Carrie Friese’s A Mouse in a Cage: Rethinking Humanitarianism and the Rights of Lab Animals—reviewed in my contribution to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Review of Books—compels us to reconsider this assumption with disquieting clarity.
Drawing on finely wrought ethnographic case studies from British laboratories, Friese illuminates the fraught dialectic between care and harm that structures the quotidian existence of laboratory animals. Her intervention advances a provocative thesis: that humanitarian sensibilities, traditionally conceived as moral compasses guiding human relations, must be recalibrated to encompass the non‑human subjects upon whose suffering modern science precariously rests.
The review underscores how Friese’s work is not merely descriptive but profoundly normative. By situating laboratory mice and their kin within broader philosophical debates on distant suffering, she unsettles entrenched anthropocentric boundaries of compassion. The book challenges readers to confront the uneasy reconciliation between scientific progress and the ethical recognition of animal rights, revealing how the very practices intended to safeguard welfare may simultaneously reproduce harm.
Published by NYU Press in 2025, Friese’s volume constitutes a seminal contribution to the sociology of science and technology and to the burgeoning field of critical animal studies. It offers a tableau in which humanitarianism is refracted through the lived realities of lab animals, provoking spirited debate among scholars, practitioners, and ethicists alike.
Keywords: Humanitarianism; Lab Animals; Biomedical Research; Animal Rights; Ethics; Critical Animal Studies.