Mackay CARLEY, York University, Canada
This paper investigates cows’ welfare, relations, commodification, and killing by drawing on grass-fed beef farmers’ stories about cows and theorizing these through the analytics of animal geographies and biopolitics. Revealing cow welfare’s complex dimensions, I conceptualize how welfare practices govern cows’ subjectivities, agencies, bodies, and (inter)relations, while also showing how cows exercise subjectivity and agency in their relationships with farmers, despite and in response to the different forms of governance that shape their lives. Through a biopolitical analysis of cow welfare, I explore the relationship between cows’ liveliness and commodity value and describe the contexts in which farmers build emotional and disciplinary connections to cows. Central to my argument is that the subjective and agentic abilities of cows both compliment and complicate their commodification. Lastly, I layer the lenses of biopolitics and animal geographies to expose the emotional, economic, and ethically complex relationships that exist between farmers and cows. Attending to these complexities, I argue, disrupts fixed logic about the ethics of animal production, while simultaneously prompting us to rethink the way we relate with animals we call food.
Mots clés : Animal geographies|biopolitics|grass-fed beef farming|care|commodifcation
A102959MC