It is important that the "shared conditions of work" in an experimental lab make us understand that entities with fully secured boundaries called possessive individuals are the wrong units for considering what is going on. That means not that a particular animal does not matter but that mattering is always inside connections that demand and enable response, not bare calculation or ranking. In this article, by bringing into dialogue fictional with real-life characters, philosophers with biologists, we propose to rethink the instrumental relations between laboratory animals and their people, centering on the epistemological, emotional, and technical work necessary for practices of care and non-mimetic sharing. I argue that the needed morality for a multispecies flourishing goes beyond taxonomic hierarchies, humanist philosophies or religious guarantees. It requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences
animal experiments; anthropology of science; companion species; research ethics