Presentation short abstract

This paper draws on participant observation and creative methods to reveal the affinities, vulnerabilities and contradictions of human and nonhuman life in a traditional grazing landscape

Presentation long abstract

Dehesas, wood-pasture ecosystems co-produced by wildlife and livestock, are one of Spain’s iconic landscapes and one of Europe’s most biodiverse ecosystems. They are not just production sites for beef, pork, lamb and cheese, but also places steeped in socioeconomic history and human-animal sociality. In this paper, I draw on a lifetime of participant observation, analysed through creative writing methods, to provide a dehesa’s perspective on human-livestock interactions. I show that producers’ relations with livestock are not based on crude framings of animals as mere ‘protein’ or ‘meat’, let alone on the separation between humans and nature, but rather on similarity and shared vulnerability. Producers insist that animals are ‘just like us’ in their sentience and intelligence, while drought, the most feared climatic event, lays bare the reality that humans and nonhumans can both be damaged by forces they cannot control. But livestock also pay with their lives for the running of a farm and, traditionally at least, for the feeding of the farmer. This contradiction at the heart of animal agriculture, and at the heart of ecology itself, is not something that can or should be ironed out – it is necessary to living well in a broken world.