In the UK, claims are often made that public support for animal research is stronger when such use is categorised as for medical purposes. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of writing from the Mass Observation Project, a national writing project documenting everyday life in Britain, this paper suggests that the necessity of using animals for medical research is not a given but understood relationally through interactions with inherent vulnerability. This paper stresses the ubiquity of ambivalence towards uses of animals for medical research, complicating what is meant by claims that such use is ‘acceptable’, and suggests that science-society dialogues on animal research should accommodate different modes of thinking about health. In demonstrating how understandings of health are bound up with ethical obligations to care for both human and non-human others, this paper reinforces the importance of interspecies relations in health and illness and in the socio-ethical dimensions of biomedicine.

在英国，人们经常声称，当动物研究被归类为医疗目的时，公众对动物研究的支持会更强烈。本文利用对记录英国日常生活的国家写作项目——大规模观察项目的写作进行定性分析，表明使用动物进行医学研究的必要性并不是既定的，而是通过与固有脆弱性的相互作用来理解的。本文强调了人们普遍对将动物用于医学研究的矛盾心理，使这种使用“可接受”的说法变得复杂化，并建议科学界与社会关于动物研究的对话应适应对健康的不同思维模式。在论证对健康的理解如何与照顾人类和非人类他人的道德义务联系在一起时，本文强调了健康和疾病以及生物医学的社会伦理维度中种间关系的重要性。