Paper short abstract:

While killability defines porcine and bovine lives (Buller 2015), how animals die nevertheless is an important concern on farms. How vets working in the dairy and pork industry valued animals' death, was shaped by the degree of control over, and economic valuation of, farm animal life and death.

Paper long abstract:

Killing has been described as an important form of care for veterinarians that is nevertheless imbued with ambivalences and ethical dilemmas (Hurn & Badman-King 2019; Law 2010; Morris 2012). In this paper, I explore veterinary care and modes of killing in the livestock production industry – specifically, dairy and pork production. Livestock production complicates an understanding of life as linearly ending in death; instead, death is folded into farm animal life in complicated ways. While killability thus defines porcine and bovine lives (Buller 2015), how animals die nevertheless emerges as an important matter of concern on the farm.

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021 with veterinarians performing clinical and advisory work on farms in the Netherlands. I show how the potential of the animal to have value to society decides which deaths constitute a ‘waste’ and where killing is legitimate. At the same time, the horizon of the animals’ certain death is often made invisible on the farm. For vets, moreover, killing is a way to prevent the possibility of animal suffering that more open-ended, uncertain futures posed. Uncontrolled and on-farm death, as opposed to controlled slaughter (Svendsen 2021: 43) that happens elsewhere, also serves as an important governance indicator of farm performance on animal welfare and biosecurity. How veterinarians valued the death of animals and their killing, was thus strongly influenced by the degree of future control over, and economic valuation of, farm animal life and death.