Sharing the burdens of medical progress

Aronson never understood his opponents’ ideology.Footnote ¹⁵ Aronson's peers insisted that he was not particularly cruel or abusive towards his animals. His opponents concurred. They targeted him precisely because he seemed to exemplify the scientific consensus.Footnote ¹⁶ Scientists of his generation had not been seriously challenged by animal welfare activists as the movement had been organizationally weak between the 1920s and 1960s.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the museum personnel dismissed the animal liberationists as an irrational relic of the Victorian age.Footnote ¹⁸

The protection of animals, including opposition to their use in medical experiments, had been a prominent concern among nineteenth-century reformers.Footnote ¹⁹ These anti-cruelty campaigners claimed that certain dependent entities (namely children and non-human animals) needed protection because of their common capacity for feeling. Emotion was central to this ‘sentimental liberalism’, in the form both of the ability of the defenceless to experience pain and of the heightened empathy on the part of their protectors to defend these weaker creatures.Footnote ²⁰ The primacy of feeling, combined with the prevalence of women as advocates, led many scientists to dismiss the humane movement as anti-scientific and irrational.Footnote ²¹ In contrast, Singer favoured a tough-minded utilitarian calculus of competing interests to distance the movement from an earlier ‘feminine’ sentimentalism.Footnote ²²

Aronson's naivety was due to the historical success of American medical researchers in crafting the laws regulating the use of laboratory animals to insulate their science from antivivisectionist critics.Footnote ²³ Turn-of-the-century physiologists articulated an ethical code that combined Judaeo-Christian theology with utilitarianism. The core assumption was theological: humanity had a God-given dominion over ‘brute creation’, to make use of it for his benefit.Footnote ²⁴ There was some ambivalence over whether this condition was truly a ‘right’ or simply represented humanity's ‘power’, but this distinction was largely moot.Footnote ²⁵ American physiologists insisted that it was ‘unreasonable to wage a humanitarian warfare against the only kind of pain giving practice that has for its object the relief of pain’.Footnote ²⁶ They recognized the close kinship between humans and other animals in terms of physiology and even psychology; their entire science depended on this assumption. These scientists did not deny that laboratory animals sometimes experienced pain. In 1897, physiologist Henry Bowditch explained, ‘No one pretends that vivisections can be conducted without more or less discomfort to the brute creature.’Footnote ²⁷ Yet the infliction of such pain had virtuous ends. Some animals were expected to suffer to benefit the rest of creation.Footnote ²⁸

In 1906, physiologist C.F. Hodge went even further, noting that by testing various therapeutics through everyday medical practice, physicians were ‘with perfect right and of necessity, “experimenting”, often painfully too, on thousands of human beings every year’. At the same time, the state destroyed potentially valuable stray cats and dogs without anyone's benefit.Footnote ²⁹ It was the scientist's duty to minimize such waste. Key to Hodge's argument was that all animals benefited from advances in physiology through the greater refinement of medical and veterinary knowledge. He put the utilitarian calculus of pain most boldly: ‘It is sheer maudlin sentimentality which would try to exempt dogs and cats from their just share of the burdens of life.’Footnote ³⁰ Medical progress for the many required that a few individual brutes must occasionally suffer physical pain even if it was not in their immediate interest.

One of the most contentious issues in these legislative battles was over who should ensure animal welfare. Were laboratories secretive spaces accessible only to invited scientists, or public institutions open to the police, humane societies or ordinary citizens? In the United States, Walter Cannon was the chief advocate for the autonomy of medical researchers from outside surveillance. The Harvard physiologist insisted that closed laboratories were the only acceptable option. This campaign was part of his broader commitment to medical professionalization following the 1910 Flexner report.Footnote ³¹ Cannon's solution was the posting within the laboratory of five principles enforced by the moral authority of the laboratory head, making ‘a man who usually stands well in the community, and whose judgment and caution can be relied upon, directly answerable for the humane conduct of experimentation in his department’.Footnote ³² Proper conduct hinged upon this elevated form of expertise to evaluate the propriety of using animals in experiments and pedagogical demonstrations. By shutting down unregulated schools, scientifically trained medical educators could ensure that best practices were maintained.

Compared with medical researchers, psychologists were considerably less concerned with antivisectionists. The American press criticized many turn-of-the-century comparative psychologists for their cruelty. However, the 1924 creation of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Precautions in Animal Experimentation came at Cannon's behest. The impetus was his involvement with the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (CRPS). In reviewing an article by a funded psychologist, Calvin Stone, the discussion of surgery without any mention of anaesthetic alarmed Cannon.Footnote ³³ Fearing reprisal from antivivisection groups, Cannon urged the journal's editor, Robert Yerkes, to ensure that future authors were more cautious and would include details about the anaesthetic process.Footnote ³⁴ Stone's casualness about this issue spoke to the obliviousness of his generation of psychologists regarding the threat of antivivisectionists to their research. What had been a career-long, acute worry for Cannon was a largely invisible, formalized procedure for the next generation.Footnote ³⁵ For Stone and later Aronson, the use of anaesthetic was so routine it was not worth mentioning. Similarly, the animal's capacity to experience pain was tacitly recognized, but given little attention.

The psychobiology of individuality and development

Sex was central to the comparative psychology conducted at the AMNH. Beginning with the zoologist G. Kingsley Noble in the 1930s, its scientists had studied the role of cortical and gonadal regulation of sexual behaviour in countless species from fish to birds to mammals. These experiments involved a host of surgical interventions: brain lesions, castrations and hormone injections. The aim was to explain how the nervous and endocrine systems worked together to manifest and control sexual and social behaviours, as well as to put these behavioural patterns in an evolutionary perspective.Footnote ³⁶ AMNH scientists used a wide variety of animals because they placed greater emphasis on species-specific behaviours compared with most of their peers.Footnote ³⁷

In an era prior to large-scale government patronage for science, sex had been a pragmatic way to fund comparative psychology. There was little money to support the field studies these scientists preferred, but the CRPS was willing to fund experiments modelled on biomedical methods. Aronson first opted to work with cats in the hopes that it would ‘hold the interest of the Sex Committee’.Footnote ³⁸ In the post-war era, AMNH behavioural scientists were quite successful in securing foundation, NIH and military support for their efforts. Vaguely grounded in the notion that such experiments served as models for either infant development or various mental illnesses, Aronson largely adhered to the Cold War ideals of value-neutrality and pure research. Because of abundance of funding and the mid-century prestige of science, he spent most of his career relatively insulated from the need to justify his research in strictly pragmatic terms with immediate deliverables.

These experiments depended on regular gifts of synthetic hormones from the Schering Corporation. Schering employees offered advice about proper dosages as well as alternative compounds for conducting the experiments. In return, Aronson provided clinical and experimental feedback on the effects of different preparations on his animals.Footnote ³⁹ However, Aronson was not an industrial scientist, conducting critical research focused on the development of new products or applications. The company did not set his research agenda, nor did it define which problems he should pursue. Instead, there was a broad alignment of concerns between the scientists at the museum and at Schering, and this connection helped Aronson conceive of his own psychobiology as contributing the ongoing refinement of therapeutics.Footnote ⁴⁰

One of Aronson's primary responsibilities as a curator at the AMNH was communicating the science of animal behaviour to the public. This took the form of exhibits, films, magazine articles and answering inquiries sent to the museum. His work with cats began with his attempt to record the mating calls of different species as part of an exhibit on animal courtship.Footnote ⁴¹ This public role gained prominence as the museum changed over the course of the twentieth century from a largely research institution into a wonder-filled play land aimed increasingly at children.Footnote ⁴² Certainly not a household name, Aronson and his research did feature in the New York press throughout his career.

The first publicly circulated account of the AMNH's cat research appeared in a 1949 New York Herald Tribune article that asked ‘What makes a tomcat howl?’. It featured a rather bemused Aronson (stopwatch and notebook at the ready) face-to-face with the equally inquisitive Eunie. It is unclear who is observing whom in this instance. Aronson studies Eunie, but the cat returns the gaze. There is no mention of surgical apparatus or pharmaceutical products, even though Eunie (short for eunuch) was a pre-puberally castrated cat later given testosterone injections.Footnote ⁴³ Despite avoiding such matters, the article remains very much a story about how laboratory technology can disentangle the social and sexual behaviour of the city's most familiar inhabitants. By recording and measuring the wails and poses of ten toms borrowed from ‘willing friends’, Aronson's team determined that what most New Yorkers assumed was ‘a love call’ was instead the masculine ‘fighting call’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Aronson introduced his research to the public using an example familiar to New Yorkers as the cat's howl that had been a fixture of the city's soundscape for over a century. An 1871 article remarked on the species’ ‘almost universal presence before the public in this City’.Footnote ⁴⁵ By 1883, New York was recognized as ‘one of the largest cat producing districts of the whole country’, with a greater density of strays residing along its back fences than Philadelphia or Boston.Footnote ⁴⁶ The common practice of families abandoning their cats when they went on vacation led to this abundance.Footnote ⁴⁷ Not everyone cherished the omnipresence of these critters. In 1893 the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) clashed with the Midnight Band of Mercy, a group of women who went about chloroforming noisy strays in the name of reclaiming the night for human sleep. When arrested, the band's leader, Sarah J. Edwards, assumed the humane mantle, insisting that these abandoned animals met a painless end and that the ASPCA neglected its responsibility of attending to these starving and homeless creatures.Footnote ⁴⁸

These long-standing patterns of interspecies cohabitation enabled distinct forms of necropolitics towards different kinds of animals which informed Aronson's research. Newspaper stories repeatedly drew connections between the species and the city. Cats were bound to New York's built form: an animal suited to a world of cramped dwellings and alleyways.Footnote ⁴⁹ Adjacent to but distinguished from vermin like rats, pigeons and cockroaches, alley cats nevertheless represented the rougher side of urban life.Footnote ⁵⁰ These years witnessed a broad shift from a largely utilitarian evaluation of animals in terms of their economic use towards seeing certain species as invaluable companions. The focus of veterinary medicine shifted from ensuring agricultural livestock's maximum yield to attending to the health and comfort of household pets.Footnote ⁵¹ This sentimentalism notwithstanding, cats remained somewhat distinct from dogs, the most cherished American pet. Cats remained aloof creatures where dogs signified loyalty and affection with a long history of close human–animal working relationships. A valued member of the urban household because of their talents for pest control, cats symbolized independence, autonomy and self-reliance.Footnote ⁵²

Indeed, an oscillation between cats as experimental objects requiring emotional distance and as pets in need of care animated much of the AMNH psychobiology.Footnote ⁵³ The knowledge derived from affectionate pet ownership informed how these scientists understood cats as models of sexual behaviour. When Aronson began to study them, he contacted his former colleague Frank Beach, an expert in mammalian behaviour. Beach related the results of an abandoned experiment, but also detailed how his house cat, Shadow, exhibited ‘most of the copulatory pattern using a pillow or folded blanket as a “love object”’. Shadow's behaviour amused and confounded Beach. He slyly noted how his pet ‘is unfamiliar with the fact that he should not be doing anything of the sort because (1) he is a castrate and (2) he is supposed to show such behavior only in the presence of the biologically adequate stimulus (Beach 1947, Psychosomat. Med)’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Wilful cats were so independent-minded that they brazenly overturned one's prized theories.

Aronson found maintaining a healthy laboratory colony a constant challenge. The first obstacle was acquiring the cats themselves. A 1953 Saturday Evening Post article suggested that Aronson obtained his virile male subjects from the city's alleyways. The magazine explained that this decision reflected Aronson's response to criticisms of psychology's overreliance on laboratory animals whose ‘countless generations have been raised in cages and it seems likely their sophisticated responses to phenomena do not at all mirror the responses of country cousins which live in a wild state’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The trope of the scientists stealing animals from the street came from the antivivisection literature, namely William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, which suggested that people's pets were regularly at risk from disreputable researchers.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Evening Post had a different message: the urban alley substitutes for the state of nature, an answer to the overrefinement of domesticity and domestication. These males benefit from their captivity. ‘Graduated from garbage cans to Grade A provender, these sleek and well-fed Toms set up a raucous chorale whenever the door to the attic domain is opened. They never had it so good.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Considering the prominence of the cat-napping story in other media, it is unclear whether Aronson ever collected alley cats. His existing correspondence does not suggest this as it includes inquiries and updates seeking to identify dealers and by the early 1950s a breeding programme had become part of life in the colony.Footnote ⁵⁸ Another major challenge was keeping disease in check. Mortality rates ran high in the colony's early years. The large number of animals kept in close, common quarters made disease a major threat. Things improved markedly in 1949 with a vaccination programme for distemper.Footnote ⁵⁹ Because of the costs involved, nutrition was always a salient issue. Initially the cats were maintained on a diet of horsemeat, but in 1952 Aronson turned to artificial feed, beginning in collaboration with Notre Dame nutritionist Thomas Luckey to test the effectiveness of his CatSNAC product.Footnote ⁶⁰

AMNH psychologists insisted that they cared about the animals with which they worked.Footnote ⁶¹ In response to a 1973 letter, Aronson insisted that his laboratory complied with existing regulations and the standards set by the ASPCA. Federal authorities always gave top ratings following their regular inspections of the facilities. He acquired cats from authorized dealers rather than pounds in order to avoid accidentally using someone's pet. They kept the animals in clean, well-ventilated and air-conditioned rooms and the cats received regular medical attention such that ‘they are in excellent health as indeed they would have to be for studies of mating behavior’.Footnote ⁶² He explained that his research involved long-term observation, sometimes over a number of years, and that animals were reused, returned to the dealer or put to sleep once the experiment had ended. Good science required good care. Starting with Noble in the 1930s, AMNH scientists had laboured to re-create such ‘normal’ environments for their experimental animals.Footnote ⁶³ Aronson's colleague Ethel Tobach insisted that

Where animal liberationists emphasized the primacy of Aronson's necropower in the form of his ability to kill, maim and torture animals at will, Tobach articulated his stewardship.

This attentiveness to care resonated with how these psychobiologists defined themselves as the most humane and humanistic interpreters of animal behaviour in post-war America. This humanism found expression in their political commitments to social justice. Schneirla organized American psychologists’ response to the Spanish Civil War while Tobach led the Genes & Gender collective's opposition to the racial and sexual politics of sociobiology in the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁵ These scientists positioned themselves as occupying the space between the reductionism of the behaviourists who saw animals as interchangeable machines and a Nazi-tinged ethology grounded in the essentialism of innate instincts programmed into the nervous system at birth. Aronson explained to a high-school student in 1952 that this research represented a genuine alternative, one focused on ‘the processes by which these particular behaviour patterns which people like to think of as “instinctive” actually develop in the individual’.Footnote ⁶⁶

This dual focus on development and animal individuality made AMNH psychobiology unique. Many of Aronson's own scientific reports emphasized the animal's emotional life and personalities.Footnote ⁶⁷ His publications on sexual behaviour included case histories of individual animals, such as a 1949 paper on a single cat's ‘nocturnal emissions’ that speculated about feline (sex) dreams. Throughout the paper, he turned to the Kinsey report to shed light on the cat's behaviour.Footnote ⁶⁸ Early publications identified individual cats by name, in spite of existing conventions to the contrary.Footnote ⁶⁹ This was in marked contrast to the almost wholly statistical approach Aronson took when analysing the sexual behaviour of fish.Footnote ⁷⁰ In correspondence, he repeated how the results of the cat experiments overwhelmed him with the abundance of individual responses that fit no clear theory or headline-grabbing conclusions. Instead, his knowledge of cat sexuality focused on documenting individual variation through long-term cohabitation and experimentation. The goal became elucidating this very complexity for its own sake. This commitment entailed longitudinal studies of the cats over many years with little demand for immediate or practical results.

AMNH psychologists understood themselves as the curators of those things overlooked and neglected by other students of behaviour. Aronson came to see cats as complicated living tools whose affordances as a species allowed him to model the complexity of the dynamic interactions between individual experience and neural and endocrine regulatory mechanisms. In contrast, the rats and birds favoured by their intellectual opponents seemed to operate as technologies for reductionism. Cats helped materialize in the laboratory the relational character of inner and outer environments. The result was an ‘epigenetic’ standpoint that saw each stage of an individual's development as the interaction between organism and environment.Footnote ⁷¹

Sex, death and taxes: the moral world of animal liberation

When first confronted by animal liberationists in 1976, the museum initially defended the cat programme by championing the pure-science ideal. Director Thomas Nicholson insisted that the AMNH had the ‘freedom to study whatever it chooses without regard to its demonstrable practical value’.Footnote ⁷² It was precisely this argument that Spira's campaign sought to undercut. Understanding his strategy historically involves documenting how events were framed by rhetoric and imaginary from both the new social movements and the new, post-1970s conservative anti-statism.

The placards carried outside the museum during the weekend protests included such slogans as ‘Let my people go!’ and ‘Voice of the voiceless’, invoking the language of 1960s social movements. Newsweek noted Spira's long-time union activities and his having ‘made the Mississippi scene during the civil-rights days’.Footnote ⁷³ These movements succeeded in redefining public sensibilities about what counts as suffering across the social spectrum. This included a new sensitivity about what counted as intolerable physical or psychological pain.Footnote ⁷⁴ The civil rights struggle not only challenged the injustice of ‘separate but equal’ institutions, but also documented the psychological damage created by this legally sanctioned inequality.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, radical feminists deployed ‘consciousness raising’ as a strategy for translating supposedly personal matters (such as reproductive choice or sexual assault) into common concerns by collecting the evidence of experience.Footnote ⁷⁶

Singer was very much aware that he was writing in the civil rights era and worked to mobilize the force of history in support of animal liberation. He placed consciousness raising at the core of the new social movements since they entailed the revelation of previously hidden forms of discrimination. Every social movement had constituted ‘an expansion of our moral horizons’, as unmarked privilege became intolerable. Black liberation, gay liberation and women's liberation had each in turn drawn into public view forms of suffering and suppressed collective traumas. Singer insisted that these movements erred in grounding rights in cognitive equality; a tentative scientific claim. Instead, he famously turned to a shared capacity to experience physical pain regardless of intelligence or language, an argument he traced back to Jeremy Bentham. Because of this capacity, all organisms had weighable interests in any utilitarian calculus.Footnote ⁷⁷ Where early twentieth-century physiologists insisted that medical research was the most humanitarian example of animal suffering, Singer pointed to scientific experiments as particularly vulnerable to attack because of the contradiction at the heart of their justification. Where the meat eaters need not identify with the food they consumed, biomedical research relied on animal models due to cross-species kinship with humans. He singled out psychologists as worthy of particular scrutiny, noting that their experiments numbered among ‘the most painful’, their results ‘very often trivial and obvious’. The entire field rested on the paradox of assuming a close affinity across species lines while denying such connections in the next moment.Footnote ⁷⁸

Aronson and Cooper rejected ‘the quasi-moralistic claim that animals have “rights” equal to the sociopolitical rights of women and minorities’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet the affinity between animal rights and other social movements was a genuine, if fraught, one. Efforts of both superpowers in the Cold War to improve material conditions and education for their citizens heightened their cultural expectations, which inspired the international counterculture that criticized the failures and contradictions of such aspirations.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the comparatively affluent postwar societies, even non-humans deserved to have their interests protected. They were no longer the raw materials that made human life sustainable, but companions whose individuality demanded recognition.

However, there was a historical irony at play, one not readily acknowledged by either side in the debate. The animal liberationists' emphasis on each organism's agency owed a considerable debt to research in developmental psychobiology like Aronson's which focused on animal individuality. Just as Cold War politicians raised the expectations of their citizens, so cognitive scientists, ethologists and their popularizers raised expectations about animal intelligence, emotion and communication, especially when it came to primates and cetaceans.Footnote ⁸¹ In other words, Aronson's own science emphasized close kinship across species lines.

During the 1970s, strands of the peace and liberation movements morphed into a variety of projects championing human rights and ecological concerns on the global stage. In contrast to the totalizing transformations envisioned by the counterculture, organizations such as Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and Greenpeace pursued gradualist strategies of focusing on concrete cases, gathering information and seeking to apply the rule of (international) law.Footnote ⁸² Greenpeace exemplified this new transnational approach as the originally Canada-based organization sought to curtail American and French nuclear testing in international waters. In 1975, Greenpeace turned its direct-action approach to the abolition of the commercial whale hunt. In addition to shifting from state to corporate targets, this campaign represented an uneasy marriage of ecology and animal liberation.Footnote ⁸³ With its emphasis on protecting individual life (albeit now across the species line), animal rights fit more squarely within the political ideology of the 1960s social movements compared with the contemporaneous environmentalism that often sought to undercut the presumption of possessive individualism.Footnote ⁸⁴ Moreover, the New York City protests that sought to prevent the mutilation of future cats resonated with another of Greenpeace's iconic projects: their effort to end the killing of (highly photogenic) seals by Newfoundland fishermen.Footnote ⁸⁵

Founded in 1961, Amnesty International sought to raise the profile of persons facing imprisonment, torture or execution for non-violent acts of conscience.Footnote ⁸⁶ The organization's approach to international justice gained in prominence throughout the 1970s after the failure of more state-centred utopian projects.Footnote ⁸⁷ Rather than focusing on broad humanitarian crises facing populations, they channelled attention through the plight of particular individuals. Figure 1 traces references to ‘torture’ in the New York Times, the newspaper where the museum's opponents placed their more visible advertisements. Although the Times included discussions of torture from its inception in the 1850s, the term saw an increase of over 50 percent in prevalence in the 1970s compared with previous decades. Substantively, these stories largely focused on the ‘rule of pain’ pursued by various Latin American military dictatorships and paid particular attention to the regimes’ ‘expertise and equipment’: secret detention rooms, isolation, maiming and mutilation.Footnote ⁸⁸

Figure 1.

References to torture in the New York Times.

An important part of this human rights movement was an elevated awareness about the role of psychology in the practice of torture via ‘sensory deprivation’ and ‘solitary confinement’, words long used by AMNH psychobiologists to describe their research.Footnote ⁸⁹ These terms had become tied to specific research programmes within psychology while carrying very different meanings in the wider public sphere. Alongside intelligence-agency-funded research into interrogation techniques, these experiments played a central role in the American reception of ethology.Footnote ⁹⁰ In these debates, AMNH scientists pursued deprivation experiments due to scepticism about instincts and their desire to demonstrate the inability of such experimental designs to isolate the innate.Footnote ⁹¹

‘Torture’ had been antivivisectionists’ keyword, but the concept gained a new valence due to the internationally ascendant human rights movement. An advertisement paid for by Spira's Society for Animal Rights conjured images reminiscent of Amnesty International's exposés of locked-away dissidents: ‘The American Museum of Natural History has one room that's not on display: an experimental laboratory filled with suffering animals.’Footnote ⁹² In May 1977, the Millennium Guild took out a full-page advertisement whose focal point was a cat in a blinding machine. The text frequently mentions the mutilations and torture faced by the AMNH cats, ‘living in an artificial environment of alternating boredom and terror’. Talk of ‘sound-proof labs’ as secret torture rooms hidden ‘behind locked doors’ cast the animals in a role analogous to that of the Latin American disappeared, even though the concept of the cat's ‘rights’ was never overtly mentioned.Footnote ⁹³

The sexual content of the experiments made them a vulnerable target of criticisms of animal research. Aronson understood himself as contributing towards more liberal sexual attitudes, describing a career-long struggle against the editorial ‘prudes in scientific publishing’ to get his cat papers published.Footnote ⁹⁴ The New York Times reported that protestors’ placards read ‘Castrate the Scientists’, ‘Aronson, What Does Your Psychiatrist Think of Your Sexual Experiments?’ and ‘Sadists Play – Our Taxes Pay’.Footnote ⁹⁵ These slogans resonated with a heightened awareness about the damaging effects of sexual abuse and sexual coercion. At the same time, the slogans represented a slippage between the sexuality of experiments from the cats as scientific objects to the scientist as curious knower. The protesters took recourse to using non-normative sexualities as a strategy to delegitimize a political opponent. Retroactively describing his tactics, Spira insisted that it is ‘a mistake to claim that research scientists get their jollies from torturing animals’, and that his goal was never to vilify individual scientists, but both strategies featured prominently in the AMNH campaign.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet the signs invoke Aronson's supposed sexual pleasures, his secret perversity. The protest could still draw on the intuition that there is something inherently wrong with the government-funded research on sexuality.

Yet the experiments’ sexual propriety was also refracted through shifting interspecies relations. Where the image of the tough and robust alley cat predominated at mid-century, a new understanding came to the fore by the mid-1970s, one intertwined with the demands of urban social and sexual life. The construction of massive apartment buildings destroyed many of the alleys and back fences where strays had once flourished. One report estimated that in the early 1960s the stray population crashed from 400,000 to 70,000, though the animals seem to have rebounded as they became increasingly concentrated in Central Park.Footnote ⁹⁷ Cats also featured prominently in the lifestyle of single apartment-dwellers who enjoyed the city's unique pleasures but often found sustained human relationships fraught. The 1970s saw the emergence of a new discourse about pets wherein they were no longer just members of a household, but constituted the household itself, serving as ‘the surrogate children – and husbands and wives – of Western society’.Footnote ⁹⁸ These years witnessed the emergence of a booming gourmet pet food market rooted in this heightened affect for pets.Footnote ⁹⁹ Animals had entered into the affective web of the family through the use of pets to impart on children lessons about care, love and duty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For some late moderns, pets had become their children.

The city's cats acquired this new symbolism in connection with the increased prominence granted to those who identified as ‘child-free’, a new social status among individuals of various sexual orientations.Footnote ¹⁰¹ A 1975 magazine story entitled ‘The only perfect relationship in this fickle world’ profiled seemingly single New Yorkers (including an actress who insisted she was not a ‘crazy cat lady’), praising their special bond with their cats as ‘the most selfless love relationship we can have’.Footnote ¹⁰² As the actress's pleading suggests, the image of these fashionably neurotic urban sophisticates was accompanied by the figure of the lonely, elderly female; a woman who risked muggings by venturing into Central Park after dark to feed the strays or required the assistance of the ASPCA to house herself and her wards.Footnote ¹⁰³ Such narratives maintained the animal's reputation for aloofness, but introduced new narratives about vulnerability and assertions about cats as fully fledged surrogates for companions.

Intellectual orgasms versus impactful science

The ‘sadists play’ slogan suggested it was not just beloved pets being abused but collective tax dollars. As demonstrator Barbara Nixon insisted, ‘Some people may not care about animals, but it's our money. You can't feel detached when it's coming out of your pocket.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Taxes served the route through which the reader was to intervene in such state-supported sadism. The one-page 1977 Millennium Guild advertisement includes nine distinct invocations of ‘your tax dollars’, the ‘misappropriation of funds’, ‘a greed for public funds’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The ‘moral shock’ designed to recruit participants invoked simultaneously the violence of the experiments and the exploitation of the reader's own money.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Linking together morality and tax dollars has a venerable political lineage in the United States, dating back to Henry Thoreau's civil disobedience over his opposition to slavery, if not to the American Revolution itself. More specifically, sex research had long been a popular target among those who wanted to limit government spending on scientific research.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Yet the evocation of squandered and abused federal dollars has greater historical specificity than might at first appear and became increasingly central to the evaluation of Aronson's work as the scientific community reflected on the ramifications of the protests outside the AMNH. In the rare cases when antivivisectionists had confronted Aronson in the past, they had withdrawn their individual membership from the museum.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In contrast, Spira very much wanted to target Aronson's relationship with his government patron. Animal liberation, as a humanitarian movement, involved the withdrawal of government financial support in the form of research dollars geared towards experiments on captive animals, rather than increased government spending in this realm. Such rhetoric had real effects as the museum faced significant budgetary constraints due to municipal austerity measures. Its new president was particularly concerned with public relations in the hopes of securing new forms of corporate support for the museum as a cultural institution while also highlighting the importance of the culture industry to the New York economy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Soon criticism of wasted federal tax dollars would eclipse concerns about wasted animal life. This move occurred as taxation again became a contentious political issue against the backdrop of the post-1973 recession and the ‘tax revolt’. The raising of taxes had not been an electoral question for several decades, but rather a policy pursued by both national parties. Initially the revolt was an ideologically polyvalent movement among homeowners until captured by supply-side economists within the Republican Party following California's 1978 Proposition 13.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Historian Daniel Rodgers has analysed the ‘thinning’ of the metaphors Americans used to understand society since the 1970s as a wide range of anti-statist thinkers challenged the capacity of the welfare state to meet the needs of the citizenry.Footnote ¹¹¹ One of the most concrete forms this took was an opposition to how taxes supported ‘wasteful’ government programmes. Free-market conservatives refused to pay the costs of reconfigured social order. One effect of the tax revolt was a shift in the political economy of scientific research, one that posed a severe challenge to the pure-science ideal that Aronson had embraced for much of his career.Footnote ¹¹²

The impact of the tax revolt on science manifested itself most clearly in the career of Wisconsin Senator and chair of the Appropriations Committee William Proxmire. In 1975, he instituted his highly publicized Golden Fleece Awards to castigate wasteful government spending. The very first award went to the National Science Foundation for the social-science grants it issued to study ‘love’ in human heterosexual relationships. Proxmire – who, as newspapers were fond of noting, was separated from his wife at the time – held that the wastefulness of such research was self-evident. He targeted sex research because ‘to explain even more about what we feel when we are “doing what comes naturally” constitutes an appalling disregard of any reasonable system of priorities’.Footnote ¹¹³ In his formulation, the nature of sex was something obvious and unproblematic, the domain of private artistic and poetic expression rather than government-sponsored science. Proxmire was a utilitarian. As he explained to one of the scientists skewered by his award, ‘There is an endless unlimited variety of problems we could spend federal money exploring.’ Such limitless possibilities for the pursuit of knowledge needed to be checked by the harsh calculus of financial prudence. ‘I do not feel that this type of research should be done with taxpayers' dollars at a time when the average American taxpayer is struggling to keep his head above water.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the immediate post-war era, the behavioural sciences sought patronage by emphasizing their potential for conducting basic research on human nature without the corrupting influence of immediate application.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The recession demanded new priorities with utility at the forefront.

A few months after the first Golden Fleece Award, Psychology Today published an interview with Frank Beach. Proxmire's revolt against useless research percolated in the background as the interview considered the question of distributing care and resources across the species line. Beach strongly objected when asked whether he felt guilty about dedicating his time to studying the dog's sexed urination behaviour in a world of starving human children. He doubled down. He upheld an eroticized form of pure curiosity as the scientist's true path. Beach insisted that it was far nobler not to pursue immediate ends but rather to seek certain ‘peak experiences’ of true scientific breakthrough, a moment he knowingly called ‘intellectual orgasm’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Beach defined the scientific life in terms of his freedom, autonomy and agency – the privilege of being beholden to no one.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Beach and Aronson had worked together for eight years at the AMNH during the 1940s; decades later they remained close friends. Beach was also an important ally as Spira's claims that the cat experiments were mere mutilations unlikely to lead to new knowledge entered the pages of Science magazine.

In October 1976, reporter Nicholas Wade wrote about the ‘public relations disaster’ that was the museum's response to the animal rights protesters. Wade dismissed many of the concerns raised by the activists, namely that Aronson and his team derived sexual pleasure from torturing crippled animals. Writing for Science’s readership, he stressed that the experiments reflected ‘the standard physiological procedures of removing glands, nerves, or brain tissue’. Nevertheless, Aronson and the museum were not blameless targets of ‘public passions’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Wade performed his own utilitarian calculus when he turned to the newly created Science Citation Index (SCI) for a ‘second opinion’ about the merits of Aronson's research.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Wade found Aronson's programme wanting. Fourteen of the twenty-one articles from the cat project had never been cited between the creation of the SCI in 1965 and 1976. The seven remaining papers had an average citation rate of merely 5.6 per paper.Footnote ¹²⁰ Aronson and his allies objected to Wade's calculations, insisting that the behavioural sciences were dominated by rat researchers who tended not to cite research conducted on other species.Footnote ¹²¹ The lack of citations also resulted from the care with which these scientists conducted their research. Psychologist Benjamin Sachs underscored how ‘few scientists have contributed more to making us aware of the complex interactions between behavioral experience and the neurological and hormonal control of behavior’. Their work challenged neuroscience orthodoxy, knowledge typically ‘derived from research less sophisticated than that characteristic of Aronson and Cooper’.Footnote ¹²²

Soon SCI's inventor, Eugene Garfield, entered the fray. He chastised Wade for his sloppy use of the index as the reporter had failed to properly delineate Aronson's field of study: it was incorrect to compare citations across different areas of biology where the number of workers and publications varied greatly. By the standards of his subfield, Aronson was reasonably well cited, leading Garfield to conclude that the research had some value. At his most generous, Garfield suggested that Aronson may be another Mendel: a great scientist whose research is not cited immediately and remains dormant but eventually comes to dominate a field.Footnote ¹²³

Such generosity had its limits. Garfield was ‘increasingly suspicious of generalized claims that we can never know in advance (and often not even in retrospect) what value “basic” research may have in the future’. His citation index was ultimately a technology of prediction, one useful for the future management of scarce scientific resources.Footnote ¹²⁴ He suggested that the SCI could erode the long-standing justification of pure research. It was no longer sufficient for scientists to operate by the standards of their small and fairly isolated fields. Aronson could not simply complain that rat researchers failed to cite his work. He had certain obligations that made him responsible for the public-relations disaster. Garfield suggested that ‘had Aronson done a bit of “selling” to his rat colleagues and perhaps helped to educate the public on the ramifications and value of his research, he might have prevented the unfortunate abuse heaped on him’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Scientists needed to be entrepreneurs, selling their knowledge to colleagues, patrons and the public. Like many of his contemporaries extending from the fields of economics to biology, Garfield offered a vision of how the regulation of human conduct need be governed by neither morality nor the legal system. The surest form of surveillance was not the opening of the laboratory to the public or to FOIA investigation, but rather the regular calculation of impact for the allocation of resources, whether money or animal lives. In this world, Aronson – not the animal rights activists – was the true outdated relic of a bygone era.Footnote ¹²⁶