Paper short abstract:

Cows, victims and contributors to climate change, undergo scientific interventions for a greener future. Gene-editing and breed revival reshape their role, questioning about whose reproduction is valued. Through ethnographic research, I explore how science and technology shape cows life and death.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of continued environmental devastations, cows are viewed as both victims and contributors to climate change, leading to various technoscientific “remediation” projects, done in the name of the “ecological transition”. I examine how cows’ bodies become sites of intervention for environmental engineering, particularly through reproductive technologies, shaping life and death in pursuit of a greener future.

Firstly, based on my ethnographic research in a reproductive biology laboratory, I explore routine procedures involving gene-editing technologies aiming to enhance cattle resilience to heat as part of a project to “adapt” cattle to climate change. I follow two researchers who nurture gene-edited embryos made of discarded oocytes from slaughtered cows, before putting them to waste. In this “biopolitics” out of “necropolitics”, whose reproduction is valued and maintained?

Secondly, I observe a collaboration between geneticists and local farmers in Western France to “revive” a specific breed, the “Bleues de Bazougers”, which nearly disappeared due to post-World War II breed standardization policies, while being now claimed to be more “resilient”. What happens when some breeds – and not others – are forbidden to reproduce, which worlds disappear with them?

By articulating these two versions of “the cow of the future” across different sites and temporalities, I show cows’ death and loss are made and unmade through science and technology. These interventions highlight the complex dynamics shaping the ecological and agricultural landscape, as I ask whose futures they are accountable for.