Paper short abstract:

The domestication of cattle was carried on in the Paraguayan Chaco in different ways according to varying cultural and economic factors. If on the one hand it produced the existence of wild cows, on the other it led to the transformation of cows into "bare life" and to extreme deforestation.

Paper long abstract:

The Paraguayan Chaco is today considered an environmental hotspot where cattle ranching is one of the main drivers of deforestation. Historically, cattle ranches have been a source of income and exploitation since the beginning of the colonization of the territory on the part of foreign investors at the end of the XIX century. Due to the extensive nature of the properties and to the lack of control on the animals, during the first half of the century the cattle often escaped from the farms and became wild (in Guarani: sagua'a).  At the same time, "domestication" was intended and performed in different ways by different social groups. In the perimetry of indigenous communities, for instance, cattle were left to wander around the village until their final day, while in the big cattle farms cows were progressively disentangled from their life-worlds and transmuted into capitalistic assets: genetic selection, branding, vaccination and accounting practices did the preliminary translation work which was completed in the slaughterhouses of the region.  In other cases, small resistant community of non-indigenous cattle farmers continued to raise cows without investing big sums of money and adapting to the environment in a softer way. By taking into consideration these different modes of domestication, my aim is to compare between them the different worlds that are produced by different ways of conceiving human-animal relationships and to envision our possible futures.