The paper examines the controversy over Lester Aronson’s experiments on the sexual behaviour of cats at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Since the 1930s, Aronson had dedicated his career to examining the psychobiology of sex in different species. Initially working on fish and amphibians, since the late 1940s he ran an NIH-funded program on cats which investigated the effects of rearing conditions, castration, and brain lesions. In 1976, the resurgent animal liberation movement led by Henry Spira made the AMNH experiments one of its earliest successful targets. Although the scientific consensus was that Aronson was not particularly cruel or abusive towards his animals, Spira selected the AMNH due to the visibility of the institution, the pet-like status of the animals involved, and the seeming perversity of studying non-human sexuality.

Drawing inspiration from Robert Darnton’s famous essay on cultural worlds, the paper will contextualize the controversy in terms of the changing meaning of utilitarian ethics in justifying experiments on animals. In part, the public redefinition of “surgeries” as “mutilations” reflected an encounter between the behavioural sciences and social movements. The various civil rights movements of the late 1960s had made Americans more sensitive to differing experiences of suffering. Spira and his followers were inspired by the bioethicist Peter Singer’s revival of a utilitarian ethics of universal organismic suffering across the lines of species. The episode was also emblematic of the emergence of a neo-liberal ethos in science. Invoking the rhetoric of the 1970s tax revolt, animal liberationists attacked Aronson’s ability to conducted disinterested, basic research with no immediate biomedical application. Moreover, to arbitrate the dispute science journalist Nicholas Wade turned to a new technology – Eugene Garfield’s impact factor – to evaluate the merit of Aronson’s cat research based on a utilitarian calculus of citations. Without denying the violence involved in Aronson’s experiments, I argue that an exclusive focus on reading the controversy through the lens of the utilitarianism obscures what ethics animated Aronson’s research. The result was a historical forgetting of the queer biopolitics around animal sexual behaviour that existed at the AMNH from the 1930s to the 1970s.