Companion Animals - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Companion Animals
as Technologies in
Biomedical Research

Ashley Shew
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University

Keith Johnson
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University

In this paper we examine the use of companion animals (pets) in studies of
drugs and devices aimed at human and animal health and situate it within
the context of philosophy of technology. We argue that companion animals serve
a unique role in illuminating just what it means to use biological technologies
and examine the implications for human-animal relationships. Though phi-
losophers have often treated animals as technologies, we argue that the biomed-
ical use of companion animals presents a new conﬁguration of ethical and
technological concerns that deserves more attention. Though it seems that com-
panion animals solve many of the ethical dilemmas caused by the use of lab-
oratory animals, the use of companion animals presents its own set of ethical
concerns. This paper contextualizes the use of companion animals in research.

Introduction

1.
When article co-author Ashley Shew announced to our colleagues in the
College of Veterinary Medicine that she had osteosarcoma a few years ago,
the reaction was shock. Of course, people get cancer. But we’ve been
embedded with folks from engineering, business, and veterinary medicine
at our university, working as part of an Interdisciplinary Graduate Educa-
tion on Regenerative Medicine, and people in veterinary medicine are very
familiar with osteosarcoma as a canine disease—one that is much rarer in
humans. Osteosarcoma kills many dogs. It typically requires amputation of

Many thanks to our colleagues through Virginia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Education
Program in Regenerative Medicine, two very helpful anonymous referees, freelance editor
Heath Sledge, and journal editor Alex Levine.

Perspectives on Science 2018, vol. 26, no. 3
© 2018 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/posc_a_00279

400

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Perspectives on Science

401

the affected leg, and while radiation and/or chemo may slow down the
progress of the disease, the outlook for a pet diagnosed with osteosarcoma
remains very poor. Osteosarcoma is a primary cancer of the bones that
metastasizes rapidly. In humans, osteosarcoma presents largely as a
pediatric disease, with two-thirds of cases occurring in childhood and
adolescence. In humans, when it is caught before it has metastasized
(typically to the lungs), the ﬁve-year survival rate is about 70%; after
the disease has metastasized, the ﬁve-year survival rate ranges from 15
to 30% in humans. The protocol for treatment of osteosarcoma in humans
involves several rounds of intense chemo, followed by surgery (amputation
or limb salvage surgery) to remove the bony tumor, followed by more
chemo. The treatment takes about a year, with a longer subsequent period
of physical therapy, and much of the chemotherapy requires in-patient
hospital stays.

People in the human osteosarcoma community often lament the fact
that there have been few advances in the chemotherapy regimens since
the late 1980s. The effects of the treatment, both immediate and long-
term, are often devastating; long-term side effects often include hearing
loss and tinnitus, kidney problems, sterility and early menopause, chemo
brain, heart issues, and immediate problems include severe mouth sores,
infections, rashes, and more. Treatments for osteosarcoma have changed
very little in the past 30 years. Progress on improving treatment protocols
has stagnated because of the small number of people who suffer from the
disease. Medicine considers osteosarcoma an “orphan disease”—it is rare
enough that it provides little incentive for drug companies to invest in
research, and it receives little research support from larger cancer charities.
However, osteosarcoma affects canines at a much higher rate than it does
humans, and one of the biggest hopes for osteosarcoma patients lies in
translational research, studies performed on animals that beneﬁt both
human and animal health. With their much higher incidence of the
disease, companion canines present a rich population of study.

This paper originates from discussions with our colleagues on the topic
of regenerative medicine, which includes stem cell science, tissue engineer-
ing, and other techniques aimed at the recovery, regrowth, and creation of
organic matter for applications in human and animal health. Although we
do not employ cases exclusively from the ﬁeld of regenerative medicine, we
do think that companion animals will increasingly be used as test studies
for human health as regenerative techniques call for real-world injuries and
diseases from which to extrapolate, investigate, test, and heal. Regenera-
tive medicine therefore presents a particular experimental situation that
highlights the way that we humans categorize and treat various types of
animals.

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402

Companion Animals in Biomedical Research

Companion animals (also known as pets) are animals kept for company;
humans ﬁnd pleasure in the lives of these animals. The category of com-
panion animals excludes livestock, laboratory or research animals, working
animals, and sporting animals. If you google “companion animals,” you’ll
likely ﬁnd studies on how canines reduce blood pressure in humans, or
some of the wealth of other studies that look at how companion animals
improve human health just by their companionship. But this paper is not
about the direct human health beneﬁts of keeping or living with compan-
ion animals. This paper concerns the use of companion animals for the
testing of biomedical devices, treatments, and drugs—the treatment of
companion animals as technologies, and the ambiguities this position
reveals about how we already view other animals as technologies. It’s
already been well established that we can think about laboratory and work-
ing animals as technologies (Roman 1984; Lynch 1988; Bulliet 1975), and
it has been suggested that companion animals may also be technologies
(Pitt 2010). We attempt here to make sense of what the use of companion
animals in the testing of biomedical devices and drugs—as technologies—
tells us about pets, pet owners, and the human-animal relationship more
generally. We also aim to introduce companion animals as a rich subject
for reﬂection within philosophy of technology; framing companion
animals as technologies in biomedical contexts provides a window into
what our use of other technologies means to those instruments—into
our relationships with what we see as things.

2. Companion Animals
“Companion animals” is not a tidy category. Therapy and working animals
can serve for companionship at times; dogs, for example, can and do per-
form multiple roles in the lives of their owners. But the category as it is
usually viewed includes species of cats, horses, small rodents (mice, gerbils,
hamsters, etc.), birds (canaries, parrots, parakeets), reptiles (snakes, lizards),
ﬁsh, hermit crabs, pigs, etc. Companion animals are often domesticated
species, but not always. Companion animals’ value to their owners often
comes from their companionship, interest, beauty, affection, sociability,
or humor. Tropical ﬁsh, for example, are often prized for their beauty; dogs
are often noted and valued for loyalty and friendship; and the keeping of
cats remains a mystery to all concerned. In the United States alone, citizens
currently keep 78.2 million dogs and 86.4 million cats as pets (Humane
Society 2012). Companion animals outnumber children at a rate of 4 to 1
(Halper 2013).

Companion animal testing—that is, testing experimental therapies,
devices, and drugs for particular health conditions on personal pets who
already have those health conditions—seems like it might sidestep some

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Perspectives on Science

403

of the ethical concerns associated with laboratory animal testing. Personal
pets have an advocate who is concerned (often very concerned) for that
animal’s health, safety, well-being, and mental state. Unlike laboratory an-
imals, pets are not anonymized or de-personalized; they do not spend their
lives in laboratories or cages. In some ways, companion animals as a test
group better mirror the contexts of human health: personalized treatment,
varying home environments, various diets, native injuries and ailments,
and differing levels of activity.

Some diseases that exist in companion animals have an analogue in hu-
man health, including bone cancers and heart defects in dogs, kidney dis-
ease in cats, tendon and joint issues in horses and dogs, and more. In this
context, trying new treatments on truly ill animals (as opposed to labora-
tory species bred, altered, or induced to have health problems that have
human analogues) provides important information about the treatment’s
effectiveness and potential use in humans. This translational research—
research on non-human animals that can be translated into cures and treat-
ments for humans—is becoming increasingly important within the
biomedical sciences.1

This seems straightforward. But once situated within the context of bio-
medical research, the companion animal assumes a position that is more
fractured, contested, unsettled, and ethically ambiguous. Studies that en-
roll companion animals are unique, and we must understand both the
studies’ uniqueness and the uniqueness of the human-pet relationship in
order to understand the claim that in biomedical contexts, companion
animals often function as novel kinds of technology.

3. Situating Companion Animals: Human-Animal Relationships
Historian Richard Bulliet lays out his account of human-animal relation-
ships in his book Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (2005). Bulliet (who is
known for his 1975 book The Camel and the Wheel, which describes how the
camel replaced the wheel as the dominant form of technology in some
parts of the world, and which won a prize from the Society for the History
of Technology), gives a provocative account of human-animal relationships
across human history. He explains how human-animal relationships have
evolved over eons, and how this evolution affects the way humans today
witness, understand, and regard animals. Bulliet’s eras of human-animal
relationships are not hierarchical. In other words, one stage is not better
than any other: a culture that still regards animals in an “earlier” mode is

1. There are now journals, including the Journal of Translational Medicine and Clinical
and Translational Medicine, and programs devoted to translational medicine, including ones
at Duke, UCSF, and UT Southwestern.

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Companion Animals in Biomedical Research

not lesser than a culture in a “later” mode. Instead, Bulliet offers a his-
torical account of how our relationships with animals have changed.
Understanding this history can provide insight into how we think about
non-human animals today.

Bulliet’s ﬁrst era of human-animal relationships is Separation. Separa-
tion is an unknown period for which no historical record could exist. Sep-
aration is the time when humans split off from other hominids, when we
started to think of ourselves as distinct from and superior to other animals.
To have a sense of a human-animal relationship, humans must see themselves
as separate from other animals—as importantly different, as humans and
not as animals. As we start to separate ourselves, we start to move to the
second stage.

Bulliet’s second stage is the era of Predomesticity. In Predomesticity, hu-
mans share space with animals. Animal symbolism becomes prominent.
Over time, shared space with animals shades into use of animals, and
animals are divided into the categories of wild and tame. Humans begin
to spend more time surrounded by tamer species.

Domesticity is Bulliet’s third era. In this era, humans create domestic
animals, breeding animals and reﬁning species for distinct purposes. With
this shift to viewing animals as workers, the spiritual or romantic connec-
tion to animals of earlier eras is lost, for it’s hard to feel spiritually con-
nected to a beast of burden. The animals that humans see most frequently
in this era are animals who serve human beings, those that have been bred
for tasks. Humans become further distanced from “nature” and are sepa-
rated from wild things by language, thought, and physical distance.

The fourth and ﬁnal stage of the human-animal relationship is Post-
domesticity. Now that people seldom share space with any but companion
animals, concerns about animal welfare start to blossom. According to
Bulliet, this is the stage where American and some European cultures
are today. In this stage, humans are distanced from other species, and civ-
ilization witnesses a surge of elective vegetarianism and objections to
slaughter, channeling the need for ﬂesh into video games and other vio-
lence of a modern era.

Overall, the trajectory through these categories is one of increasing
alienation from animals and animality. While Bulliet’s account may or
may not map onto historical reality, the arc he traces in our relationships
with animals, and his account of our current arrangement (with its daily
interactions and conceptual distancing), provide an interesting lens
through which to look at human-animal relationships today.

That we even discuss “human-animal relationships” suggests that we
made a distinction between ourselves and all other species at some point
in the past (we do not discuss animal-animal relationships), and in modern

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Perspectives on Science

405

life, this conceptual wedge continues to separate us from animality (Bulliet
2005). But biomedical translational research emphasizes the similarities
between non-human animals and humans; such research relies on the
animality of human beings. In other words, translational research makes
explicit the similarities between humans and non-human animals by focus-
ing on diseases which translate between the species. While some transla-
tional research is conducted on laboratory animals, studies involving
companion animals exist. These studies throw into question our treatment
of all animals in the biomedical context, push for greater “patient advocacy”
in this arena, and suggest that both animals and humans are treated as tech-
nologies in the practice of science. Nowhere is it more evident that we re-
gard our pets and ourselves as technologies as in their use as test subjects.
To use Bulliet’s terms, translational medicine brings us back to a place
where we consider animals and humans to be a part of the same category; it
is premised on the idea that animals are sufﬁciently like humans to matter.
When autologous stem cells are used on horse ligament injuries, we anal-
ogize towards the human; if the treatment goes well, we hope that human
ligaments will respond to similar treatment. When we enroll dogs with
naturally occurring osteosarcoma into trials of new chemo regimens, we
hope that any success for them will translate into success for our children.
Our concerns about animal welfare are also about human welfare. We
would see these animals have improvements in health, and we hope that
our bodies will respond similarly. In a post-domestic era, when the animal
rights movement has taken off and many protocols exist to guide research
on animals, we simultaneously use animals and believe that they are like
us. The context of the work relies on animals being like us in very speciﬁc
ways—and in only those ways.

4. Categories of Animals
Our understanding of animals and of our relationship to them depends on
a kind of bracketing—a placing of animals into different categories. These
categorizations affect the human-animal relationship and all of the histor-
ical, religious, symbolic, political, economic, philosophical and ethical di-
mensions that it entails. Over time, different animals are assigned to
different categories and considered in category-speciﬁc and morally signif-
icant ways. Although the different categories of animals in use remain ﬂuid
and regularly contested, categorical schema do exist.

For example, as Sarah Wolfensohn (2007) explains, in the context of
veterinary research and laboratory studies, certain animals are viewed as
pure technologies—purely instrumental. Animals like the nude mouse
are bred to be standardized animal models, and that is all they are. Lab
animals like the nude mouse are often considered to suffer the most insult

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406

Companion Animals in Biomedical Research

to their welfare, yet these animals are perhaps the most regulated, and their
public advocates are perhaps the most vociferous. Generally, only speciﬁc
types of animals are “condemned” to the laboratory and its confusing
harm-beneﬁt logics. We see the same types of categorical divisions in wild
life; wild animals capture the hearts of many, and interest in wild life re-
mains high. But some wild animals who are condemned to particular cat-
egories (such as the pest category) are subject to marginalization and
eradication. Categorical divisions exist between the laboratory and the wild
(zoo animals are laboratory; park animals are wild, and farm animals come
with their own philosophical ambiguities), but pets used for experimental
research trouble these categories. It seems that there is no one model under
which we can understand our relation to non-human animals. We con-
struct a varying and confusing set of relations with different types of an-
imals. These different categories are accompanied by ever-evolving and
ﬁercely contested attitudes towards suffering and welfare, human-animal
obligations, what is natural, harm to animals vs. beneﬁt to humans, cost,
etc. The policies and regulations in place are inconsistent and do little to
mitigate the confusion. We exterminate some; we test drugs on others; we
protect and love some of the remaining.

Pets generally receive some of the best treatment—not hunted, not
carelessly eradicated, not used for meat.2 Indeed, in veterinary medical re-
search, treatment of pets is often considered a “family management” issue,
and it is often determined by the psychological state of the owners as well
as their ﬁnancial capabilities and geographic location. Pets’ special status is
visible in the emotional response to euthanasia and animal control mea-
sures being used on populations of dogs and cats without owners; these
are often considered tragic in a way that the intentional elimination of rats
and skunks is not. And although egregious harms and animal abuse do
occur, adopted and owned pets usually have good lives compared with
other categories of animals.

We keep pets for all sorts of reasons. The breeding history, morphology,
physiology, and behavioral and genetic traits of our pets are usually
less conditioned, directed, and manipulated than their laboratory counter-
parts. Unlike nude mice, for instance, who are bred to a strict standard
( Wolfensohn 2007), the category of canines contains both intentionally
standardized breeds and mutts. But companion animals in biomedical re-
search are a border category; they do not neatly ﬁt into either the pet or the
laboratory animal category. Pets in the laboratory offer novel opportunities
to reﬂect on how we categorize animals, human-animal relationships, and
what these categories and relationships say about our science and broader

2. And, of course, some types of animals will be pets in one place and meat in another.

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Perspectives on Science

407

cultural interests. With their own history of domestication, with their promi-
nence in human happiness and experience, their role as economic objects, and
with their proximity to humans and thus to sophisticated sciences—research,
development, therapy—the border category of companion animals in re-
search rests at the nexus of science, technology, animal, and human.

Pets in the laboratory are both a new and an old phenomenon. Indeed,
the animal rights movement is rooted in concerns about the use of dogs in
laboratories; the Brown Dog Affair in the United Kingdom ignited the
anti-vivisectionist movement, and Life Magazine’s 1965 coverage of the
case of Pepper, a beloved pet who was kidnapped and sold for medical ex-
perimentation that ended in her death in 1965, led to public outcry and
the passage of the 1966 Animal Welfare Act in the United States (Engber
2009). These changes in policy and research protocols were sparked by the
treatment of canines—a group of animals whose feelings we take very se-
riously (after all, we think of them as having feelings for us). But dogs have
always been both companions and technologies; we’ve relied on dogs for
comfort, companionship, sport, work, research, and more—think of Ivan
Pavlov’s famed drooling dogs, St. Bernard dogs doing winter rescue work,
Dalmatians in ﬁrehouses, and corgis trotting after Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth. In Bulliet’s terms, in Postdomesticity, our only regular contact
with animals is with companion animals, and this is shaping how we think
about all animals; our concern about dogs and other companion animals is
drastically changing the ways we think about using animals in research.
The use of companion animals in research presents an opportunity to re-
conceptualize how we categorize companion animals—a category that only
recently became ﬁrm.

5. Scenarios of Companion Animal Testing
While the theory of how animals are categorized and of their relations to
humans should be developed, our interest here is in very real-world cases—
in speciﬁcs of how humans use animals classiﬁed as laboratory animals in
biomedical research and how this compares to our use of companion ani-
mals in controlled research studies. This section explores the following
three areas of research that feature companion animals in the dual roles
of patient and research subject:

(a) dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) in Doberman Pinschers;
(b)
(c) osteosarcoma in dogs.

joint, tendon, and bone issues in horses; and

Although other cases involving different illnesses, injuries, and animals exist,
these three areas of research are particularly illustrative for a number of reasons.

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408

Companion Animals in Biomedical Research

The diseases or injuries listed above have one or more of the following char-
acteristics: they are congenital, they are acutely prevalent in an individual
animal population, and they are often presently untreatable (often fatal).
These areas of research also serve as established animal models for the equiv-
alent diseases and/or injuries in humans, with the potential for breakthroughs
to cross over into human medicine. Thus, the work done by basic researchers,
translational scientists, and clinicians to treat the three above conditions has
the potential to produce a signiﬁcant and direct impact on the health and
well-being of both companion animals and humans. These three particular
biomedical contexts, which serve to illuminate the practice of using com-
panion animals as technologies require brief explanation.3

(a) DCM in Dobermans
Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM) is an insidious congenital disease of the
myocardium (or muscle tissue of the heart) that is characterized by a grad-
ual decline in muscle function associated with cardiac dilatation, impaired
contraction of the ventricles, and predominantly left-sided congestive heart
failure (Everett et al. 1999; Wess et al. 2010). DCM typically progresses
undetected, with few or no symptoms. In fact, death is often the ﬁrst clin-
ical indicator of the disease (Purina 2009). Although known to affect larger
breeds such as Newfoundlands, Cocker Spaniels, and Great Danes, DCM
occurs at a higher rate in Doberman Pinscher populations than in any
other breed. Unfortunately, reliable data on the etiology, development, and
morbidity of the disease in Doberman populations does not exist. Clinical
appraisals of the situation remain quite bleak. According to several esti-
mates, as many as 30 to 40 percent of all Doberman Pinschers are affected
by DCM; of these, nearly 50 percent eventually die suddenly from ventric-
ular arrhythmia or erratic heartbeats (Purina 2009). Dobermans living with
the disease often develop a severe cough and experience extreme lethargy,
but these symptoms appear only intermittently, and when they do, often go
undetected or misdiagnosed.

A recent increase in awareness of the extent and severity of the disease,
coupled with the failure of conventional treatment options, has led to a
surge of interest in clinical trials that test nontraditional therapies on com-
panion or client-owned Doberman Pinschers with DCM. At the vanguard
of such research, several studies are testing techniques that harness the
power of the client-owned Doberman’s own stem cells to target and reju-
venate areas of the heart affected by the disease. Studies using this method,

3. Another common translational animals model is kidney disease in cats, but we felt

that three examples served the goals of this paper.

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known as stem cell transplantation therapy, are still in their early stages.
However, scientists express optimism that if stem cells can be properly har-
vested and cultured, they can also be reintroduced into the patient—a pro-
cess known as autologous transplantation, since the stem cells are both
derived from and transferred back into the same Doberman, posing little
to no risk of immune rejection. They can then be directed to migrate to-
wards the site of the injured or dying cardiac cells (Purina 2009). Once
there, scientists believe that these stem cells (often taken from the bone
marrow of a Doberman’s humerus in its front legs and femur in its back
legs) will “secrete growth factors that stimulate and stabilize [the damaged
cells], thus improving organ function” (Purina 2009). This description of
stem cell transplantation therapy is greatly simpliﬁed, for it is an im-
mensely complex and time-consuming process. However, if these proce-
dures are successful, they would not only immediately improve the
health of DCM-affected Dobermans and the emotional well-being of their
human owners, but also contribute enormously to our understanding of
the role of disease and the functioning of the heart in both human and
nonhuman animals. Richard Vulliet (University of California-Davis and
medical director of ReGena-Vet Labs) and Amara Estrada (University of
Florida College of Veterinary Medicine) are pioneering these stem cell
technologies, and studies involving client-owned Dobermans are currently
underway.

( b) Tendon and Ligament Injuries in Horses
Stem cell therapies are also being developed to address the widespread
prevalence of bone, tendon and ligament injuries in client-owned pet
and performance horses. The nature and severity of these injuries vary
greatly from horse to horse due to factors such as age, breed, and the kinds
of exercise that the horses engage in—for instance, as part of a rigorous
sport or performance regimen. Thus, there is great discrepancy in treating
bone, tendon, and ligament injuries across the ﬁeld of equine medicine.
For instance, traditional bone repair relying upon mechanical implantation
of plates and screws poses numerous problems over the long-term healing
process of an injured horse (Smith 2008). It is often a “race” between the
failure of the implants before the bone is properly healed and the develop-
ment of equine supporting limb laminitis, a condition where a horse, typ-
ically with a bone fracture, shifts its entire body weight to one or more of
its uninjured limbs, damaging its feet (Smith 2008). The horse often
experiences great pain, inﬂammation, and changes in blood ﬂow; when
current therapies fail, the horse is often euthanized.

Scientists in the ﬁeld of regenerative medicine, however, hope to address
some of these contributing factors by developing novel stem cell therapies.

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The use of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to treat fractures avoids some of
the challenges of the internal ﬁxation methods mentioned above; this con-
stitutes, according to some, a “major breakthrough in veterinary medicine”
(Smith 2008). MSCs can differentiate into a variety of cell types, including
tendon, bone, cartilage, and muscle, and these cells are also showing great
utility in the treatment of other types of injuries. Although most programs
are still in their infancy, teams such as the University of California Davis
Stem Cell Regenerative Group, housed at the Center for Equine Health,
are using MSCs to regenerate whole tissues, tendons, and ligaments in the
laboratory; MSCs could thus be used to address injuries and illnesses as
wide-ranging as strain-induced tendon and ligament damage and degen-
erative joint disease. Scaffold technologies and gene therapies are also
promising new tools in the veterinary scientists’ toolbox.4 Because the
horse is an established animal model for focal cartilage injuries, other tech-
niques and procedures may follow on this research.

(c) Osteosarcoma in Dogs
A variety of non-stem cell treatments are being tested in dogs with oste-
osarcoma, and these trials in canine companions hold great promise for
the small human population devastated by this aggressive cancer. Osteo-
sarcoma, the most common type of bone tumor in dogs, can be found in all
dog breeds (and, rarely, in cats) (PetMD). The current treatment in both hu-
mans and dogs is systemic chemotherapy paired with amputation or limb-
sparing surgery (where rods or cadaver bone are used to replace sections of
bone). The same types of chemo are standard for both humans and canines
with osteosarcoma: doxirubin/adriamycin and cisplatin, sometimes with
the addition of others (Hoskins 2004).5 The chemo protocols for this can-
cer cause toxicity of the kidneys and heart, and in humans, they require
that a port device be inserted to deliver the chemotherapy.

For each of these described species, researchers see animals as models for
human disease—as both living beings who deserve health and technologies
for improving the long-term health of human beings. The researchers aim
to understand and improve health for both animals and humans. What we
see in these research practices is a new way to imagine and treat health
for both people and pets. We also see companion animals crossing the

4. For further reading, Koch et al. 2009 provides an excellent overview of the ﬁeld of

regenerative medicine and equine injuries.

5. Although this reference is from 2004, the protocols developed in the late 1980s and
early 1990s for osteosarcoma are the ones that are currently used. Because of the small pop-
ulation of osteosarcoma patients among humans and lower levels of funding for pediatric
cancers, improvements in the chemotherapy treatment of osteosarcoma are slow to come.

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boundary between categories, a crossing that shows the instability and
fungibility of the categories to which we assign animals. The next section
will examine in more detail how these categories operate, and how com-
panion animals as research subjects trouble them.

6. Philosophy of Technology on Animals
Scholars of philosophy of technology have discussed animals in ﬁve differ-
ent ways: some view animals as technologies; some see them as being op-
posed to technologies; some see them as input-output machines; some treat
them as metaphors; and (the most common attitude) some don’t address
animals in any meaningful way at all. Philosophers who hold the ﬁrst
view—that animals are themselves a form of technology—generally exam-
ine humans’ development and use of domesticated working animals. Domes-
tication and selective breeding are human techniques that produce the
technologies (the animals) that help us, say, herd sheep, have eggs for break-
fast, or hunt. In this view, animals are reduced only to their relationships and
use to human beings: dogs and chickens are seen as tools, created and shaped
for the use and convenience of human beings. This is the view articulated by
Paul Thompson of Michigan State, who has written on bioengineered ani-
mals and who, with his research group, maintains a blog on “Bio-Engineered
Animal Awareness” (http://bio-engineeredanimalawareness.tumblr.com/).
While Thompson is critical of the reduction of animals to only technologies,
Thompson and his group recognize the ways that animals—especially food
animals—are processed and understood by our wider culture. His work
highlights the ways we treat animals as technologies and commodities
(Thompson 1997). This critical-but-realistic view is shared by Joseph C. Pitt,
a philosopher who also breeds Irish Wolfhounds, who has spoken about the
ways that breeders of working and show dogs select for different traits and
characteristics. In his view, modern farm animals, modern companion species,
and (given our long history of arranged marriage and reproduction) even
humans are all species whose development and evolution have been deliber-
ately shaped by intentional selection, and therefore constitute technologies
(Pitt 2010).

The second group of philosophers of technology treats animals as
completely separate from technology. The story goes like this: humans
are different from animals because humans make tools, and tools make
technologies.6 In the words of historians of technology Melvin Kranzberg
and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., “[m]an made the tools, but the tools also made

6. Co-author Ashley Shew calls this addition of language about technology as a humans-
only project “the Human Clause” in her book Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge
(2017).

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the man” (Kranzberg and Pursell, 1967, p. 8). In this account, it is our
tool use that distinguishes homo technologicus from all other species, that
makes us superior. This view is widely held in our culture, and it has
its roots in Judeo-Christian texts concerning stewardship and care-taking
of animals, especially those employed in human service.

There are cases of tool-using animals, of course. To answer these cases
while maintaining humans’ categorical difference from animals, philoso-
phers of technology dismiss animals’ tool-use as mechanical, simply a mat-
ter of inputs (stimulus) and outputs (behavior). This viewpoint is expressed
in some of the foundational texts of Western philosophical thought:
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Descartes’s Discourse on
the Method, and Kant’s Lectures on Ethics. This third attitude toward animals
is inﬂuenced by behaviorism and computation logic, and philosophers of
technology who hold this attitude extrapolate from input-output machines
to the behaviors of animals, which they read as simplistic and unreﬂective
(Baird 2004; Ferre 1988). Newer scholarship on animal tool-use and the
relationship of humans to technology shows more nuance (Blad 2010;
Shew 2017).

The fourth way that philosophers treat animals is as metaphors for tech-
nologies. We talk about the evolution of technology—a phrase that nods
toward nature to describe the most “unnatural” of things, technologies.
People who want to show that some technological innovation is possible
often compare it to the products and production of nature—to the way
spiders spin silk, to how bacteria reproduce, to the minute piece-by-piece
construction of anthills. Animals are used in this way not because they
themselves are viewed as interesting objects of study but because they
demonstrate some model of possibility or serve as the impetus for new,
creative human approaches to realizing a particular technology. This view
of animals and animal constructions as metaphors for human technological
capabilities is strongly present in the literature on nanotechnology and
biotechnology, and many people who have popularized and journalized
science (such as Eric K. Drexler, Ed Regis, and Richard Smalley) rely on
metaphors from nature to aid understanding of current and future techno-
logical science (Drexler 1986, Regis 1990).

The most common way that philosophers of technology discussed ani-
mals is simply to not discuss them at all, even when an animal study
would be relevant or when a case study would be enriched by an animal
case. Animals are usually absent from technology studies. The recent “en-
gineering turn” in philosophy of technology uses engineering and what
engineers do as a representation of all technological thinking, design,
and politics, and this turn has both served to distract from larger under-
standings of technology and to obscure studies of animal construction,

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understanding, and practice.7 When we work exclusively within an engi-
neering framework, questions about animal life and relation are occluded
by questions of technical knowledge and politics. The increasing research
in biomedicine that uses companion animals as a technology of biomedical
engineering must broaden this disciplinary frame.

7. Companion Animals as Technologies in Research
The cases of companion animals as medical and veterinary research subjects
challenge the simpliﬁed categories within which animals are usually
lumped. Companion animal research carries with it an idea that we can
help non-humans and humans in health at the same time, a concept some-
times called One Health. To some philosophers of technology, this might
seem to be a case where animals serve both as technologies and are opposed
to technologies. Using animal models for human health implies that the
animals are used like other types of technology—computerized simula-
tions and cell cultures on which researchers test treatments. Animals, like
devices and scientiﬁc models, serve as a medium for testing. However, com-
panion animal bodies, like human bodies, are sites of organic conditions of
injury and disease, and the complexity of each individual animal’s case
denies and resists simple technologization. Laboratory animals—animals
used exclusively for research—have their injuries or illnesses induced, and
researchers standardize the animals’ conditions as much as possible, and
the researchers cause harm to initiate the research process. But companion
animals have organically developed a particular disease, which means that
researchers are working primarily for the health of the animal. The use of
companion animals actually reveals more about how human bodies are used
in the context of medicine, and perhaps asks us to rethink our complete
abstraction of the body from the person, both in humans and in laboratory
animals. To think of bodies as models and individuals as representations
requires a detachment from context and rich life histories. This detach-
ment has always already existed with regard to laboratory animals, who
are bred to be normalized toward particular standards and to present
particular phenomena.

Does the use of companion animals in research mitigate the ethical
concerns about the well-being of laboratory animals? Laboratory animals
reap no beneﬁts from their participation in the research, and their lives
are often sacriﬁced, either for autopsy or at the end of the experiments.

7. Joseph C. Pitt, in Thinking about Technology (2000), explicitly moves to examine en-
gineering as a subset of technology. Engineering has been prominent in technology studies
by philosophers and historians, including the work of Carl Mitcham, Darryl Farber, Ann
Johnson, Cyrus Mody, Walter Vincenti, etc.

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Companion Animals in Biomedical Research

Unlike laboratory animals, companion animals have advocates in their
owners, and research in which they participate aims to beneﬁt both human
and animal health—often to directly beneﬁt that companion animal sub-
ject. These animals are not mere means to health outcomes. But although
companion animal research avoids some of the ethical concerns about bio-
medical animal research, it opens up other complications. The use of com-
panion animals reveals the weirdness and illogicality of how we currently
categorize animal species—always in terms of human use and beneﬁt,
always in terms of how we project instrumentality and utility onto animal
bodies as technologies. In this context, our narratives about pets change to
focus on use, and this, in turn, enables us to look more critically at how we
situate and imagine laboratory animals.8 By thinking through how com-
panion animals serve as technologies in biomedical research while retain-
ing our concern for their feelings and wellbeing, we bring into relief our
lack of concern for other animals’ and species’ feelings and wellbeing. Just
as coverage of the Brown Dog and Pepper led to new policies protecting all
animals’ welfare, considering the use of companion animals in research can
drive a more critical understanding of animal technological ethics.

We love pets and exterminate pests, and our relationships with animals
are anything but clear. Donna Haraway’s work explains the false binary
that “human-animal” invokes, and Pitt has examined the falsity of the nat-
ural/artiﬁcial distinction (Haraway 2013; Pitt 2000), upon which Bulliet’s
era of separation depends. These false binaries are further challenged by the
emerging conﬁgurations of translational medicine and the increased test-
ing on companion animals, which emphasize human-animal similarity
while still instantiating a hierarchy based on difference. Pets in drug
and device testing throw into relief the ethical tensions inherent in loving
and using something or someone else. Making sense of our love for and
obligations to our pets tells us about our obligations to the other live
things we create and maintain, for laboratory use, farm use, as food, and
in many other situations.

If it seems that the use of pets in biomedicine is expanding, especially in
the context of regenerative and translational therapies, this is because the
use of pets disrupts categories that have ossiﬁed in the past 50 years—a
period when researchers distanced themselves from animal subjects,

8. Thinking about use is also bolstered by thinking about model organisms, the picking
of experimental object, and this history; see Ankeny and Leonelli 2011; Burian 1993. The
prominence of use can and should be explored through several approaches. Though this
paper is not centered on philosophy of biology, philosophers of biology provide resources
for systematically thinking some of these categorical distinctions through, particularly
when it comes to selection of what constitutes a good class of animals or organisms to test
with particular interests in mind.

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415

stopped publishing animal names in papers, and attempted to project a
veneer of objectivity. This change coincides with an increasing movement
to Bulliet’s age of Post-domesticity. We cannot maintain our notion of sep-
arateness between animals and humans when we consider translational re-
search. But the assortment of animal categories in the multiple different
organizations that regulate and govern animal testing and use,9 as well as
the multiple and overlapping animal categories we each informally main-
tain, creates a patchwork of human values about the importance of ani-
mals. The use of companion animals in biomedicine demands that we
consider the differences between tools and people—that we decide which
living things are not, in fact, things. Animals have not until now received
wide, sustained consideration in philosophy of technology, but these emer-
gent new categories and their disruption should play a role in our disci-
pline’s future considerations, especially as philosophy of technology and
science and technology studies (STS) increasingly overlap in shared concerns
about the actors and agents that shape history and practice.

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