To Leave with the Reindeer

by Olivia Rosenthal

  In Cat People’s second scene, sexual allusions come into focus. At last you decide that it’s better, for the sake of dramatic tension and the film’s high standards, for sex to remain at the level of discussion and for there to be no transition to the act. This is, of course, what your mother would have thought. You find yourself thinking like her. You’re trapped. You must look for ways of freeing yourself. You are preparing.

  Isolation is guaranteed by the use of almost completely sealed aerated enclosures. These enclosures, or biosafety cabinets, ensure the protection of the technician by means of a motor-driven suction point at the front of the work area, drawing air around the user and into the cabinet. Thus, biosafety cabinets provide an invisible barrier between technicians and their biological samples. Critically, they ensure the protection of samples from contamination by means of the vertically descending, unidirectional airflow that enters through their air filters. Contamination can equally arise from the lab environment and from other samples under examination at the same time.

  In the regulation scientific terminology, the words ‘sample’, ‘supplies’ and ‘equipment’ may indicate either manufactured items, or living creatures reduced to the condition of guinea pigs.

  During Reed’s second visit to Irena, she, kneeling at the feet of her American friend, softly hums ‘Dodo l’enfant do’ to him, a lullaby more often employed to send babies to sleep than to arouse a lover. You conclude that she is muddling maternal love with another kind of love, one more appropriate to the two protagonists’ ages and sexes. You realise that Cat People will not show you how to escape your mother.

  The manuals on procedures for inoculating animals with pathogenic agents include descriptions of autoclave points, chemical safety valves, sterilisation procedures, equipment flow, clearance space, storage zones, clean zones, dirty zones, containment breaches and cleaning products. On the other hand, no mention at all is made of the animals used, neither in the texts, nor in the illustrations that usually run alongside them, as if the presence of living things might obstruct the functioning of an entirely mechanised, computerised, industrialised and dehumanised system.

  Before marrying Mr Reed, Irena Dubrovna admits to her future spouse that she suffers from all kinds of fears and phobias which have been passed down from mother to daughter since time immemorial. One ancient legend from her country tells that if she sleeps with a man, she will turn into a panther. Irena feels torn between two irreconcilable desires: the desire to marry and the desire to remain faithful to her past. You feel like Irena Dubrovna, unable to decide. You are trapped.

  The French Animal Rights League campaigns for animals’ right to respect. According to this line of thought, the league proposes that we reshape scientific vocabulary so as to increase researchers’ awareness of the ethical problems posed by experimenting on animals. The league calls for scientific publications to stop referring to animals under the classic heading ‘equipment’ but to create a new heading for them: ‘biological subjects’.

  I used to have a colleague who worked with cats, which is quite unusual. To investigate the influence of sense activity on their digestion, he fitted them with gastric cannulae and set them up on a sort of hammock. He’d lie them on their stomachs, their paws dangling over the worktop, then he’d stimulate them with pictures and odours, and gather the gastric juices through the cannulae, a working method that could well appear indefensible to the general public. Well, far from fearing the moment of being lined up on their hammocks, the cats in question used to fight to be first inside the lab. They knew that at the end of each experiment they’d get tasty things to eat.

  We concoct a lot of mistaken ideas about animal experimenting; the nightmare visions we’re peddled are often far from the truth. It’s difficult to know if caged animals are content but many are much less stressed than in the wild: they’ve no predators, no anxiety about food, they are visibly healthier than if they’d been left to themselves.

  For fear of incurring all kinds of reprimands, you follow your parents’ recommendations to the letter. You never go to bed naked with a man in order not to fall pregnant; in order not to be attacked in the street you never come in after midnight: the night-time curfew fixed by your parents. The world is full of blind alleys and other perils. You are forgetting yourself.

  In experiments inoculating lab animals with pathogenic agents, contamination by dermal contact can occur if the skin tissue is infected or damaged. This could be the case, for example, following animal scratches or bites, scrapes from contaminated glassware or even cuts from surgical instruments occasioned during procedures on living or dead animals.

  Mr Reed does not believe his wife will turn into a panther and kill him. ‘You’re Irena. You’re here in America. You’re so normal you’re even in love with me, Oliver Reed, a good plain Americano. You’re so normal you’re going to marry me. And those fairy tales: you can tell them to our children.’ In 1942, no doubt the viewers hoped Irena would fall into line, get married and draw a line under her legacy of fear. You start to think like them. You no longer believe in fairy tales nor in the flight with the reindeer after Christmas. You try to calm down. You are forgetting yourself.

  We practise conditioning on the monkeys. This means spending a three- to four-month period training the primates to pick up objects secreted in little grooves all over a board. They really enjoy this because the board is dotted with treats so they pick up the objects as quickly as they can. It’s a hellish task, you have to train them every day, teach them to leave their cages by themselves, sit in the right chair of their own volition and stay there, aided by some kind of partial restraint, otherwise after five minutes they’re scratching their arses and ambling off elsewhere.

  Mr Reed ought to have been more cautious. He ought to have suspected that singing a lullaby to a man one claims to be in love with is not a healthy sign. But Mr Reed is a warm, open American, ready to kiss and to penetrate a pretty Serbian woman as soon as their marriage has been celebrated. Indeed, marriage provides for copulation with total impunity and the consent of all concerned; it constitutes an effective means of definitively curbing one’s fantasies, giving them a more decorous, appropriate, more regular form, so as not to scare oneself. You support Mr Reed’s decision, you don’t want to be afraid, to stand out, to step out of line. You are forgetting yourself.

  Once trained, the monkeys attain a maximum speed at completing the task. When this point is reached, we open a lesion in the cervical region of their spinal cord, a lesion which will modify the fine motor skills in one of their hands. Next, we observe how long it takes for the monkey to spontaneously recover its capacities by comparing the speed of execution in the wounded right hand and the undamaged left, bearing in mind that, unlike humans, monkeys are ambidextrous. After that, we may graft in therapeutic cells to see if recovery can be hastened.

  Caring means finding the remedy to an illness that one has already deliberately introduced.

  Having inculcated you with their fear of the other, your parents explain that you’re too wild and urge you to be more sociable. To set you right, they are ready to connect you with their own selection of inoffensive and well-intentioned humans. You mostly refuse the therapy they’re trying to prescribe. You are preparing.

  When training mice, two reinforcements are used: positive and negative. Positive reinforcement consists of starving the mouse and only giving it a ball of food if it has correctly carried out the tasks we want it to carry out. Whereas for negative reinforcement, we use electric shocks to give the mouse an aversion to something. This is the principle of punishment and reward, of which we know that punishment is far more effective even though it’s not at all nice to electrocute mice, sometimes the shocks are too powerful, they squeak, some die, they cling to the bars and channel the whole current, though it’s worth saying that some are also a bit thick.

  To avoid explanations, arguments, confrontations and collateral damage, you never disobey the rules established for
you, sometimes you narrow their remit even further, so you can never be caught out. For example, not only do you never go naked in a boy’s bed but you make sure never even to be alone and clothed in a boy’s bedroom. You are forgetting yourself.

  Conditioning means teaching a given animal to do what you want as if it were acting of its own accord – without your resorting to torture. It requires a long and difficult training phase which handlers generally much prefer to using blows and violent methods. No one wants to be the baddie.

  You never step out of line, you come home at the agreed hours. Your obedience lulls your vigilant parents, you could easily take advantage of their confidence in you to betray them. You are preparing.

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  Some campaigning groups have decided to take action against the systematic incarceration of animals and people. On 27 June 2009 in Nantes, men dressed in black, their faces masked, broke into an area where some wolves were to be displayed. They broke glass and furniture, and sprayed liquid pitch over the floor and walls. They left after this violent intervention, shouting demands for the joint liberation of humans and animals. No detailed guidance was provided as to how we might carry out this double liberation.

  As you watch Cat People unfold, you realise that a calm and ordered life would mean nothing to the main character. It might be better for her to show her claws and turn violently against all the sexual predators circling around her. You’re plunged into confusion; you can’t decide if you wish Irena Dubrovna would consummate her marriage to Mr Reed or if you’d prefer her to escape and turn into a wild animal. Your own uncertainty troubles you. You’re afraid you may not be sufficiently conditioned. You are trying to control yourself.

  Primates are very destructive animals. In the lab centres where they experiment on monkeys, the cages must have smooth walls, no handholds, and be able to withstand repeated washing with high-pressure sprays. Earthenware finish along the top of all walls and epoxy resin grouting fulfil these requirements.

  As soon as the marriage has been celebrated, Mr Reed realises that the sexual relations he was counting on pursuing with his young wife remain in contention. Irena refuses him gently but firmly. Having hoped to watch torrid scenes between Reed and Irena, you now hope that the metamorphosis Irena is so afraid of will happen before the end of the film. Your expectations, your hopes, your desires have changed, despite your only partial awareness of this revolution. You are preparing.

  The enclosures’ floors, their gutters and waste pipes are made of washable materials. The porcelain tiles, flooring with a watertight underlay extensive enough to encase the joins, plinths with curved bases, treated surfaces with a 1 per cent slope towards stainless-steel drains are specially recommended for the evacuation of purine and residual water.

  Every time Irena Dubrovna refuses her husband, Mr Reed’s, advances, you are both sorry and relieved. Instinctively you know it’s better not to talk about it, you continue to live in silence, dazed and blinkered, although this hardly prevents you from ringing changes, from seeing people your own age while taking care to be home on time every evening. You are holding back.

  Thinking about suffering we imagine unbearable things, but it’s worth knowing that you can pick up a rabbit, for example, a nervous creature, and lay it on its back – easily done when you’ve learnt to handle animals – and then you can stretch out its paws and do intracardiac blood taps, directly from the heart, without the slightest squeak or wriggle from the rabbit. You can’t insert a needle into a human’s heart without anaesthesia, the pain would be too intense, which goes to show that situations, reactions and physiologies aren’t always comparable.

  You’re not in pain, you’re not sad, you’re not depressed or nostalgic or upset, you don’t think about the young man you loved and who hanged himself in his bedroom, you move forward with the consistency of a metronome, a robot, an automaton, you’ve no awareness of your own emotions, you’re not listening, there’s no feedback, you are dazed, numb, deaf, blind. You are holding back.

  I first worked with planarians. These are little flatworms which live under the rocks in unpolluted rivers. I’d ordered some from the United States but hadn’t managed to get them through, they arrived dead, couldn’t survive the journey, so I had to go and fish up some I could work with in French rivers, I made quite a splash among the locals with my waders and containers, I supplied my own animals, that’s quite unusual but it’s very handy, and as for reproduction, you just cut one planarian in half: now you have two.

  You try not to think about death, you try not to think about desire, not to think about the link between the two; you eat, you sleep, you talk, you make jokes, you smile, you study with unfailing tenacity and regularity, nothing disturbs you, nothing stops you, nothing surprises you, nothing triumphs over you, nothing disarms you, nothing weakens you, you control everything, you monitor everything, you watch everything, you are holding back.

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  Animal welfare militants are behind a range of attacks targeting researchers at the University of California (UCLA) who do experiments on animals. In June 2006, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a garden in Bel Air, Los Angeles. The arsonists hoping to damage the home of a UCLA psychiatrist had the wrong address. Luckily, no fire broke out. In June 2007, another Molotov was thrown at the car of a different researcher but the bomb did not explode. In October 2007, the house of a specialist on nicotine addiction was vandalised. In June 2008, a van belonging to UCLA was damaged by another home-made fire bomb. In November 2008, a vehicle was destroyed and two others seriously damaged during an attack organised by animal rights activists who claimed responsibility for the attack and said they’d been aiming at the house of a UCLA researcher whose experiments involved animals. The police stated that the activists had hit the wrong target. In California, animal rights militants are primed to carry out acts of violence but their equipment remains primitive; they could do with a few high-grade GPS links to improve their hit rate for those they claim to be aiming at.

  ‘The cats torment me. I wake in the night and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain. I have no peace, for they are in me.’ You endlessly repeat this line, spoken by Irena Dubrovna in Cat People. They are in me. And you know that everyone who sees the film can project into that pronoun ‘they’ all the powers that press down on them, that constrain and condition, and on which, despite their resistance or attempts to escape, they depend. You are suffocating.

  Professor McConnell has shown that some acquired properties can be transmitted from one animal to another, even among invertebrates. For example, we can teach planarians to contract in response to light, conditioning them with electric shocks. Once they have acquired this property, we chop them up finely and serve them to other planarians to eat – and we observe that the cannibal planarians are much quicker at acquiring the property of contracting under light than the first, sacrificed planarian. From this we conclude that an acquired property is transmitted by ingestion of cell matter, in other words, by means of cannibalism.

  Cat People has opened your eyes neither to the forces that hold you back, nor to the ways they act on you. You don’t think about the young man whom you loved and who hanged himself in his bedroom, you are neither sad nor impassioned, neither furious nor exalted, you keep your distance from other people and from yourself, you don’t listen to your emotions, you bury them, you stifle them, you deny them. Although you’ve a feeling you’ll have to leave your mother, you hold back.

  Not all animals are equivalent. The vertebrates and the octopods are the most highly evolved: they have emotions. We aren’t sure that insects have emotions, we don’t know but we think they are genetic automata. What scientists can say is that an ant’s life doesn’t have the same meaning, even to others of its species, as that of a ram; there is a process of evolution towards individualisation, some animals are more individualised and have developed a limbic system, i.e. a nervous system capable of producing emotional perceptions. It’s clear that the need fo
r and meaning of individualisation for an earthworm are not the same as for a chimpanzee. There’s a hierarchy that depends on the animals’ mode of functioning as a species. Animal rights must take this hierarchy into account. In other words, it’s not the same thing to tear the wings off a fly and to cut off a mammal’s limbs.

  Having identified with a gorilla that ravishes women, you now identify with Simone Simon, a foreigner who’s afraid she’s turning into a big cat. You are preparing.

  The facilities for the animals’ accommodation absolutely demand soundproofing, especially if the breeding centre is situated close to laboratories or to any other building where staff will be working. The animals can be noisy and all the more so when kept several to a cage.

  In a moment of doubt and ambivalence, you feel as much a prisoner as the big cats, but your prison has no name, no depth, no extent, no volume, no odour, no ways in or out. As biologists say, the situation is anxiogenic.

  We can create models to measure the link between anxiety and balance. To do this, the mouse must be made anxious, by being shut inside either an unlit box, or what’s known as a rodent restrainer, a transparent container with small air holes, inside which a mouse cannot move at all. In this way, we can provide a given population of anxious mice. After letting them grow hungry, we send two populations of mice, the anxious ones and the rest, to walk on turning bars, knowing that if they succeed in walking along their bar they’ll get a reward at the end. We have been able to show that the population of anxious mice will slip and fall from the bar whereas the population of unstressed mice will manage to walk right along the bar, as far as the ball of food.