Analysis Of Sharing Pain By Haraway

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Shared Suffering: Is it enough?
In this essay I will be focusing on chapter 3: Sharing suffering, instrumental relations between laboratory animals and their people. In this chapter, Haraway argues that animal welfare and care should be intrinsic within the experiments or scientific tests that involve animals. While writing to biologist colleagues she states “I want to argue that such care is not of experiments that might also involve killing and/or pain, but is intrinsic to the complex felt responsibility (and mundane non-anthropomorphic kinship) many researchers have for their animals” (Haraway 2007, 90). Haraway furthers her argument with the belief that sharing the suffering of a test animal is essential in the process of forming an equal …show more content…

Although the chapter is occasionally hard to follow, Haraway successfully demonstrates an empathetic response to animals suffering due the actions of humans subjecting them to research. She uses arguments to support her views that animals should be regarded as co-workers rather than objects that simply react and are dispensable. She looks at the different perspectives of the act of killing between animals and humans, and states “The problem is actually to understand that human beings do not get a pass on the necessity of killing significant others, who are them-selves responding, not just reacting” (Haraway 2007, 80). This view is unique in comparison to what society commonly believes, so reading this chapter was both enlightening and interesting. Despite the interesting ideas and arguments that Haraway communicates, the chapter often has run on sentences and unnecessarily lengthy words, such as ‘multiplicitous’ (Haraway 2007, 80). This often made the chapter hard to read and therefor difficult to digest. This can, however, be seen as a fault of my own. My final thoughts on chapter 3 of ‘When Species Meet’ is that the extensive research that Haraway underwent proved effective when supporting her argument and, in turn, created a thought compelling and respectable piece of

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