Cyborg Animals
Definition
Cyborg animals are non-human animals whose capacities have been altered, extended, monitored or directed by an integrated technical system. The category runs from the microchipped house cat to the beetle flown by radio, and the distance between those two cases is where all the interesting questions are.
The First Cyborg Was a Rat
The word "cyborg" was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in "Cyborgs and Space," published in Astronautics in September 1960.[1] Their argument was that engineering the body for space was more tractable than carrying an Earth-like environment along, and that the regulation should be automatic and unconscious — leaving the astronaut "free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel."
The paper's illustration was a white laboratory rat with an osmotic pump implanted beneath its skin, delivering chemicals at a controlled rate without any attention from the animal. That rat, not a person, is the first thing ever to be called a cyborg. The field's founding image is an animal, and its founding logic is homeostatic regulation delegated to a machine — a point usually lost in later, more cinematic uses of the word.
Instrumented Animals
The overwhelming majority of cyborg animals are instrumented rather than controlled. Pet microchips, an RFID transponder injected under the skin, have made identity machine-readable for hundreds of millions of animals. GPS and satellite tags have restructured wildlife biology, turning migration from something inferred to something logged. Dairy cattle wear activity collars and swallow rumen boluses that report rumination, temperature and oestrus to a herd management system, so that the animal becomes a continuously reporting node in an agricultural database.
Restorative technology also belongs here: prosthetic limbs and tail flukes, insulin pumps for diabetic dogs. In each case no one directs the animal's behaviour in real time.
Controlled Animals
The other branch is older than it looks. B. F. Skinner's Project Pigeon, funded from 1943 and revived as Project Orcon in 1948, trained pigeons to peck at a target image in a missile's nose cone, steering it. The birds worked; the project was cancelled because nobody could take it seriously.
Direct neural control arrived in 2002, when Sanjiv Talwar, John Chapin and colleagues at SUNY Downstate published "Rat navigation guided by remote control" in Nature.[2] Electrodes in the whisker regions of somatosensory cortex supplied left and right cues, and an electrode in the medial forebrain bundle supplied reward. The rat could be steered through terrain from a laptop up to half a kilometre away. Notably, the animal was not overridden — it was motivated, which is a different and in some ways more troubling mechanism.
Insects followed. DARPA's HI-MEMS programme funded implantation of control hardware during metamorphosis, so the animal grows around it, and Michel Maharbiz's group at Berkeley demonstrated untethered radio flight control of beetles. The commercial endpoint is Backyard Brains' RoboRoach (2013), a classroom kit for making a remote-controlled cockroach, which drew objections from PETA and from animal-behaviour researchers and produced the field's first genuinely public ethics argument.
Ethics
The debate turns on three questions that the technology does not settle: whether the animal experiences the intervention as harm, whether an animal that can be steered retains anything meaningfully called agency, and whether the instrumentation serves the animal or only its owner. Invertebrate cases sharpen the first question rather than avoiding it, since the argument that a cockroach cannot suffer is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Animals are where cyborg technologies are tested before they reach people, and where the ethical questions appear without the complication of consent. They also expose an asymmetry worth noticing: the same integration that is described as enhancement in a human is described as control in an animal, and the difference lies not in the hardware but in who holds the transmitter.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. "Cyborgs and Space." Astronautics, September 1960, 26–27, 74–76. Full text.
- ↑ Talwar, Sanjiv K., et al. "Rat navigation guided by remote control." Nature 417 (2 May 2002): 37–38. doi:10.1038/417037a.
