Animals as Sentient Commodities

Abstract

A discrepancy exists between the legal and perceived status of livestock. Legally, food animals are property, but their thing-like status is unstable and does not determine how they are perceived in practice. The extent to which food animals are regarded as commodities or sentient beings is therefore contextually contingent, oscillates, and is riddled with inconsistency. To understand livestock as a sentient commodity is to attend to, and (re)contextualize, the contradictory and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified animals in food animal productive contexts, and to how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Bringing to the fore the relatively mundane aspect of human-livestock relations not only upsets commonly held assumptions that productive animals are nothing more than mere commodities, it also highlights the non-productive aspects of stockpeople’s roles that have, to date, been typically overlooked or underexplored.

Making meat moral: A comparison of rearing and killing practices in Swedish cattle farming

“…The entrepreneurial and peasant ideal‐types reflect the contemporary (re)structurisation of cattle farming in Sweden and elsewhere in the Global North. Farms are decreasing in numbers and growing in size as more labour is automated (Swedish Board of Agriculture, 2017; Wilkie, 2017). The same holds true on the killing front: Fewer slaughterhouses are slaughtering more animals faster as technological developments increase the line speed (Hultgren, 2018).…”

Animating capital: Work, commodities, circulation

“…Moving beyond straitjackets of how marketization and alienation flatten and deaden nature into abstract objects, the former retrieved the role of embodied relations with the animal/commodity, suggesting these relations are vital for the creation of economic value (Duffy, 2014). Work on sentient commodities, predominantly focusing on livestock (Wilkie, 2005, 2015), sought to recast the commodity as one aware of its environments, corporeal sensations and relations to others, thereby foregrounding ‘empirical, attitudinal and affective elements of stockmanship’ missed out when the focus is on abstraction and exchange (Wilkie, 2015). These interventions have been critically expanded through a body of work on ‘lively commodities’, which recovers a role for nonhuman animals as active participants in co-constituting the fabric of the economic, without fetishizing the commodity all over again (Collard, 2013b; Collard and Dempsey, 2013; Barua, 2016).…”

Introduction

“…Second, it follows that we will approach animal resistance in two ways: On the one hand, resistance will be understood the way it has been theorized in cultural geography (Emel, Wilbert, and Wolch 2002;Philo and Wilbert 2004;Sharp 2000;Warkentin 2009;Wolch and Emel 1998), by some ethologists (Allen and Bekoff 1995;Bekoff 2003;2004;2010;Bekoff and Allen 1997), and by authors from less institutionalized channels such as critical and radical animal studies (Colling 2021;Hribal 2003;2011;Nibert 2002), i.e. as a form of active uncooperativeness to both the physical or metaphorical lines that humans have drawn for them.…”

“…Their own identities as workers are, thus, challenged as the satisfaction associated with their professional savoir-faire is tainted by self-doubt and philosophical considerations. This emphasis on human savoir-faire means that this collection of research articles will also explore resistance and transformation in human-animal interactions through the lens of classical and contemporary debates about commodification (Collard and Dempsey 2013; Kopytoff 2013;Macquet in Appadurai 1986;Polanyi 1944;Stuart and Gunderson 2018;Wilkie 2010;. Using these debates as theoretical frameworks will enable the contributors to this Special Issue to show that when individual humans attempt to establish what kind of commodities animals are, they provoke the latter to emerge as selves.…”

“…We will engage with a series of terms coined by academics focusing on these questions to articulate the tension between the commodified, the commodifier, the commodification ideal, and the reality of the commodification process. These terms include "sentient commodities" (Wilkie 2015), "fictitious" or "incomplete commodities" (Polanyi in Stuart and Gunderson 2018), "singularized beings" (Kopytoff 2013) and "lively commodities" (Collard and Dempsey 2013).…”