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- Convenors:
-
Else Vogel
(University of Amsterdam)
Camille Bellet (The University of Manchester)
Eimear Mc Loughlin (Aarhus University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Animal farming is in crisis. While alternatives are often imagined outside intensive systems, the economic and productive pressures of industrial agriculture create a sense that “there is no alternative”. This panel explores how alternatives are imagined, enacted, and suspended within the sector.
Description
Industrial animal agriculture is facing numerous crises – zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance, climate change, labour precarity, and animal suffering(1-3). While “alternative” human-animal relations are imagined outside industrial systems, e.g. biodynamic farming, animal sanctuaries (4) or peasant ecologies (5), such imaginaries of multispecies co-existence hit up against an industry where economic valuation and tight margins often produce a sense that “there is no alternative”.
We invite contributions that interrogate how change emerges as “otherwise” and when it operates as adaptive continuity, e.g., legislation, audit, and valuation devices that stabilise business-as-usual. How are alternatives performed – through knowledge practices, experimentation, narratives, and infrastructural redesign – and what are the social and political stakes of presenting something as different? (6) What temporalities and futuring techniques (technologies, roadmaps, milestones) enact a notion that things are changing, and how do these unfold in care practices, risk management and audit? In turn, how does the absence of an alternative come about?
Centring human-animal relations, we welcome ethnographies, historical analyses, multimodal engagements, and collaborative approaches focusing on specific problems (animal wellbeing, emissions, disease, labour conditions, farm digitalisation) or on industry actors charged with improvement, including veterinarians, scientists, regulators, farmers, and animals.
1Hinchliffe, S. 2022. Postcolonial Global Health, Post-Colony Microbes and Antimicrobial Resistance. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(3), 145-168.
2Porcher, J. 2011. The Relationship Between Workers and Animals in the Pork Industry: A Shared Suffering. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 24(1), 3-17.
3Blanchette, A. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Duke University Press.
4Abrell, E. 2021. Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care. Minnesota University Press.
5Martín, R. I., & Mol, A. 2022. Joaquín les gusta: On Gut-Level Love for a Lamb of the House. Ethnos, 89(4), 723-740.
6MacKay, C. 2023. Grass-Fed Beef, Alterity, and Care: Complicating Food Binaries, Relations, and Practices. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 36(2), 1–17.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper compares hunting, organic farming, and animal rights activism as “livestock-politicizing scenes” that articulate alternatives to industrial animal agriculture. It analyzes how they critique intensive farming, imagine utopias, and reproduce or challenge dominant human–animal relations.
Paper long abstract
In the face of multiple crises surrounding industrial animal agriculture, diverse actors articulate alternatives that promise more ethical, sustainable, and responsible human–animal relations. This paper examines how such alternatives are imagined, performed, and contested across three “livestock-politicizing scenes”: hunting, organic agriculture, and animal rights activism. Drawing on qualitative narrative interviews and group discussions, it analyzes how each scene constructs an “otherwise” to intensive animal farming and how participants understand their practices as both critique and alternative.
At first glance, these scenes seem fundamentally opposed. Animal rights activists call for the abolition of all animal use; most hunters kill animals in their leisure time; and organic farmers aim to improve rather than abolish livestock farming by making animals’ lives “a little better.” Yet all three articulate strong critiques of intensive animal agriculture and foreground animal wellbeing as a central concern. Their strategies differ: activists seek to “veganize” society to reach a political critical mass; hunters frame the killing of free-ranging animals as the only ethical way to consume meat; and organic farmers emphasize everyday care work and improved labour conditions.
These positions rest on distinct utopian horizons and ontologies of humans and non-human animals. By comparing them, the paper argues that alternatives emerge not only as radical breaks but also as recalibrations of nature-culture in pratices such as use, care, and killing. Understanding the underlying human–animal imaginaries within these scenes is crucial for grasping where transformative potential unfolds, and where ideological commitments may ultimately lead to an adaptation to continuity.
Paper short abstract
Virtual fencing promises to harmonize human-animal interactions by installing a data-driven mobility infrastructure on the pasture. This contribution critically examines these promises of an alleged ‘otherwise’ of pasture management from a media-theoretical and infrastructure-critical perspective.
Paper long abstract
The rapidly spreading technology of virtual fencing (VF) promises to make driving cows and cattle less stressful, more efficient, and highly flexible. By delegating practices traditionally shaped by close and conflict-laden human-animal interactions to smart wearables these systems seek to transform pasture management into an automated and data-driven mobility infrastructure. Marketed as a technological alternative to stressful and violent forms of animal handling, virtual fencing is accompanied by powerful imaginaries of harmonious human-animal relations and by visions of a pasture without human presence.
From an operational perspective, VF-systems do not merely install virtual boundaries on the pasture. They steer animals through micro-temporal sensory stimuli in order to control their spatial distribution. Essential practices of guidance and coordination are thus delegated to self-learning algorithms and decision models that act directly on animal bodies, enabling highly interventional and automated forms of management.
This contribution critically examines these promises of harmonization and flexibility from a media-theoretical and infrastructure-critical perspective. It situates virtual fencing within broader transformations of industrial animal agriculture, where digitalization and automation are framed as solutions to persistent crises of labor, animal welfare, and environmental disruption. Focusing on the infrastructural and operational conditions of these systems, the paper shows how algorithmic time regimes and fickle communication infrastructures become embedded in the contingent processes of the pasture. Rather than simply enacting an ‘otherwise’ of animal agriculture, virtual fencing emerges as a technological reconfiguration that stabilizes existing production logics while redistributing care, control, and responsibility across animals, farmers, and digital infrastructures.
Paper short abstract
This study examines how dairy farming rhythms emerge through multisensory interactions between humans, cows, and technologies, showing how automation and digital monitoring reshape temporal, spatial, and sensory relations on industrial dairy farms.
Paper long abstract
Since the 1950s, the industrialisation of dairy farming has sought to regulate cows’ biological processes through scientific techniques, including genetic selection, standardised feeding, and automated milking. These innovations increased productivity while reshaping the temporal and spatial organisation of interactions between farmers and cows. More recently, digital technologies and artificial intelligence have enabled continuous monitoring of cows’ biological rhythms, translating physiological signals into actionable data for farm management.
Existing research on the socio-cultural foundations of industrial farming has often taken an anthropocentric perspective, emphasising industrial regulation and production while overlooking the sensory experiences and lived rhythms of cows and humans in daily practice. To address this gap, this study adopts a multisensory, post-structuralist approach, drawing on 200 hours of ethnographic observation, 60 hours of video recordings, 43 interviews, and archival work on farms in France and the United Kingdom.
The analysis reveals that rhythms of milking and care are neither purely biological nor mechanistic. They emerge through co-constitutions of humans, cows, and technologies, and are perceived and negotiated through sound, movement, touch, smell, and sight. Industrial farm infrastructures, technologies, and materials actively shape these rhythms, coordinating practices and structuring daily management. These rhythms operate as forms of adaptive continuity, through which humans, animals, and technologies continuously adjust while sustaining the regularity required by industrial production. Yet attending to rhythm shows that these adjustments are not smooth or unidirectional; they reveal the granular texture of everyday practices that sometimes align with, and at other times constrain or rework, the industrial system.
Paper short abstract
In its crisis, the Namibian Swakara sheep farming industry re-branded its product as ‘eco fur’ in an attempt to ensure a future for itself. However, there were frictions among multiple valuations of what ‘humane’ and ‘good’ killing meant, and how to make care, profit and killing commensurable.
Paper long abstract
The Namibian Swakara sheep farming industry once exported millions of lamb pelts for luxury fashion each year. Now, its future is endangered, as the climate crisis, drought and volatile prices have put the viability of any industrial agriculture in southern Namibia, one of the driest areas worldwide, into question. In this situation, farmers and industry representatives decided to market Swakara as ‘eco fur’. This involved a complex set of valuation practices, which clustered around the interconnected issues of animal welfare and sustainability.
Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the implementation of a set of humane slaughtering standards, an industry “code of practice”. It investigates the frictions and efforts of translation between multiple values that emerged in the code’s implementation by different actors. For instance, farm workers resisted the prescribed use of a stunning apparatus in slaughtering, since using it could mean injuries and the de-skiling of their work. On the other hand, the stunning apparatus was necessary to the performance of care and animal welfare in a way that auditors of the fur industry’s WelFur certification scheme could evaluate.
Performing the killing of lambs as humane allowed farmers to reconcile their care for animals with the necessity of economic profit. ‘Humaneness’ became a valuation device around which the industry constructed a reporting framework and a way forward in its crisis situation. However, there were frictions among the multiple articulations of what ‘good killing’ meant and how it could be rendered measurable.
Paper short abstract
I examine ClassyFarm, Italy’s digital livestock governance system, as an infrastructure through which industrial farming is reconfigured from within. I show how metrics, checklists, and audit tools enact change from within the sector, recalibrating rather than replacing industrial production models.
Paper long abstract
Industrial livestock farming is frequently framed as operating under conditions of crisis, yet also under the pervasive sense that no meaningful alternative is possible. This contribution analyses the Italian digital governance ecosystem ClassyFarm as a key site where attempts to make industrial livestock farming “otherwise” are articulated and operationalised from within the sector itself. Introduced as an innovation aimed at improving animal welfare, antimicrobial stewardship, transparency, and equity, ClassyFarm aggregates farm-level data into databases, risk scores, checklists, and thresholds that structure inspections, antibiotic monitoring, and the allocation of public subsidies.
Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among private and official veterinarians, farmers, policymakers, and system designers in Italy, the contribution examines how ClassyFarm performs change through metric-based evaluation and infrastructural redesign. I approach its checklists as socio-material devices that redistribute responsibility, redefine professional discretion, and reshape what counts as “good farming.” By embedding care within indicators and risk categories, ClassyFarm extends the veterinary gaze while also constraining it, privileging comparability and auditability over situational judgement, and orienting farms toward a future of “improved” industrial production.
At the same time, the promise of being “otherwise” is unevenly realised. While the system can support structured self-assessment in large farms, its checklist logic often struggles to translate smaller or heterogeneous contexts, generating frictions that veterinarians must mediate. Rather than replacing industrial production, ClassyFarm recalibrates it, folding animal welfare, antimicrobial reduction, and transparency into existing economic pressures. Alternatives thus emerge less as rupture than as adaptive continuities enacted through metrics, infrastructures, and professional mediation.
Paper short abstract
This paper asks how financial actors render the future industrialisation of animal agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa plausible and investable. It argues that they use nutritional transition models to portray dietary ‘meatification’ as inevitable and to marginalise alternative agricultural futures.
Paper long abstract
As international development becomes increasingly financialised, food system crises faced by many sub-Saharan African countries – from rural poverty to undernutrition – are attributed to underinvestment in the region’s livestock producers. Development funders therefore attempt to forge more sustainable food and farming futures through ‘unlocking’ private investment in local animal agriculture, meat processing and dairy production enterprises (Brice 2022). Using interviews with key actors in the financing of animal agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores how they attempt to convince investors who would typically dismiss such enterprises as posing excessive financial risks that the region’s livestock systems have a sustainable and profitable future.
Nutritional transition models originating in epidemiological research prominently inform investors’ expectations about the region’s agricultural and dietary futures. Positing a unilinear sequence of dietary ‘patterns’, nutritional transition models depict economic growth and urbanisation as leading inevitably over time to increased consumption of intensively-produced animal products as sub-Saharan African food systems ‘catch up’ with those of Europe, the Americas and Asia. Financial institutions mobilise these models to convert forecasts of future GDP growth across sub-Saharan Africa into assurances that increasing demand for animal-sourced foodstuffs – and therefore the industrialisation of animal agriculture – is inevitable. The ‘temporal enclosure’ of sub-Saharan Africa’s agri-food futures (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022) effected through this conjoining of epidemiological science with colonial spatio-temporal imaginaries and financial de-risking practices ‘unlocks’ investment in livestock production only under very specific conditions. However, it nevertheless marginalises alternative futures for animal agriculture through rendering them implausible and uninvestable.
Paper short abstract
Using the results of an ethnographic fieldwork with infectious disease modellers, I will show the role modelling plays in enacting the current politics of industrial meat production and its alternatives, as well as how modellers navigate the performative effects and ethical dilemmas of their craft.
Paper long abstract
Mathematical modelling of infectious disease outbreaks is a powerful tool for imagining future livestock agriculture systems under various 'what-if' scenarios, widely used at the science-policy interface. The range of factors determining the course and outcomes of ongoing or virtual epidemics that can be examined through modelling is incredibly broad. It includes things as diverse as the characteristics of farm animal species; pathogens’ transmission routes, temporalities and symptoms; effects and limitations of vaccinations; locations of farms, regimes of animal keeping and their multispecies contacts. This makes mathematical models an important source of argument in the numerous debates around agriculture, as they are widely used to assess and project the effects of implemented or potential changes. Yet the outcomes such models produce depend heavily on how socio-ecological relationships are valued and operationalised, as well as on the assumptions that underpin them within the modelling process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with infectious disease modellers in the Netherlands and in the UK, I will show how modellers have to constantly face two interrelated questions: how to make good models and how to do good with models? I will discuss some examples of how these questions are answered in various academic settings and interactions with policymakers, livestock producers, and vaccine manufacturers. These examples not only point to the complex everyday ethics of doing science of/for agriculture but also highlight the role of mathematical tools in enacting the current politics of industrial meat production and its alternatives.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research following the closure of a major pig slaughterhouse in northern Denmark, this paper examines how pressures within industrial animal agriculture are absorbed through spatial reorganisation rather than structural change, after the cessation of slaughter.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Danish town following the closure of a large industrial pig slaughterhouse in 2023, this paper examines how the end of local slaughter reshaped, rather than transformed, regional pig production. The slaughterhouse had long structured local livelihoods and social life, employing hundreds of workers and anchoring the region’s pig production. Its closure produced collective grief and uncertainty about the future of the site. However, rather than opening space for alternative forms of agricultural practice, slaughter was reorganised elsewhere through the centralisation of processing capacity and through the increase in the export of live piglets. Pigs continued to be raised and killed within the same industrial system, even as the local infrastructure that had long sustained these practices was shut down.
Grounded in archival materials, production records, and interviews with farmers, former slaughterhouse workers, and other local actors, the research shows pressures within industrial animal agriculture are absorbed through spatial reorganisation, rather than structural change. While welfare reforms, climate regulations, and technological innovations are often presented as transformative, they frequently reproduce the underlying logic of industrial animal production. By examining the afterlives of pig production in a region where slaughter has ceased but pig farming continues, the paper explores how the absence of alternatives in industrial animal agriculture is not simply ideological but produced through economic dependence, infrastructural centralisation, and spatially uneven transitions that redistribute labour and responsibility without fundamentally altering food systems and human–animal relations.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how veterinary expertise is assembled under bioeconomic constraints as the Danish pig industry enacts its visions of a specific pathogen-free future. It foregrounds vaccine practices in veterinary work and how they blur conceptions of porcine health.
Paper long abstract
Intensive pig production exacerbates not only the scale and scope of health problems that veterinarians must respond to but also entails volatile markets and production contingencies that further complexify veterinary work. This paper explores how veterinary expertise is assembled in practice under such complexities. By engaging debates on immunity and veterinary expertise, I contribute empirically by sketching out new problems and strategic roles for the veterinary profession, and conceptually by advancing a veterinary bioeconomy.
The paper examines how state and corporate actors enact a specific pathogen free future in Denmark by eradicating the widespread and pernicious Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome. We foreground private vets charged with enacting this future and aligning flow of viruses, pigs and people on and, critically, between herds as coordinators. This role is imbued with compromises that arise in between responsibilities to individual farmers and their pigs on the one hand and to state and corporate actors’ obligations on the other. Here vaccination protocols emerge as a key point of contention. Empirically, we first show that vaccination differ and how this variation halts PRRS-eradication. We then explain why variations exist, by paying attention to the situated troubles that vets navigate across more-than-human mobilities, farm design and export markets.
The paper is a work in progress, but presently we are thinking about changes in the industry as radical modification. Radical modification means to capture not only sectorial conceitedness, but also the exertions and politics of making microscopic things matter within an industry characterized by ravaging bigness.
Paper short abstract
Based on an ethnography of the phase-out of live piglet castration in France, this paper analyses how science–law intermediation produces “quick-fix” welfare reforms that stabilise industrial livestock systems, domesticating potential alternatives rather than enabling structural change.
Paper long abstract
Violations of farm animal « welfare » are among the most emblematic excesses of intensive livestock production (Kirchhelle, 2021). Although widely criticised, agro-industrial systems persist and require continuous efforts of maintenance and control to ensure their reproduction (Déplaude and Fortané, 2025). This paper asks to what extent such maintenance work not only stabilises industrial animal production, but also contributes to domesticating or preventing alternatives to it.
The paper analyses a specific modality of what Anna Tsing calls scale-maintenance work in agro-industrial animal production: the intermediation between science and law, undertsood as attempts to produce coherence between epistemic and normative understandings of animal production (Jasanoff, 2004).
The analysis draws on an ethnographic study of the phase-out of live piglet castration in France, conducted with actors operating at the interface of scientific knowledge production and legal norm-making. Tracing the development of what has been framed as a quick-fix solution (Rich, 2008), the paper describes how regulatory change was crafted in ways that allow large-scale agro-industrial systems to persist despite their recognised fragilities.
Attending to the materialities of law and science, we show how this work relies on selecting and orchestrating forms of knowledge compatible with the continuation of practices widely criticised for harming animal welfare. As legal instruments become embedded in technical mechanisms developed by professional agricultural organisations, these actors retain significant discretion in defining the boundaries of legality. At te the same time, scientific expertise is reconfigured to support, rather than challenge, the dynamics of industrialisation in livestock production.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research with veterinary inspectors tasked with safeguarding animal welfare in the Dutch meat industry, I analyze how inspection reshapes 'business-as-usual' while gaining its value relative to negative imaginaries without regulation.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I explore relations with ‘business-as-usual’ that emerged in my ethnographic research with veterinary inspectors who safeguard animal welfare in the Dutch meat industry.
Veterinary inspectors enforce animal welfare law intended to prevent ‘unnecessary suffering’ (see McLoughlin 2025), a legal term that highlights the moral duty to limit suffering while accepting the practical reality that some suffering is unavoidable. In veterinary inspection, it matters not that animals are killed and reared, but how they are killed and reared—whether animals are stuck, sick, or conscious after stunning.
Due to their local and specific engagements, veterinary inspectors are often criticized for ‘stabilizing business-as-usual.’ I complicate this critique with two ways veterinary inspectors make sense of their work.
First, inspectors emphasize that the definition of ‘unnecessary suffering’ has historically changed in response to societal concerns, technological innovation, and ethological research. Inspectors are tasked with guiding the realization of welfare law in practice, safeguarding previously unregulated aspects of animal welfare. Inspection thus emerges not as stabilizing the status quo but steering its adjustment to new notions of welfare.
Second, with memories of less-regulated pasts, inspectors emphasize how (as one participant put it) ‘animal welfare would be far worse without inspection.' Here, the ‘otherwise’ against which inspection gains value is one in which economic incentives go unchecked, leading to greater suffering.
I argue that in analyses of human–livestock relations, it matters what degree of stability we ascribe to business-as-usual and what alternative futures are latent in our evaluations of the present.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines efforts to end routine tail docking in European industrial pig farming through deploying ‘iceberg indicators’ of animal welfare, focusing on the pig’s tail. It traces how pig tail biting becomes a focal problem through which alternative forms of pig husbandry are articulated.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines attempts to end routine tail docking in European industrial pig farming through the deployment of ‘iceberg indicators’ of animal welfare, focusing on the pig’s tail. Iceberg indicators are animal-based measures that render a range of welfare-related conditions legible through a single bodily sign. Based on ethnography with ethologists, veterinarians and regulators in the Netherlands, and analysis of EU and national governance tools, I trace how pig tail biting becomes a focal problem through which alternative forms of pig husbandry are articulated and administered.
I show efforts to coordinate industry actors, from producing a single, standardized notion of an intact tail, to the development and circulation of observational protocols and checklists, and training farmers to see biting not as ‘what pigs do’ but as a preventable welfare issue. This work enacts intact tails as a performance value that can be monitored, benchmarked and improved through roadmaps leading to a ‘curly tail’ future. Consequently, the tail reorganizes care, accountability and responsibility among farmers, advisors and regulators, and pigs themselves.
The effects of this reconfiguration, however, are ambivalent. The indicators that demand curiosity to pigs’ perspective and sociality also help stabilize industrial pig production as an optimizable management system. Iceberg indicators thus emerge as devices that both enact change and secure the continuity of the sector. They invite attention to porcine sentience but may also keep the industry viable under societal critique – even if so far, pigs with intact tails have stubbornly resisted being in-corpo-rated into worlds of production.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on fieldwork with EU government inspectors who grapple with sustaining a level of pig welfare they themselves deem to be insufficient, I explore the stasis of audit, the failed promise of change, and the moral affects that might offer some hope when indicators of welfare lose their power.
Paper long abstract
Tail docking has been banned in the EU since 1994, yet the majority of intensively reared pigs have docked tails. My ongoing research with inspectors in Denmark, Italy and France examines how they address the intractable issue of routine tail docking. This procedure is conducted in the early days of a piglet’s life and involves the removal of part of the tail, typically with a cauterizing iron. This procedure is illegal in the EU; however, tail docking is authorized if there is a risk that a tail biting outbreak can occur.
In the absence of change, many inspectors, farmers, and veterinarians are now asking, is the tail the right indicator to improve welfare on farms? Whilst the tail has been identified as an iceberg indicator for welfare, the everyday reality on farms reimagines this as an iceberg deleterious to progress, communication, and change due to its proclaimed multifactorial nature. Many factors influence a tail biting episode, so are long tails simply a fairytale of welfare?
Mutilations thus enable compliance with meeting welfare standards within a wider welfare audit regime. Within capitalist agriculture, alternatives exist, whereby alternative is understood as altering the animal in order to comply with audit logics and the profit imperative. By paying attention to the emotions that bubble up when inspectors grapple with the reality of industrial confinement of animals, where animals must be mutilated to fulfil audit logics of acceptable welfare, I interrogate the kinds of alternatives and moral affects that constitute welfare.