Observer 8: Outliers, attention, and situated knowledge in a Qualitative Behavioural Assessment of laboratory mouse welfare

This article explores how an innovative animal welfare methodology known as Qualitative Behaviour Assessment negotiates the balance of subjectivism and objectivism in its distinctive epistemology, as it strives to produce a certain kind of laboratory mouse—a complex, social subject. Through an ethnographic study of the development of a QBA tool for laboratory mouse welfare, I show how QBA foregrounds the lived emotional experience of the animal by using qualitative language to assess their welfare, while also relying on statistical methods of validation. Drawing on Mol et al’s understanding of care as something that parses, handles, and balances diverse “goods,” I argue that QBA’s care for its data must balance competing priorities and values, and I take particular interest in what makes a “good” assessor as they transform between subject and object. When two observers are found to be outliers, with their divergent judgements marring the successful statistical validation of the QBA mouse tool, the situated nature of knowledge is brought to the fore. I argue that a turn to the embodied practice of attention, as distinct from care, helps us understand why this was the case, and raises questions about both the epistemic culture of conventional animal welfare science and the extent to which the human observer risks reification within QBA’s formal methodological practice.