Paper short abstract:

Dangerous microbes (pathogens and super bugs) signify a 'wildness' that arises out of and threatens industrial livestock farming and public health. We investigate the spatial flow of dangerous microbes in producing proteins in and outside of the farm and their affective presence in calculating risk.

Paper long abstract:

Supplying national and international markets with animal proteins via industrial agriculture has produced unintended by-products of uncontrollable pathogens and drug-resistant microbes. Microbial agents indifferently transgress species' boundaries and, by doing so, elude the traditional domestic/wild dichotomy. While microbial populations make use of natural infrastructures (water, air) and (non-)human host bodies to pass on resistance genes, compartmentalized breeding, production and slaughter operations prevent the next generation of livestock from inheriting their own responsive defence mechanisms. Therefore, the overly crowded monospecies production of industrial animal agriculture provides a petri dish for potentially dangerous microbial life to burn through populations and potentially emerge more lethal as they spill over into adjacent ecosystems. Our ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in India and Germany analyzes the spatialization processes of such 'microbial geographies', by observing more-than-human actors in and around livestock farming that co-produce 'wild' and 'unruly' conditions of life that threaten the health of publics and the security of animal protein supply chains. We suggest that these human-animal-microbial commons are neither competitive nor collaborative and are often the result of calculated risks in the production process.