INTRODUCTION

What is it like to drill into the shaved head of an unanesthetized baboon who is strapped to a table? As a workaday task what are the challenges, the dangers, or rewards? Is it best done, do you suppose, in the early morning or, perhaps, late in the afternoon? What is it like to be the baboon? Is that an intelligible question? Who's to say?

Sociologist Arnold Arluke conducted an ethnographic study of different primate laboratories and found a variety of ways of situating oneself with respect to captive animals (Arluke and Sanders 1996). Some laboratories had developed a culture of abuse and terror where technicians – or “cowboys” as they called themselves – related to monkeys in a manner not unlike sadistic prison guards to inmates. In Arluke's view a principal task in these laboratories was maintaining the difference between “them” and “us” through continual displays of dominance. In other laboratories, however, he found a culture more like that of a nursery school in which the technicians formed emotional bonds with specific animals. They played together, ate meals together, and cared for each other. The relationships here were patterned on the nurturing relations of human adults and children. Technicians in these laboratories professed strong ambivalence about the whole enterprise of primatology.

Films distributed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) such as Unnecessary Fuss depict episodes of gratuitous abuse of primates (Francione 1995).