© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156853008X357658 Society and Animals 16 (2008) 316-335 www.brill.nl/soan A Feeling for the Animal: On Becoming an Experimentalist Tora Holmberg Research Coordinator, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Box 634, 751 26 Uppsala, Sweden E-mail: tora.holmberg@gender.uu.se Abstract Tis article deals with questions that arose during a 2-week university course in nonhuman animal laboratory science. Doctoral students and researchers take the course to acquire the knowledge necessary for future independent work with nonhuman animal experimentation. During the course, participants learn to handle animals in the laboratory, both in theory and in practice, and to do so in a humane way with a feeling for the animals. Te paper analyzes how this knowledge, in other tacit contexts, is constructed and learned and focuses on two main aspects of handling rodents in the laboratory: habituation and killing. Te course’s focus on good handling works as a means of doing good research, as a strategy of including animal welfare as a legitimate agenda, while keeping intact traditional scientific norms—such as standardization. In this case, standardization has a wider scope than commonly assumed: Not only are the animals standardized but also the experimentalists who become standardized through courses and curri- cula. However, this process of standardization is not complete; thus, a feeling for the animal implies, as the case study shows,, individual animal and human-animal interaction. Keywords animal welfare, nonhuman animal, laboratory studies, STS, human-animal relationships Introduction “Good morning, humans,” the teacher says to the students and starts the lec- ture, continuing: “You may think it’s a funny thing to say, and actually it is, but for a different reason than you think. How can I actually know that you are humans?” If you did not know the context of this introduction, you might think the above quote was excerpted from a dog-training class, a group of new-age scholars, or a lecture in philosophy. Actually, it was taken from a Swedish university course in laboratory animal science, sometimes called com- parative biology. Te course is mandatory for all people who plan to work