The Sacrifice of the Animal: Altar and Laboratory

This paper builds on my earlier article 'Cutting up Life', where I argued that Judeo-Christian blood sacrifice is a technology for stabilising the fluid distinctions between human, animal and divine andthen breaking these boundaries down. In a usage that began in the Journal of Physiology in 1903,and still survives in laboratories (though often abbreviated to ‘sack’ or other euphemisms) the term ‘sacrifice’ took on the additional meaning of ‘to kill an experimental animal for scientific purposes’. Inthis paper I compare sacrifice in the laboratory and on the altar focussing on three key ambiguities:1) literalism and euphemism; 2) guilt and justification; 3) secrecy and visibility; 4) transitive andintransitive sacrifice (separation from and identification with the sacrificed animal as data, equipmentand object and surrogate human, martyr, ‘pet’).