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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Turkey’s live cattle imports to discuss the significance of nonhuman animal bodies and their metabolic capacities not only as nodes in more-than-human entanglements but as entities subsumed under capitalist relations of production for their value-generating labor.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I propose that in order to critically analyze interspecies relations and acknowledge often violent and exploitative implications of economies of scale for nonhuman animals, we need to turn to the nonhuman animal body not only as a node in more-than-human entanglements, but as an entity subsumed under relations of production for their value-generating capacity. To unpack the specific value production processes in which nonhuman animals are involved, I focus on Turkey’s ‘cheap meat policy’ and live cattle imports. Using my ethnographic fieldwork on live cattle imports in Turkey, I document the significance of bodily, particularly metabolic, capacities of nonhuman animals in both catering to and challenging the organization of live trade. I argue that the viability and profitability of the live trade, hence the production of ‘cheap meat’ as the expected output of the live trade, is possible in relation to the unaccounted-for form of labor, metabolic labor (Beldo 2017; Wadiwel 2023), that the living bodies of animals generate. Acknowledgement of this usurped and unaccounted-for labor is essential not only for critiquing exploitative economies of scale, but also for rethinking multispecies ethnography in a critical way attuned to the operations of the Animal Industrial Complex (Noske 1989; Twine 2012).