Paper short abstract:

Intensive bovine breeding practices compromise animal and environmental health and have fuelled breed and bloodline extinctions. Australian heritage breed farmers exemplify an alternative model, foregrounding love within a politics of conservation that seeks to safeguard agrobiodiversity health.

Paper long abstract:

‘Domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled’, observes Anna Tsing (2012: 141). While for millennia humans and livestock have largely enjoyed mutualistic relationships, in recent decades the dynamic has shifted towards domination, with the livestock industry exploiting animals as unidimensional commodities. Within the neoliberal focus on increasing performance for economic gain, cattle have been divided into dairy or beef breeds, and selectively bred for milk volume, or rapid growth and muscling, respectively. Production increases have been extraordinary, yet have come at a cost to animal welfare, agrobiodiversity and the environment. Biodiversity is critical for health at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels, yet the homogenisation of bovine bloodlines has resulted in the extinction of 184 cattle breeds globally, with many more under threat.

In response, Australian heritage breed cattle farmers are working hard to preserve the old breeds, whose bloodlines and histories are enmeshed with their own. Living interdependently, often over generations, results in strong emotive ties with animals, who heritage breed farmers consider family, even while they instrumentalise their bodies to support their livelihoods and breed conservation. In this paper, I explore the animal health and ecological detriments of intensive breeding practices, and suggest heritage breed farmers exemplify an alternative to the dominant mastery model. I argue that their love for their particular breeds and bloodlines is proving the cornerstone of breed conservation in Australia, providing a key safeguard for healthy agrobiodiversity into the future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines a metabolic ecology through which alpacas are entangled to human and potato in the Andean highland. The metabolic intimacies between plants and animals in the potato domestication center offers new insights on the meaning of in-situ conservation in the pursuit of sumaj kawsay.

Paper long abstract:

In its Peruvian center of domestication, potato offers a rich diet to its growers, making it a vital companion in the pursuit of sumaj kawsay (quechua, good life). A few so-called “improved” breeds introduced through agricultural development policies have been included in the local biota, but hundreds of native varieties are still cultivated in the richest soils of the higher plots, where Green Revolution packages are inefficient. This tuberous cornucopia famously offers a complete diet for human beings, if complemented with minor animal protein intake.

Animal contribution is crucial for a good life in ayllu (agricultural community) for yet another, less noticed, reason: their faeces. Called papa mikunan (potato’s food), they offer a necessary manure for tuberous flourishing. Herding, however, requires daily husbandry year-round; a commitment jeopardized by growers’ seasonal migration to earn wages. This paper outlines a vulnerable metabolic ecology through which alpacas are entangled to human and potato in the reproduction of the ayllu.

At the turn of the century, international institutions for the conservation of agrobiodiversity launched a shift from ex situ genetic banking to the conservation of plants in their ecological milieu. With these international institutions trumpeting the potato as a strategic crop to achieve food security in marginal communities, conservation initiatives have multiplied in Tuberosum domestication center. Looking at the metabolic intimacies between plants and animals in this agrobiodiversity hotspot offers new insights on the meaning of in-situ conservation policies in the pursuit of sumaj kawsay.

Paper short abstract:

Eating well among families who depended on home-rearing for nutritional sustenance in rural Egypt entails caring for an animal as it grows and killing it as rapidly and painlessly as possible to care for a family through serving the animal as wholesome, trusted, and delicious meat.

Paper long abstract:

In rural Egypt, women farmers reared animals in their household to feed their families or to sell them in markets or through merchants. Beginning in May 2021, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork among different families in a village on the Nile's Delta in Egypt, exploring how animals became meat and how women farmers related to the animals they rear as they nurtured, killed, and ate them. These animals include chickens, goats, and rabbits, and are kept on rooftops, in courtyards, or in shared open enclosures. Alongside men, women farmers typically work land that they own, or on agricultural land for modest daily wages. Beside agriculture, only women farmers rear animals as food for their household. Care is essential to rearing animals, but it is a caring that began with the inevitability of killing. In other words, women cared for animals while fully realizing and envisioning the end in mind: killing animals to feed families. In most cases, it is women who rear and kill these animals and home-rearing is how women feed their families and eat “well”, a descriptor that I explore in this essay through paying closer attention to the human-animal relationship through which animals become meat and through comparing home-reared meat to store-bought. In my field-site, eating well always involved home-reared animals, cared-for and well-fed by women without pesticides or antibiotics, an alternative to the otherwise cheap, frozen, and imported subsidized meat.

Paper short abstract:

In the recent past outbreaks( Lassa fever, Ebola,COVID-19), there has been wide-scale investments in disease surveillance and veterinary training in Sierra Leone. In the paper, I argue that these investments in surveillance are limited in the sense that they still lack reach and capacity.

Paper long abstract:

Animal Health is Human Health: changing multispecies relationships in the context of new zoonotic disease surveillance systems and increased veterinary capacity in Sierra Leone

By

Tommy Matthew Hanson

School of Social Science and Law Njala University

In the recent past, outbreaks such as Lassa fever, Ebola, and COVID-19 have claimed the lives of many people and exposed the fragile nature of the health system in Sierra Leone. A significant legacy, particularly since the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic, has been wide-scale investments in disease surveillance and veterinary training.

While much has been written about the failure of humanitarian agencies and people’s experiences during pandemics, minimal attention has been given to the longer-term legacies of pandemic recovery. In particular, in Sierra Leone, we need to know more about how new kinds of surveillance systems, growing veterinary capacity, and community involvement with these initiatives are playing out. This paper explores how these initiatives are changing the way people live their everyday lives, including how people engage with a health system with new priorities and concerns, and how livelihood activities involving animals are changing as a result.

In the paper, I argue that these investments in surveillance and veterinary medicine are limited in the sense that they still lack reach and capacity, but where communities are engaging with them, they are making a profound impact on the way that people understand multi-species health and use animals in their livelihoods.

Paper short abstract:

Through the usage of the knife Kisu, and the building, this ethnography shows the experience of Elakat, Bukavu's slaughterhouse, and its more-than-human inhabitants of an unhealthy ecology made up of failed institutions, unregulated practices, revisions of health, and economic insecurity.

Paper long abstract:

“Here the meat isn't bad because the animals are inspected by vets (…)”. Over my three months of fieldwork I followed the transformation of cows into meat “fit for human consumption” at Elakat, the public slaughterhouse in Bukavu, South-Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of a multidisciplinary project on emerging infectious diseases -RESOH-LABO-, I am exploring killing, health and human-cow livelihoods in the slaughterhouse. My ethnographic attention on human-animal livelihoods focuses on the knife used to kill and inspect meat, the Kisu, and the building, the slaughterhouse, a vestige of colonisation and of ways of existing and killing. The knife in this context appears as the object that crosses social groups, expertise, species and health. First as the object of “undoing” life and the animal; it also is the tool for veterinary inspection and regularization for meat ; or the tool by which people get by through carving oneself a “salary” from slaughtered animals. Elakat, built in 1955 was intended to provide westerners with meat from the ranches in the countryside. Since independence, the building has been left deteriorating. Without fences and with rapid urbanisation, the interface where human and animal meet is transformed, and health and hygiene are being renegotiated. If slaughterhouses can be good examples of " unhealthy ecologies ", this ethnography shows that they are made up of failed institutions, unregulated practices, revisions of health, economic insecurity and intimate encounters between people, cows and pathogens.

Paper short abstract:

This article is concerned with the circulations of piscine animals – both dead and alive, with human experience of crisis / time, and with the character of the divine under terraqueous capitalism in Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

This article is concerned with the circulations of piscine animals – both dead and alive, with human experience of crisis / time, and with the character of the divine under terraqueous capitalism in Senegal. It weaves together an anthropological account of the unhealthy making of an Afropolitan piscine commodity, keccax bu amul xorom – a non-salted species of smoked and dried fish – at one locale on the Senegalese Atlantic seaboard, where decades of protracted fisheries extractivism and the violence it brings about have long rendered crisis into a permanent condition. Grounded in an ethnographic description of the everyday materiality of the crisis at a site placed under the sign of fish, this article sketches the history and current production politics of this charismatic yet astonishingly spectral commodity. Bringing Jacques Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx into conversation with Achille Mbembe’s (2002) invitation to read (African) ‘subjectivity as time’ (p. 242), I argue for a refined understanding of the (commodified) animal as time. The corollary of this proposition is that anthropological accounts of contemporary human experiences of time under capitalism on the continent should take (more) seriously the entanglement of humans with nonhuman animals and their cyclical absences and presences; a concern which political ecology has yet to better engage in critiques of the devastating relations between capitalism and nature. The article concludes with remarks about the (im)possible extinction of piscine animals in postcolonial ruins placed under the sign of the divine.

Paper short abstract:

Livestock diseases are targeted not only through globalised forms of governance but also technical practices of meat processing. In Mongolia, where livestock diseases have posed a barrier to export, such practices facilitate the export of meat to China, but also generate distinctive anxieties.

Paper long abstract:

The threat posed by the spread of livestock diseases is increasingly addressed through globally-circulating forms of governance which target rural populations in developing countries. Scholars have critiqued how such initiatives restructure rural lives and livelihoods on the periphery in the interests of securing the livelihoods of farmers in the global north. But much of the cross border trade in livestock and meat takes place between countries outside the global north, and is subject to specific national regulations and bilateral agreements.

Mongolia is today seeking to export more meat, particularly to its southern neighbour China, as it attempts to diversity its economy away from mining, though the prevalence of livestock diseases in a country where mobile pastoralism predominates poses a significant obstacle to this development path. International organisations have initiated programmes which aim to address the problem of livestock diseases by targeting and transforming pastoralists. However, China’s demand for Mongolian meat is such that an interim workaround has been found. Livestock production itself is left alone, but sheep and goat meat is heat-treated in Chinese-run factories in periurban Ulaanbaatar before crossing the border.

This paper situates this particular biosecurity practice in cultural, historical and political context. It shows how this apparently mundane technical practice has generated intense anxieties in the Mongolian capital, as concerns about urban food supply and safety articulate with longstanding fears over Chinese influence. The paper thus argues for attention to the ways in which particular, situated sociotechnical arrangements shape the geopolitics of biosecurity beyond global north/south binaries.

Paper short abstract:

Newly proliferating pests threaten smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Western Kenya. In this context, intensified agrochemical use emerges as a default solution, but also raises questions about the cost, both in terms of economic sustainability and long-term health.

Paper long abstract:

“Fall armyworm is everywhere.” During my fieldwork with smallholder farmers in Western Kenya in 2019 on pesticide use, I heard this refrain repeatedly. That year I did not come across a single plot under cultivation that had not been ‘invaded’ by this moth species: having only arrived in 2017, it reduced maize harvests overall by a third in 2019, and even up to 58% in some places, impacting most negatively on smallholder farmers (De Groote et al. 2020; Kansiime, Rwomushana, and Mugambi 2023). While the outbreak seemed sudden, I argue that the conditions for it were created over centuries of intensifying global connections, colonial policy, and capitalist modes of production. I show how a higher intensity and lower diversity of crop cultivation, and of maize in particular, contributes to a vulnerable ecology that resembles larger-scale monocropping, but without the techniques, inputs, or scale that create the profit margins of cash cropping – creating a partial plantation condition with its attendant impacts on human and environmental health. Staying close to farmers’ perspectives, I take pests as novel ‘monsters,’ analysing how these ecological shifts of the Anthropocene are tied to the accelerations of imperialism and industry and can be read in landscape disturbances, processes of ruination, and feral proliferations (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019). Newly proliferating pests threatened farmers’ livelihoods; In this context, intensified agrochemical use emerged as a default solution, but also raised questions about the cost, both in terms of economic sustainability and long-term health.

Paper short abstract:

Communities in Busia practice socio-economic activities that increase human, animal and vector interactions, exposing individuals and their livestock to risk of trypanosomiasis. Questions arise concerning access to livelihoods and multi-species well-being in a changing economic contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Small scale farming in form of livestock and crop production is the main livelihood practiced in Busia County. Different types of animals and birds are kept for varied socio-cultural and economic purposes. These socio-economic activities increase human, animal and vector interactions, exposing individuals and their livestock to risk of contracting trypanosomiasis, a zoonotic disease transmitted by tsetse flies, creating an impediment to agricultural production and affecting human and livestock health. Possible disease control measures present a classical conflict arising from antagonistic interactions between environment, vector, wildlife and human activities. Destruction of tsetse habitats, elimination of wildlife reservoir hosts for the deadly parasites was opposed by environmentalists and conservationists. Localized methods considered to have less environmental effects and easier to use by farmers are propagated. Farmers have to change livestock management practices to protect cattle against trypanosomiasis by regularly spraying and using trypanocidal drugs. The disease-causing pathogens infect multiple species forcing the farmers to make the hard choices on animal species to treat or spray with their meagre resources. The excessive and uncontrollable use of antimicrobial and acaricides builds up drug resistance as some find their ways into the environment and water bodies. Tsetse and trypanosomosis eradication remains elusive as the pathogen exists in a species that serves as a ‘reservoir’ for future infections and game reservoirs continue to serve as the greatest habitat for tsetse. The limited options available to farmers reveals the serious questions at stake in terms of access to livelihoods and multi-species wellbeing in changing economic contexts.

Paper short abstract:

In post-war Sierra Leone, improved rural-urban connectivity has streamlined market access and stimulated an intensification of hunting activities. We explore the interplay between market forces, technological advancements, and changing hunting practices in the Sierra Leonean context.

Paper long abstract:

In Sierra Leone, the hunting and trapping of wild animals are activities that have played a key role in rural life for generations. As important forms of pest control, they have long complemented agricultural activities and provided rural dwellers with an additional source of protein and vital nutrition. Increasingly, however, rural-urban connectivity achieved in the post-war period has streamlined market access to enable hunters to supply urban markets more quickly and readily using motorcycle taxi transport. We observe a shift as more and more hunters transition to market-oriented, profit-driven activities. Trappers and hunters report making greater use of materials produced outside of the community, making hunting easier and faster. Wider access to mobile phones has also enabled hunters to arrange sales with distant customers located in urban centres even prior to leaving the village. As both physical and digital isolation has reduced, bushmeat has thus increasingly become a commodity sold for profit, leading to an intensification of hunting activities. Interestingly, in this context, some younger hunters report giving lower importance to the performance of pre-hunting rituals as they increasingly engage in hunting activities to earn ‘fast money’. In this talk, we aim to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between market forces, technological advancements, and hunting practices, shedding light on the broader implications of these transformations in the Sierra Leonean context. This ethnographic account highlights the need for thinking in new ways about changing multi-species livelihoods in different socioeconomic contexts.