Abstract

"Animal-Capital Co-operation: Bovines and the Industrial Feedlot"

Abeer Saha, University of Virginia (as2tw@virginia.edu)

Feedlots are industrial sites where bovine animals are fed a diet of grains, laced with hormones and antibiotics, for a four-to-six month period before being sent to slaughter. Such concentrated feeding operations have allowed tremendous spatial and temporal contractions in the global ecology of animal production. This transformation began in the mid-twentieth century through the systematic application of animal science, technological expertise, state regulations, and the logic of capitalism upon animal lives. But these changes in the global ecology of animal production would not have been possible without the animals themselves. Bovine creatures played a crucial part in shaping the feedlot enterprise. They did this, not by acting out of character, but by being themselves. Their very “cow-ness” combined with their subjective urge to resist confinement and industrial discipline, thwarted, and in turn shaped, feedlot design and the norms of animal handling. By virtue of their unprecedented concentration the surrounding air for miles was made obnoxious and their fecal waste poisoned the water, killing riverine life nearby and downstream. This forced feedlot-capitalists to adopt various expensive and unsuccessful waste containment systems and sometimes move locations altogether. Furthermore, the total bovine populace released enough methane into the atmosphere to raise global temperatures. Bovine creatures acted in bovine ways, without knowing, to force us to reckon with the very industry that has alienated them from their natural habitat. In the literature on agribusiness, animals are considered through the lens of the very industries that control them—as constant capital, subject to depreciation in a capitalist calculus. American bovines, this paper argues, are agents of feedlot design, not merely raw materials that are acted upon with impunity. This paper participates in what Harriet Ritvo of MIT has termed the “animal turn.”