Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals: Addressing Alienation in the Dairy Sector

Abstract

We extend social theory to farm animals in an attempt to illustrate how non‐human animals embedded in social systems can be examined using sociological concepts. Inspired by efforts to include the freedom to express natural behaviour in farm animal welfare standards, we apply Marx's conception of alienation to dairy cows. We first examine industrial dairy farm conditions and find that these systems result in the distortion of life and the suppression of physical and social needs. We then explore alienation in an alternative production system where cows graze on pasture and choose when to be milked by robotic milking machines. Based on farm visits and interviews with farmers, we find that this alternative system addresses several aspects of alienation found in industrial dairy farms. However, despite the benefits associated with alternative production systems, forms of alienation will persist in all systems where maximising profits remains prioritised over life and wellbeing.

The Plight of the Honeybee: A Socioecological Analysis of large‐scale Beekeeping in the United States

“…Long justified by dominionism, the ideology that animals and nature in general are here for humans to manage and dispose of (Ellis ; Ellis and Irvine ; Irvine 2008), exploiting nonhuman animals is central to capitalist agriculture and generates large amount of surplus‐value through the process of converting cheap, subsidised plants into high‐value animal products (Novek ; Gunderson ; Longo and Clausen ; Carolan ). Animals are alienated (Stuart et al ) and transformed into value‐producing entities, deprived of their freedom, their bodies modified, all for ‘optimised’ production. Certain questions beyond the realm of economic instrumentality (Adorno and Horkheimer ; Scarce ; Gunderson and Stuart ; Gunderson ) become irrelevant, invisible.…”

Introducing the Ecological Explosion

“…In turn, she demonstrates how these constructions have shaped how humans interact with nonhuman animals. Canonical sociological concepts can even be appropriately applied to nonhuman animals, as Stuart, Schewe, and Gunderson (2013) demonstrate in their work on the alienation of dairy cows on industrial farms. This literature has proved and will continue to prove the importance of human society's relationship to animals.…”

Industrial Animal Agribusiness and Environmental Sociological Theory

“…Along with cultural anthropologist Barbara Noske (1997: 18-21) (see endnote 2), environmental sociologists (Benton 1993;Dickens 1996;Gunderson 2013;Stuart, Schewe, and Gunderson 2013) have extended Marx's theory of alienation across species lines in order to better understand the lives of farm animals reared in intensive operations. Although critical of Marx's conceptualization of animals in the Manuscripts, Ted Benton argued "a good deal of the content of Marx's contrast between a fulfilled or emancipated human life, and a dehumanised, estranged existence can also be applied in an analysis of the conditions imposed by intensive rearing regimes in the case of nonhuman animals" (Benton 1993: 59).…”

“…They live in order to sustain a system that stunts and damages their livelihood (for nuanced accounts of the conceptual and analytical issues of understanding food animals as alienated beings, see Gunderson 2013: 265-66;Stuart, Schewe, and Gunderson 2013: 206-7). Drawing on these theoretical insights, Stuart, Schewe, and Gunderson (2013) conducted a study in the Netherlands and Denmark, detailing whether or not pasture-based, robotic-milking systems (grazing-robotic systems) can minimize the alienation experienced by dairy cows in confined, intensive operations. They argued that in confined systems, dairy cows are indeed alienated from their product, productive activity, "species-being" (when understood as a flourishing life free from exploitation), and fellow animals.…”