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Paper 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.