Since the early 2000s, researchers in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities have been discussing an ongoing paradigm shift in the consideration of animals. This paradigm shift directly affects the way laboratory animals are perceived in contemporary discourses: Not only is knowledge produced by and with them, but laboratory animals simultaneously possess interaction potential, sociality, and agency. Consequently, several contradictory animal orders emerge in animal experimentation (Knorr-Cetina): The laboratory animal as a naturalistic and analytical body (Lynch), as a technical object (Rheinberger) and interactive subject, and as a singular and collective animal body (the animal model). While these coexisting animal orders pose a risk to standardized cultures of experimentation, they simultaneously provide a productive surface for literary experimentation with animals. In contemporary German literature, as I will discuss with reference to Thomas Kling’s poetry, these multiple animal orders are used, problematized, and aestheticized for experimental purposes. By deploying the laboratory animal as a nexus in between organic, mechanical, medial, and material practices, Kling undertakes a poetological re-testing of its bodily transmission qualities.  Kling thereby relies on connotative contaminations, which – when thought as radically reciprocal – are always already inherent in the logic of animal experimentation.