Certified Angus, Certified Patriot: Breeding, Bodies, and Pedigree Practices

Abstract

The pedigree chart is a cornerstone technology for producing bodies and value in livestock pure breeding. It organizes a cluster of processes, technologies, and discourses gathered under the rubric 'pedigree practices'. Angus breeders commonly use artificial insemination to import performance 'genetics' into their herds, using the 'expected progeny differences' predicted by massive pedigree databases that now also contain phenotype data reported by cattle growers. Discourses of biological inheritance, good breeding, and pedigrees arose in the eighteenth century, concomitant with a fascination with races, species, and other biological kinds. A case study from Angus cattle breeding illustrates pedigree practices and the bodies made through them, showing how information and computing technologies, assisted reproductive technologies, and discourses of good breeding, purity, health, and disease leveraged a single bull and the two genetic diseases he carried into the pedigrees of up to 10% of the Angus herd. Technologies now widely used in human reproductive medicine were developed for use in livestock animals, especially cattle, extending a long relationship between cows and humans. While the development of these pedigree practices represents increased control over animal reproduction and bodies, it has also been instrumental in rendering all animal bodies, including human bodies, not only more technically but also more rhetorically available for reproductive interventions. These interventions may amplify anxieties about health, species, breed, and kin while also providing opportunities for contesting the boundaries of these nature -cultural categories.

Country Life: Agricultural Technologies and the Emergence of New Rural Subjectivities

“…This research has especially explored the discourses and practices around animal bodies' ‘boosting’ through genetic techniques – techniques that are increasingly ubiquitous, being used alongside or replacing longer‐standing approaches in the evaluation of animals. Discourses of good breeding and pedigree have been prevalent in livestock farming since the eighteenth century (Calvert ), often focusing on breeding animals for particular characteristics (producing larger yields of milk or leaner meat, for instance). Conventional (non‐genetic focused) breeding has placed emphasis on the visual assessment of animals.…”

Breed wealth: Origins, encounter value and the international love of a breed

“…By constituting a complete "global pedigree tree of the purebred Icelandic horse," it effectively preserves the purity of the breed and facilitates the successful breeding of Icelandic horses in Iceland and abroad. Like livestock stud books (Calvert, 2013), this is a technology for producing the breed and for producing difference; that is, for making the breed valuable as a whole and of differentiating between horses to produce degrees of quality and the potential for breeding success. Not all Icelandic horses are valued equally.…”

The lore of low methane livestock: co-producing technology and animals for reduced climate change impact

“…As with Holloway’s ( 2004 ) pedigree breeders, Calvert ( 2013 ) emphasises the importance of the concept of 'breed’ and its social construction within cattle breeding practices in the USA. Grasseni ( 2007 ) perceptively observes the dichotomy between the need to create a 'breed’ from individual animals of similar appearance, and selecting outliers from this group to produce the next generation, emphasising specific characteristics.…”

“…They suggest that breed societies, by their actions, are also implicated in the co-production of both humans and farm animals. Calvert ( 2013 ) identifies similar practices involved in pedigree Aberdeen Angus breeding in a more industrialised context in the USA.…”