A necessary evil? Examining the complexities of care and commodification

Abstract

In this article, I draw on a case study of interviews with Ontario grass-fed beef farmers about cow welfare and theorize these using the analytics of animal geographies and biopolitics. I engage with the former's work on animal agency and subjectivity, and the latter's focus on animal commodification, showing how welfare practices impact cows’ subjectivities, agencies, bodies, and interrelations. I make clear that cows exercise agency in their relationships with farmers, despite and in response to the different forms of governance that shape cows’ welfare and relationships with farmers. Analyzing welfare practices as different forms of biopower, I show how cows’ liveliness impacts their commodity value and describe the contexts in which farmers build emotional and disciplinary connections to cows. Central to my argument is that cows’ subjective and agentic features complement and complicate their commodification. Fusing animal geographies and biopolitics, I extend my analysis of cow welfare into a discussion of the emotional, economic, and ethically complex relationships between farmers and cows. Lastly, I contribute to emerging debates in literature on the complexities of caring and killing in human-animal relations through my analyses of welfare as an avenue for exploring the function of care, commodification, and killing in farmer-cow relations. Attending to these complexities, I argue, disrupts fixed logic about the ethics of animal production, while prompting us to rethink the way we relate with animals we call food.