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Paper short abstract:

With a focus on the North American West, this paper explores how fences, erected for the purpose of livestock agriculture, became sites of multispecies encounter, as birds, insects, and small mammals adapted to technologies of animal confinement in different environments.

Paper long abstract:

Scientists recognize that animal agriculture is a leading contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. But animal agriculture has affected the environment in other, less direct ways than through emissions, and farmed animals are not the only animals to be impacted by technologies of livestock confinement. The spread of animal agriculture was attended by the spread of technologies of animal confinement; these technologies transformed environments and animal habitats in consequential, and underexamined, ways.

One such technology of confinement is the fence. Wildlife ecologists have explored how fences have disrupted animal migration routes, and historians have examined fences as legal artifacts. But as physical and technical artifacts, fences have received relatively little scholarly attention. This paper considers fences as sites of multispecies encounter; assemblages of wood and metal that prevented farmed animals from roaming, fences were also sites where insects burrowed, birds perched, and small mammals nested.

The multispecies nature of fences was addressed in trade literature, publications by the US Forest Service, and by wood preserving organizations. Drawing on such sources from the Forest History Society in Durham, North Carolina, this paper demonstrates that technologies of animal agriculture were as much concerned with managing non-human life along the fence line as with managing the bodies of “livestock.”