of hearing “Don’t,” we need more odes to lowly creatures like hedgehogs and mice who are always part of relationally producing knowledge. Maybe that ode is the work of the visiting sociologist and distinguishes her from the ethicist. More-than-Human Humanitarianism and Consent Consent relies upon spoken and written language and can be formalized with a “yes,” often by signing one’s name. However, hearing another say something that we may take as a “Don’t” relies upon more than language. Hearing a “Don’t” requires intimate knowledge ( Raffles 2002 ). How might we recognize the work that goes into hearing “Don’t”? How might this ability to hear and respond to a “Don’t” be recognized and valued without trying to codify it in the process? To address these questions, I started by exploring the theme of interspecies communication and relational knowledge. Then, I moved on to the vexed question of how to hear another say “Don’t” without words. These moves trouble the focus on individual freedom and self-ownership, which are often taken for granted in the processes and procedures of informed consent. The hedgehog is a countering image of consent and coercion, as always in something of a dialectical relationship to one another in the everyday interactions of life. It should again be emphasized that laboratory animals do not consent to being in biomedical science. However, it is worth noting that both informed consent and the regulation of laboratory animal welfare stem from the belief that rules and regulations help keep tyranny at bay. 13 For example, the impetus for British regulation of animals in science in the 19th century was exactly this. It was egregious practices occurring as part of vivisection that, in part, prompted the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. Since then, a range of practices—including the 3Rs (replace, reduce, and refine animals from research), the scientization of animal welfare, and “cultures of care”—have all sought to address everyday ethical concerns. I agree with Tone Druglitrø and Kristin Asdal (2024) that there are different versions of care, and this includes not only the type of “skilled care” ( Druglitrø 2018 ) described in this chapter but also “procedural care” ( Druglitrø and Asdal 2024 ; G. Davies et al. 2018 ), which includes paperwork, bureaucracy, and the creation of standards. However, I would like to suggest in this chapter that laboratory animals show us both the need for and the limits to a rule-based approach to ethics—highlighting what is needed in addition to bureaucratized procedures like informed consent. I make this argument by asking the following question: What intimate knowledges are required so that a person in a relative position of power can detect, hear, and respond to nonverbal signs that intimate “Don’t”? If formal ethics has given us informed consent—where the individual understands and says yes to their proposed future—virtue ethics provides us with the challenge of hearing and responding to a “Don’t” that is always also not a “no.” Formal and virtue ethics need one another in this context; neither can be fully relied upon. The problem is not formal ethics per se, but rather how its formality can render invisible and thus unnecessary all the virtues of engaging in the hard work of listening well. A more-than-human humanitarianism puts these needs at the forefront of both formal and informal ethics. Time and embeddedness are needed to cultivate the skill of being in a position to receive consent and dissent. Humanitarianism through the Prism I would like to conclude this chapter by suggesting that the work and time that goes into interspecies communication—and the attendant critiques of languagism presented in animal studies by anthropologists like Eduardo Kohn (2013) , sociologists like Mariam Motamedi Fraser (2019 , 2015 ), and feminist ethologists like Vinciane Despret (2004 , 2005 , 2008 , 2013 , 2016 )—is important for humanitarianism to consider. Can recipients of aid say “Don’t” in a meaningful way that is listened to and responded to? Do aid workers have the intimate knowledge gained through an extended time spent day in and day out with the receivers of aid that is required to hear a “Don’t”? A focus on language as a form of communication and the codification of consent could make it even more difficult for humans with very different experiences in and of the world to say and hear “Don’t” to and from one another. Indeed, in their study of consent in the context of combat sports, Channon and Matthews (2022 , 910) similarly find that “the formalization of consent within the rules and norms of a sport undermines athletes’ perceived need to purposefully engage with consent as a process of clear and explicit interpersonal communication.” I will give an example from social studies of humanitarianism here to demonstrate how consent comes to be assumed and the dangers that arise. Lisa Stevenson (2014) describes what forms of anonymous care can mean to a person who is subjected to a humanitarianism that presumes a biopolitics rooted in life. She explores this topic ethnographically, through an empirical focus on the tuberculosis epidemic in the mid-20th century and the suicide epidemic of the early 21st century among native people colonized by the Canadian state. For Stevenson, the suicide hotline is an exemplar of anonymous care. Originally developed by the Good Samaritans in London, anonymity was viewed as crucial to this intervention that sought to save lives. Common humanity was the basis for a staged interaction between a volunteer and a caller who did not know one another. The telephone connects two who share a humanity, allowing for care through language. Stevenson is careful to note that anonymity, of course, has benefits, particularly in small communities. However, she shows how legacies of colonialism persist, partly because an assumption is made that biopolitics rooted in preserving life is good and in the best interest of people. Consent is, therefore, generally assumed. Stevenson questions what it feels like to be made to live regardless and irrespective of who one is. In other words, what does it feel like to be an index of the proper workings of another’s humanitarianism (e.g., to be one who has been saved from suicide)? Despret (2016) asks, as an ethologist, “What would animals say if we asked the right questions?” When taken seriously, the counterintuitive nature of the question and the hard work it requires could serve as an important prompt for humanitarians. Are humanitarians asking the right questions of the receivers of aid? What might be elicited if different questions were asked? Based on Monika Krause’s (2014) sociological examination of humanitarian projects as work that is greatly defined by the field, I would like to suggest that the answer is often no. Krause shows this is not because of pigheadedness but because managers need to produce “good projects” as a commodity, and the beneficiaries are part of that commodity form. Beneficiaries are competing for aid, and in order to receive resources, compliance with that commodity form is mandatory ( Krause 2014 , 37, 52). Humanitarian project managers and beneficiaries risk losing resources by asking different questions or responding to unexpected resistances—even if those questions might yield a better humanitarianism. The parallel in this chapter is Sarah, who must change her practices of cage cleaning rather than stop cleaning in response to hearing a mouse say “Don’t” because of the institutional field within which she works. To close, I want to return to Miriam Motamedi Fraser’s point that: “The stakes in a word encounter are thus very high, for failing to acknowledge or respond to potential meaning is likely to lead to the profound injustice of stifling thinking” ( Motamedi Fraser 2019 , 143). Motamedi Fraser was here talking about dog words, signs to which a stable signifier is not attached. Humans, however, are also always trying to make new words to make new worlds; listening well becomes a way to attend to and participate in these worlding practices, in the flow of life with one another rather than according to a prescribed index. Based on illness narratives that were elicited during her ethnographic fieldwork with Kosovar Albanian women from 2007 to 2009, Hanna Kienzler (2022) builds upon scholarship on the elusiveness of communicating pain to ask what relations are needed for bodies to speak in and through pain. She articulates this as “SymptomSpeak [which] allows people who perceive each other as similar enough to co-articulate truth claims” ( Kienzler 2022 ). How did Kienzler, as a dissimilar ethnographer, engage with SymptomSpeak? It was a language or words that Kienzler had to learn to hear as part of the worlding practices of an ethnographer involved in the flow of life, relationally. © 2025 by New York University. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 . Monographs, or book chapters, which are outputs of Wellcome Trust funding have been made freely available as part of the Wellcome Trust's open access policy Bookshelf ID: NBK616112 Contents < Prev Next > Share Views PubReader Print View Cite this Page Friese C. A Mouse in a Cage: Rethinking Humanitarianism and the Rights of Lab Animals [Internet]. New York (US): New York University Press; 2025. Chapter 6, Consent. PDF version of this title (2.9M) In this Page Vignette How Do Animals Say "Don’t"? 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