Surrogate Mother
It has been nearly a decade since I left my job in animal research and today marks the first time I have been able to even think about writing about it.
I started in animal care and worked my way up into other positions, mainly focused on animal welfare. I had just graduated college and was working at Starbucks when I decided to make the jump into what I thought could be a fulfilling and interesting career with rhesus monkeys.
I was 27 and idealistic. I didn’t realize yet that systems like animal research are unstoppable, that making a difference on the personal level doesn’t always translate to real world change within something so profitable and strong.
I fought every instinct to leave over the course of three years because I felt a responsibility as a witness to this world and an inability to turn my back on the monkeys I had come to love.
I remember interviewing at the university facility and initially thinking, “this isn’t so bad.” The grounds were essentially set up as a zoo with large and small enclosures. The majority of the research was behavioral, and the monkeys lived in large family groups. This was a breeding facility, but it felt like a wildlife park.
Animal care staff were responsible for feeding, cleaning, and providing enrichment for the hundreds of monkeys, and I loved watching them eat, play, and groom each other. I eventually moved into the nursery for orphaned monkeys, and it was my responsibility to socialize and prepare them for re-introduction. They were tiny and needed to be bottle fed every 4, 6, or 8 hours. As I warmed their bottles they would coo and hoot loudly in anticipation in a way that still makes me smile. Eight babies would fill the room with sound as they jumped around and shook the bars of their cages, and I was their surrogate mother.
art by alev art
As I moved up in my career at the facility, I eventually transferred to the kind of environment that most individuals imagine when they think of animal research. The facility was filled with individual cages, and my job was to focus on behavior management and enrichment. After three months, I quit on the spot.
Years of compassion fatigue, moral injury, and mental exhaustion had finally caught up to me, and I quit one day in a flurry of tears. By this point, several of my nursery babies had to be euthanized for various reasons, and though each one was more agonizing than the next, I persisted.
Then, several months into my new position, a nursery baby was transferred into my facility to be used in the kind of research I had been avoiding thinking about, and that’s when my world came crashing down.
It’s hard to explain the cognitive dissonance you can have as a person. I knew where I was working. I knew the kind of protocols in place and the things that happened around me. I knew the system was wrong, and I knew that the rows of monkeys housed in single cages being used for biomedical research existed.
But I also felt that the individual monkeys deserved someone who cared for them now that I was inside. For three years, I tried to focus on what I could improve while avoiding the bigger picture.
But the moment that nursery baby showed up, the entire façade came crashing down, and I lost it. That moment had a cascading effect, and all the pain and anger I had internalized came flowing out.
I spent my lunch quietly going into every room of caged monkeys I was responsible for and saying goodbye to each individual, bawling under my face shield. When I made it to my car afterwards, I sobbed as I felt the weight lifting from my shoulders. I sobbed for them. I sobbed for me. I sobbed because I had completely lost any semblance of optimism or direction. The world was dark, and I couldn’t change it.
It has taken 10 years for me to revisit that moment and it is with this moment that I would like to end my reflection with, because I believe it is a feeling I think so many lab workers have experienced and are shamed into hiding away.
The following is my journal entry from my last day of work in 2016:
I connected with each and every monkey in my area before I left. I did it during lunch so I didn’t look like a crazy person. I cried looking at each and every one of them. My baby boy in virology--He was getting sick from SIV I’m assuming. It was so obvious. He had been losing a lot of weight and wasn’t as feisty. I cried in front of him and he looked into my eyes. He was really looking at me. There is something more there. Way more than anyone is willing to admit. And it’s wrong. It’s all so wrong.
I cried in front of him and gave him his mirror and he looked at it (because he loves his mirror) but he also looked at me. I looked at all of them and interacted with the ones that wanted interaction and moved past after a quick glance at the ones that didn’t. I just acknowledged them as the beings they are, what everyone else has seemed to have forgotten. They are living beings. They’re in a prison. No animal is meant to be in that captive of an environment. It’s not possible, it should not be right. But it makes someone money. I fell in love with so many of those monkeys and they won’t be okay. They just won't. That breaks my heart.
Artist Statement
alev art
This is a truly heartbreaking story. It's hard to believe this kind of research is still happening today, while we already know that most animal research doesn't apply to humans. It's angering, absurd, and leads to nothing but suffering for animals and humans. As hard as it is to read and bring the art to life, these kinds of stories offer an incredibly insightful view of what is happening behind closed doors that most people in the world are blind to, and I am honored to do my part in helping show it to the world.
In this piece, I tried to represent this former lab worker’s emotions as she described them: her cognitive dissonance, her powerlessness, her caring, and her heartbreak. She holds that last one of her baby monkeys, as his spirit slowly fades away, just like the others before, who still surround her. I hope this piece will help open some eyes and hearts to this reality and, hopefully, encourage them to help us all move toward a better world for all living creatures.
Seeing my story interpreted into art was a lot more emotional than I anticipated. I was nervous before I opened the reveal-mostly because I was scared it wouldn’t do justice to such a personal part of me- but the artist did an amazing job and I immediately felt seen. I spent a lot of time looking at it again and again that first day, and I have been blown away at how powerful this experience has been.
AUTHOR OF Surrogate mother