Geriatric Ex-Dairy Cows: Caring for Otherwise Expendable Life

• In Event: Growing old in a more-than human world: Materialities of care and interspecies entanglements II

Abstract

The high cost of animal feed and the low price of milk forced a farmer in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen to take his herd of dairy cows out of economic production. They were not sent to slaughter, as to be expected of the millions of dairy cows every year when they are no longer reproductive. Instead, with the help of a vegan activist, they were afforded the possibility of retirement. The exceptional circumstances of this herd allow for experimentation in the care of otherwise expendable life. How does the act of taking dairy cows out of economic production reimagine other modes of productivity than capitalist growth? What geriatric life histories are possible to sustain in more than human worlds?

This paper contributes to feminist concerns in STS about care, life, livelihoods, and more than human worlds (Besky and Blanchette 2019; Haraway 2008; Parrenas 2018). It draws from a larger ethnographic study about the ideas and pragmatics that shape retirement and geriatric care as they are extended to nonhuman animals in a moment when humans experience greater uncertainty about achieving retirement.

Bibliography:
Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette, eds. 2019. How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Parreñas Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, Cornell University, Department of S&TS