Send message to Author

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.