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Presentation short abstract

Based on an original case study in Corsica, where stray cattle are both a tourist attraction and a source of public safety and public health concerns, we confront the utopia of animal freedom with the physical reality of bovine bodies and the infrastructure constraints of an inhabited territory.

Presentation long abstract

Sometimes described as a paradise for stray cattle, Corsica appears to be a laboratory for animal freedom.

Once confined to rural and mountain areas and kept under surveillance and control, cows now roam freely along roads and beaches, through villages and even in the island's main towns. Since then, these animals generate a paradox. On the one hand, animals’ mobility is popular with tourists and inspires artists, animal rights activists or researchers who see it as a possible alternative to the highly controlled farming systems on the mainland. On the other hand, the accidents these animals cause, the competition they pose for grazing resources and the diseases they can carry lead to them being seen as a public health and safety issue.

This observation makes Corsica a prime location for studying how utopian ideals of cattle freedom – whether inspired by rewilding theories or notions such as "animal liberation" – are embodied in specific territories and may come into tension with their material realities.

This article analyses how animals’ unexpected presence and mobility lead to recharacterize the activities of those who are supposed to look after them. By questioning the spaces traveled and the boundaries crossed by cows, we describe how technical and administrative categories are transgressed and transformed, and how stakeholders act to maintain or limit these transgressions.

In doing so, we map animal freedom as a heterotopia where cattle gravitate in the grey zones of modernity and circulate in territories where they have no place anywhere.