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Short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with veterinarians on Dutch dairy farms, this paper analyses different modes of killing and dying for farm animals, how these matter, and how they are evaluated. It highlights veterinary care as a crucial node where different values at stake around animal farming are negotiated.

Long abstract:

While killability arguably defines farm animals’ lives (Buller 2015), following livestock veterinarians reveals that how animals die nevertheless emerges as an important matter of concern on farms. In this paper, drawing on fieldwork with veterinarians on dairy farms in the Netherlands, I tease out different modes of killing and dying for farm animals, how these matter, and how they are evaluated. I show how the potential of the animal to have value to society shapes which deaths constitute a ‘waste’ and where killing is legitimate. At the same time, killing forecloses the possibility of more open-ended, uncertain futures that promise further economic gain, but risk animal suffering. 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. Rather than staging vets as powerful biopolitical agents that shape the politics and governance of human and farm animal life in the Dutch bio-economy, the ethnography emphasizes how both veterinary practice and killability are shaped by what I call the ‘value-scapes’ of livestock production; these comprise the financial and personal relations between the farmer and veterinarian, legislation, regulations and industry incentives, as well as the socio-material infrastructure of the food chain. The offered analytical perspective highlights veterinary care as a crucial node where the different values at stake around animal farming, and the different guises of farm animals (as meat, food producer, disease carrier and companion), come together and are negotiated.

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Short abstract:

Veterinary medicine is embedded in complex and ambivalent human-animal relationships. This talk explores the work of death in different veterinary worlds, focusing on their relationships and boundaries. It identifies "good" killing as a professional norm.

Long abstract:

Veterinary medicine's embeddedness in the complex and often conflicted human-animal relationship presents the profession with a multi-contextuality and a significant challenge. The purpose of this talk is to explore this complexity by analyzing a central activity within the veterinary profession: the killing of animals. Veterinary practice involves not only curing and caring, but also the task of ending an animal's life. It involves a variety of methods, technologies, and ethical considerations. This diversity is evident in different veterinary fields, where different forms of killing intersect and diverge.

Using the social world-arena mapping of situational analysis (Clarke et al. 2018), it examines the interconnections and boundaries between three key practices (euthanasia, slaughter, and termination) and three veterinary worlds (companion animals, livestock, and laboratory animals). Drawing on a dataset of 17 semi-structured interviews with veterinarians from different fields in Germany, as well as relevant documents, this research illuminates the multifaceted realities of veterinary killing.

By analyzing the complex ecology of humans, animals, and killing practices, the professional pursuit of "good" killing emerges as a boundary object across worlds. It becomes a fixed yet flexible normative anchor for a shared professional identity.

Ultimately, this research underscores the need for comparative and contextual analyses to deepen our understanding of the meaning of these practices in veterinary medicine and their implications for veterinary professionalism.

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Short abstract:

This paper draws on sociological studies of diagnostic practice in human medicine and compares veterinarians’ diagnostic practices and management of infections in individual animals and groups of animals repectively.

Long abstract:

Diagnosis is at the heart of medical practice. While diagnostic practice in human medicine is relatively well-studied, the knowledge of veterinarian practice is limited. In particular, little is known on how veterinarians’ diagnostic practices differ between animals that are related to at the group level and animals who are related to as individuals. This paper draws on sociological studies of diagnostic practice in human medicine and compares veterinarians’ diagnostic practices and management of infections, including decisions on antimicrobial prescription or other measures for managing disease, in dairy cattle and poultry. I argue that the focus on individuals and flocks interacts with different knowledge practices, which differentially shape diseases as phenomena. Cattle veterinarians’ diagnostic practice aims at identifying and managing disease in individual animals – which might or might not be deemed killable, due to their anticipated future productivity. While the locus of disease in a bovine body is potentially certain, the same body is also a source of uncertainty. By contrast, diagnostic practice for poultry aims at identifying disease in a flock – individual animals can then, through their positions as killable, be known more or less in full. However, these individual animals only give clues about disease in the flock, which means that the precise locus of disease seldom can be definitely established.

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Short abstract:

The current development of preventive approaches to animal health is related to a profound transformation of veterinary expertise, which is observable both through the emergence of new medical practices and of new business models that can economically support these practices.

Long abstract:

Over the past 10 years, veterinarians have drastically reduced their prescription of antibiotics in order to contribute to the fight against antimicrobial resistance. This objective has mainly been achieved thanks to new forms of regulation of the veterinary drug market: monitoring of prescriptions, obligation to perform sensitivity tests, dissemination of prescription guidelines and, last but not least, control of antibiotics prices and interdiction of back margins in antibiotic sales. These transformations have fostered the development of new professional and economic models in veterinary medicine, namely preventive approaches which are currently extending veterinary expertise towards new areas (nutrition, hygiene, biosecurity) and allow in the same time practitioners to diversify their source of incomes.

This paper is based on 32 interviews and about 20h of ethnographic observations of veterinarians working in the pig and poultry industry, in Western France. It describes these two sides of preventive approaches to animal health that have contributed to the decrease of antimicrobial use in livestock. First, how veterinarians’ practices are evolving from a medical perspective: news tools, forms of knowledge and professional roles emerge in veterinary activity that could be described as a process of protocolization of care. Second, how veterinary activity is also transformed from an economic and organizational perspective: new business models and forms of veterinary companies support the development of these preventive services. In total, we observe a profound transformation of the veterinary profession that starts to be dominated by large corporate groups driving this medical and economic shift of veterinary expertise.

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Long abstract:

Xenotransplantation science is an experimental field where scientists aim to use gene-edited (GE) pigs as “organ suppliers” for humans needing transplantation. In Germany where I conduct fieldwork, xenotransplantation is still in the proof-of-concept stage, meaning that scientists are carrying out experiments to prove that GE porcine biomaterials could be biomedical therapies for humans. This science depends upon creating, caring for, experimenting upon, and killing GE pigs. The actors responsible for these tasks are mainly livestock veterinarians who have been hired to work at biotechnology research facilities. However, as trained livestock – namely pig – veterinarians, they did not necessarily envision themselves working in experimental animal science.

In this talk, I’ll showcase how livestock veterinarians come to find themselves situated in xenotransplantation science, how they make sense of their roles, and what types of subjectification processes (Sigl 2019) they experience. Through ethnographic research, I trace how livestock veterinarians both enjoy their work in xenotransplantation science but simultaneously question their position within an interdisciplinary and hierarchical scientific structure. While some claim, “I’m just a stupid pig vet!” others feel they are “100% scientists.” What emerges from my analysis is how a nuanced combination of socioeconomic and political factors in both agriculture and research influences my interlocutors’ decisions to enter xenotransplantation science. Consequently, their transition from livestock (pig) practices into the research sector points to a broader phenomenon in Germany, namely a lack of rural livestock veterinarians. To conclude, I question: how are livestock veterinarians valued in contemporary sectors like agriculture and research?

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Long abstract:

In Yakutia, in the Russian Federation, the reindeer-breeding Eveny practise various forms of husbandry, more or less, depending on the village, linked to or detached from regional power.

However, whether in independent communities or state-run enterprises, the laws of Yakutia impose strict veterinary controls, on which, according to the government, the good health of the animals and consumers and optimum management of the pastures depend.

However, not all livestock farmers, although obliged to comply with the law, see their work in this way, and have conflicts, often discreet, with the veterinary technicians responsible for examining their herds.

This mistrust has been present in Siberia for a long time, and has its roots in the Soviet period, when traditional reindeer husbandry was rethought. The aim here is to show the different ways in which veterinary science was imposed by the Soviet authorities in order to modernise the indigenous populations, who were considered to have archaic ways of doing things. However, while this pattern offered an arena for conflict, it is surprising to note that in the end the veterinarians also learned from the livestock farmers. This led to questioning on both sides for a time. In spite of this, this bio-power is now more pressing, with a desire for control seen as increasingly important by Evens breeders.

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Long abstract:

This paper is about a veterinary fence in northern Botswana. Veterinarians consider the fence necessary to prevent the transmission of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) from buffalo (considered the FMD reservoir host) to cattle. The fence also separates a wildlife area from a communal farming area. This separation therefore does more than just prevent disease transmission; it also prevents people and their livestock from entering the wildlife area, and it prevents wildlife species other than buffalo from crossing over to the communal area. However, the fence does not prevent elephants from crossing, and they cause damage to the fence to such extent that currently the fence cannot be effectively maintained. By doing so, elephants challenge human practices of ordering multispecies coexistence and force stakeholders to envisage alternative futures. This paper therefore considers the ways in which veterinarians, conservationists and farmers make sense of the elephants’ agency, and what they think should happen to the fence. While all three stakeholder groups are concerned with mobility across the fence, they are concerned with different species and different directions (communal into wildlife area vs. wildlife into communal area). Consequently, the groups suggest different ways forward. At the same time, the stakeholder groups also partially share some of each other’s concerns, and are internally not always unified. What does this ambivalence mean for veterinary worlding? What kind of governance arrangements bolster rather than suppress this ambivalence, and how can it be made actionable? To answer these questions, this paper will draw on a variety of literatures across multispecies anthropology, health geography and feminist STS.

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Long abstract:

Since 2007, African Swine Fever (ASF), an economically disastrous epidemic affecting domestic and wild pigs, has spread across Eurasia. By 2017 it reached the Czech Republic, where concerted veterinary-state efforts (temporarily) eradicated it. Here double-fenced zoning, with boar shot outside the core zone, led to a “veterinarization of multispecies coexistence” (Broz et al. 2021). Other modalities of veterinarization ranged from merciless and chaotic culling, as in Poland, to patrolling the boundaries of forests where sick animals retreated, as in Lithuania or Hungary. Serbian veterinarians attended EU-financed ASF workshops since 2019. But when an outbreak finally occurred in the National Park Đerdap (NP) in Eastern Serbia in 2021, the professionals were disunited. The experienced NP’s game manager, a veterinary by training who leaned towards Czech or Polish modalities and advocated consulting a respected Serbian wildlife epidemiologist (but not member of the governing parties), was overruled. Fencing the area seemed too expensive to the Ministry; and enrolling private veterinary practitioners in intensive monitoring schemes seemed inopportune to the veterinary inspectors. Instead, the incident was downplayed, and the Lithuanian-Hungarian approach inauspiciously adapted to the much denser forests of the NP. Despite otherwise favorable environmental conditions – given the natural barriers of the Danube to the North and steep mountains to the West – the virus could not be contained. The case study exemplarily shows how veterinary worlds depend on situated epistemological negotiations over which knowledge practices to adopt and how to translate them in multispecies relations and in fields of power across scales.