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From behind stall doors: Farming the Eastern German countryside in the animal welfare era
Focaal , 2020
Animal husbandry, a major part of the contemporary German economy, is the subject of politically and morally charged discourses about the eff ects of the industry on the nation's landscape and its role in economic globalization. German politicians and activists oft en discuss industrialized animal husbandry practices as abusive and polluting. Th is article analyzes how these debates are imbricated in forms of concern about nonhuman animals that tend to be diff erentiated geographically by urban-rural boundaries. I argue the privileging of animals as moral entities causes interpersonal friction between those who rely on animals for a living and those who do not, and expresses fundamental tensions about the rural landscape as a space of industrialized agricultural production, as opposed to a space dedicated to the conservation of the natural environment.
Nevada foothills in the USA show considerable parallels in the relationship between livestock raisers and society. This becomes evident by sketching the historic course of interactions between society and pastoralism as well as the present situation. The authors emphasize that purely economic or ecological studies of pastoralism are not sufficient to explain the characteristic features of livestock farmers. In both countries a specific livestock farming culture can be characterized by team spirit, a desire for independence from the outside world, ranch fundamentalism, and a special relationship with nature. This set of values and attitudes should be considered whenever dealing with pastoralism, whether in a scientific, political or everyday context.
Husbandry to Industry: Animal Agriculture, Ethics and Public Policy
Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 2010
The industrialisation of agriculture has led to considerable alterations at both the technological and economical levels of animal farming. Several animal welfare issues of modern animal agriculture -e.g. stress and stereotypical behaviour -can be traced back to the industrialised intensification of housing and numbers of animals in production. Although these welfare issues dictate ethical criticism, it is the claim of this article that such direct welfare issues are only the forefront of a greater systemic ethical problem inherent to industrialisation. Consequently, this article provides an analysis of the foundational ethical problems in animal agriculture which derive from (I) overly positivistic science and (II) free-market ideology. It will be argued that both these ways of thinking allow for a systematic reification and commodification of animals and that this contributes to language and attitudes which cannot encompass ethical consideration of animals.
As a top EU exporter of pork and dairy products, Germany is home to highly mechanized animal production infrastructures such as intensive animal feeding and confinement facilities and the high-throughput slaughterhouses. However, the German Federal Department of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) conceded in 2015 that the livestock sector shows undeniable deficits in animal and environmental protection. The animal welfare movement is often depicted as being cultivated away from contexts of animal use, gaining momentum in urban centers through the circulation of what are now electronically mediated and politically pointed images of suffering farm animals. Based on 20 months of ethnographic research in Thuringia, Germany, this paper traces out how industry insiders – former workers, veterinarians, and consultants – share vivid narratives and critiques of their work experiences witnessing animal suffering with each other, activists, and kin. I argue that these narratives are able not only to transfer affectively charged impressions of the functioning of animal production infrastructures to publics off the farm, but they also begin to build critique of the industry from the inside out. Although these are fragmented collectivities, composed of dispersed critics whose stories move both geographically and affectively, they point to potentially generative dimensions of the violences that the infrastructures of the meat and dairy sector have on the human beings, animals, and the environment: to de-naturalize industrialized meat production as the best way of producing nourishment, and to build common understanding as the basis for local thinking about its transformation.
Cows and capitalism: humans, animals and machines in West German barns, 1950–80
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2018
From the beginning of the 1950s, milking machines increasingly replaced former agricultural workers in West German stables who now preferred better-paid jobs in the industrial sector. The investment necessary for the milking machines led to new ideas about economic thinking and production-optimization, which changed the interplay among human, animal and technology. Within less than two decades, cattle farming in the Federal Republic of Germany changed from an animal-lacking, devastated economic branch of manual labour to a mechanized profit-oriented industry, which produced more than was demanded. This essay challenges the prevailing historical interpretation in which the industrialization of farming has been described as one of the last stages of capitalism’s penetration of society. Central aspects of capitalism remained unfulfilled: there was neither a free market nor individual autonomy of entrepreneurs, and wage labour literally vanished within the barns. A close-up view of the practices at the place of action reveals an arbitrary mixture of efficiency and care that made the industrialization of animal farming differ from the traditional narrative of capitalistic expansion. When animals are the resources to be utilized, capitalist economic activity reaches its limits at the point where the animals’ vital processes begin to malfunction. By bringing together human-animal studies with economic history, this article offers new insights into the role of animals as living beings in history as well as into the expansion of capitalism in an economic sector that continued to operate according to its own rules.
Geography, Science, and Subjectivity: Farm Animal Welfare in the United States and Europe
Geography Compass, 2013
In the US and Europe, factory farm animal welfare has become a matter of significant public concern, leading to increased scientific research on animal welfare in order to guide public policy. In both locations, scientific opinion is growing that farm animals' welfare is directly related to their capacities for subjective experiences and, as a result, increased research is on cognition, behavior, and emotions. The geography of science and animal geography literatures have broadly examined, respectively but with overlap, the social construction of scientific knowledge and ideas about animal subjectivity. This article argues that these literatures should be further employed to better understand the current construction and social negotiation of the concept of farm animal welfare in Europe and particularly in the US, specifically through the exploration of three significant spaces of knowledge production: the geopolitical environments of the US and Europe, the particular scientific research spaces, and animal spaces or the ''locations'' of their subjectivity.