The good aquarist: Morality, emotions and expectations of care in zebrafish aquariums

Zebrafish are one of the most important species used in contemporary bioscience research. As vertebrates, they have, in the UK, the same legal or welfare protections as other commonly used animals like rats, mice, and rabbits. However, the human–animal relationships that emerge between animal technologists and zebrafish are different to the case of relations between terrestrial mammals. What does this mean in terms of care relations? Specifically, this chapter investigates how animal technologists who work with fish (aquarists) navigate the disjuncture between their embodied experiences of caring for zebrafish and the social expectations around empathy and inter-species bonding that increasingly accompany regulatory discourses and ideas of professional identity and responsibility in the wider animal technology and welfare arena. In this light, the chapter focuses on how aquarists conceive of and present themselves as moral agents in the relative absence of the kinds of emotional attachment typically seen as desirable, and the experience of which might normally be expected to act as signs of moral and professional virtue. Concretely then, this paper empirically investigates some of the quotidian activities, attitudes, and modes of speaking adopted by aquarists who, like all animal technologists, wish to do good and be perceived as doing so – despite the ambivalence of their personal experiences and the specificity of human–fish relations in the research aquarium.