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.