"The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem," says HG Wells's mad vivisector Dr Moreau, attempting to justify his grotesque animal experiments. In Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat, the philosopher and psychologist Rom Harré explores the history of scientists who have used plants and animals - the "living laboratory" - to test hypotheses and collect data. But Harré's original and thoughtful study is not explicitly about the ethics of animal experimentation. Instead, he wants to show how the instrumentarium of science is not restricted to beakers and Bunsen burners, but has always included organic apparatus, from Galvani's frog's legs twitching with electricity, to Mendel's pea plants, to thought experiments such as Schrödinger's cat, poised eternally (and inhumanely) between life and death. Indeed, the living laboratory is at the very heart of science, he argues: "animals and plants become devices we research with rather than something we research on".