AThis paper looks at the entangled histories of animal-human relationship and modem surgery. It starts with the various different roles animals have in surgery--patients, experimental models and organ providers--and analyses where these seemingly contradictory positions of animals come from historically. The analyses is based on the assumption that both the heterogeneous relationships of humans to animals and modern surgery are the results of fundamentally local, contingent and situated developments and not reducible to large-scale social explanations, such as modernization. This change of perspective opens up a new ways of understanding both phenomena as deeply interwoven with the redrawing of the nature-culture divide.