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Paper short abstract

How factory farm workers navigate the dialectic of genetically "modernized" hog minds and lingering traces of seemingly timeless instinct. Focuses on how surprising natures that exceed rote instinct or disciplined behavior -- hog alterity -- manifest and prompt worker critique and refusal.

Paper long abstract

It is surprisingly hard to learn positive knowledge about "the hog" in factory farms, even in cases of intensely intimate labor, such as breeding, when capitalist production presses human and animal bodies together. Managers insist that it is workers' job to replicate "natural" behaviors and instincts in production, even as they engage animals whose behavior and semiotic perception has been deliberately altered in order to maximize carnal productivity. Migrant workers routinely speculate as to whether a particular hog behavior is natural and shared across the species, or the specific product of histories of hog "modernization" in the form of breeding designed to accustom animals to live in industrial confinement. From hog crate chewing to lordosis reflexes, non-reactive docility to violent anger, this paper examines laboring modes of apprehending capitalized animal sentience. The analysis is particularly concerned with a series of odd moments of hog behavior, attunement, and apparent perception that were jarring to my co-workers in an American breeding barn; moments when it became clear that, despite their radical instrumentalization, hogs dwelled in barns in ways that seemed incomprehensible to the human mind. Prompting surprising forms of auto-critique of the very idea of farming animals by those tasked with their mass-production, this talks explores folk narratives and modes of emic factory farm refusal that emerge from events that exceed tropes of knowable nature and controlled modernization.