Individuation,the Mass and Farm Animals

Introduction

A flight of screaming birds, a school of herring tearing through the water like a silken sheet, a cloud of chirping crickets, a booming whirlwind of mosquitoes … crowds, packs, hordes on the move, and filling with their clamour, space. Leibniz called them aggregates, these objects, sets. He brought them to people’s attention at least, even if he undervalued them by merely according them the status of a heap of stones, even if he kept them mum by classifying them under harmony. (Serres, 2005: 2)

A colleague and I were recently standing on the narrow circular edge of a farmed salmon cage, anchored deep in a Scottish sea loch. We were, to borrow Law and Lien’s phrase, standing ‘on the rooftops of a city of fish’ (2012: 370). Inside the 15-metre-deep container, largely invisible in the dark waters, were over 25,000 mature fish, each between 4 and 5 kilos. Impossible to see, let alone count, the density of these fish in their three dimensional space is calculated not in numbers but in biomass, reaching upwards of 25 kg per m³ at harvest. This ‘mass’ of fish – not a ‘shoal’ nor a ‘school’ – is for us observers an essentially undifferentiated multitude. Bred in tanks containing over a million fry, graded into cages of similar size for smolting and mature growth, the fish are fed, grown and treated as one, a plural trope of productive aquaculture. At what point, if at all, do these individual fish break out of their collective noun to become, at last, singular and the objects – or subjects – of our affective relationality? The answer, at one level, is at the moment of their slaughter when, albeit briefly, their individual sentience, their ability to feel pain, concerns us. Less obviously at specific moments of handling, treatment, grading or intervention, all of which are physical moments of human/fish interaction. At these occasions, the individual fish is acknowledged and accounted for. For this short time, being a fish matters (to us) as a fish.

Similar observations might be made in a broiler shed. These appear spacious, almost luxurious at initial stocking, when 40,000 three-day-old chicks run over the littered floor, a welcome change from the tight conveyor belts, beak-clipping machinery and ventilated transportation boxes of their first 74 hours. Within 30 days, however, the space is transformed. Each bird has roughly the space equivalent of a sheet of A4 paper –with recommended maximum pre-thinning density being around 22 birds per m². The chickens are undifferentiated, multitudinous, excessive. But contra Spinoza, this is a multitude without power. Like salmon, though, there are individuals that, because other things are mattering to them, are not conforming to behavioural norms or growth standards. They become visible and identifiable. This is often their undoing. Their moment of singularity is also that of their culling.

This paper explores the tensions inherent in how animals are figured within the relational lives, spaces and processes of animal farming. Although animal farms are unequivocally sites of affective relationality, intertwining human and non-human species together in both instrumental and convivial assemblies, it is argued here that those affective relations are complicated by an enduring duality, that of the animal as individual and the animal as multitude/herd/mass. In livestock farms, animals are both ‘one’ and ‘many’. At one level, both as individuals and as multitudes, farm animals offer us the potential or the promise for an affective mattering derived from ‘a more proximal, contingent and bodily form of thought’ (Springgay, 2011: 67), one of noises, smells, movement and shared vitality. Yet, at another level, by their very numbers, (farm) animals offer a challenge to individualization, one that has been singularly useful to humankind.

God created not only Adam and Eve, in his own image, but also beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kind and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. These creatures are defined not as individuals but according to a ‘kind’ that prepares them for use and classification by Adam and Eve. (Stengers, 2010: 6)

The Affecting Bodies of the Farm

The singular ‘farm’ is increasingly a place of ever-greater multitudes, a deceptive and porous aggregate that is, in so many ways, very much less than the sum of its constituent parts. What might stand as a seemingly fixed entity or unit is, in reality, a constant flow and passage of multiple life (zoe) and individual lives (bios). To borrow from Heraclitus’ attributed aphorism, you can never really go into the same farm twice. The life and lives within them is forever changing and moving. Yet farms are, arguably, amongst the most defining sites of contemporary human/animal relations. Ordered, yet dynamic, umwelts of species inter-mingling. The vast majority of the 24 or so billion terrestrial farm animals that are kept and grown for human and other consumption at any one time do so on farms, with an increasing proportion of them on large scale, industrial farm units. Here is where kingdoms most emphatically meet, collide, intertwine, entangle, respond: the sovereign and the beast, the beast and the sovereign. In these numbers there is also an invisibility – a ‘de-singularization’, as Boltanski and Thevenot (1991) have called it, or a ‘de-animalization’ in Catherine Remy’s (2009) words, both of whom are cited in a recent book by Vinciane Despret (2012). There are echoes here of Bauman’s (1990) ‘effacement of the face’ wherein lies the ‘drama of individuation, the tracing and erasing of those boundaries without which there would be no phenomenal world, no individual life’ (Bersani and Dutoit, 1993: 144). In today’s large, modern livestock farms, the individual animal is subsumed into a functional collective of normative material life. If animals, in general, are good to think with, then with respect to farm animals: ‘Numbers help us to stop thinking’ (Despret and Porcher, 2007: 36).

So how, and when, do the singular numbers – individual lives in that living mass of salmon or broilers – count in animal farming? For there is no herd nor shoal – no ‘heap of stones’ – without the individual animals that compose it, just as there is no herd without multitude. We are ultimately, as Serres declaims, ‘as little sure of the one as of the multiple’ (2005: 3). At the end of the day, when you do stand on the edge of the farmed salmon cage, or the trout race, or the broiler shed, or the cattle shed, what you actually see is the individual animals. Your eye is drawn in and focuses on the one, and more particularly, on the eyes or that cognitive control centre we might call the face – if we accept that anthropomorphism. The face, which Levinas famously identifies as the locus of all moral responsibility (Wright et al., 1998). For while Levinas pointedly distinguished the human from other animals as actually having a face, Davy (2007) counters that anyone who meets a cow or a dog or even a snake in the wild is easily persuaded that they too have a face and that from that ‘face’ communication and ultimately understanding and ethics may flow. How can we look and not know? How then can we look and not feel?

In the eyes of other animals we see the challenge to their oppression, their implicit rebuke of human arrogance, and the irreversibility of what makes us and other beings animals: our embodied consciousness and our relationality with other sentient beings. (Weisberg, 2011: 186)

Animal farms are founded on a utilitarianism where what is considered to be good is taken to equate with the positive consequences that benefit either the animalian mass in its wholeness or the socio-technical production system in its material efficiency or the absent human sovereign. From Jeremy Bentham to the UK’s Farm Animal Welfare Committee and Peter Singer, utilitarianism provides a moral backdrop to our treatment of farm animals. Yet utilitarianism is – by necessity – a philosophy of the mass, of the undifferentiated, in many ways the ideal position for modern animal farming with its emphasis on the ‘greatest number’. To see things as numbers requires detachment, like the salmon in the tanks. As the critic Giles Fraser (2012) said recently, utilitarianism always sees from a distance. It has no understanding of particularity. Taking this critique of utilitarianism in relation to farm animals a step further, we might, like Derrida (2008), object also to its abject empiricism. Animal suffering, when one sees it happening, whether on a farm or elsewhere, is not something one can simply calculate away on the basis of utilitarian consequentialism. On the contrary, it appeals to our compassion towards the ‘other’ and particularly the vulnerable ‘other’ (Ito, 2008). To the tension between the mass and the individual we might therefore add that between the calculation and the ‘gaze’, between rational numbers and affective and affected imagination.

Farm animals as individuals constitute a pervasive form of affective rural agrarian imagery, one we are initially exposed to at a young age. They are still remarkably prevalent as children’s toys and infantile imaginaries. James Joyce’s ‘moo-cow’ coming down the road was a benevolent, if supernatural, creature in Irish mythology, resident of that mythical island of Inishbofin. Accepting that there are a lot of vested interests in maintaining the alluring fiction of the farm, these are forceful and durable representations; these wonderfully monogamous, animalian couples, these anthropomorphized humanimals where nurture, care and conviviality are the dominant paradigms of a seemingly innocent conviviality. Such representations are all about life (not death). Intentional animal death takes place – for the most part – somewhere else.

How do we become affected by these farmed animals: as flocks, as herds, as swarming multitudes or as individual beings, subjectivities with lives and corporealities that we share, ‘cared-for’ charges for whom we are responsible and to whom we are responsive? How do these animal lives – lives that we violently end for our own purposes – matter, not in a formal, coded, ethical sense but in a practical convivial sense? How is the tension between individuality and massivity or multitude-icity, between the needs of the herd and the wants of the individual, negotiated and reconciled in practice and how does such a reconciliation affect or even condition our responsibility (and our ability to respond) with respect to farm animals? How then to respond to the material and ethical requirements and singularity of an individual ‘life worth living’?

Animal Multitudes

The machinstic reduction of the farm animal to a component within a multitudinous productive unit, to ‘meat on legs’, to ‘egg-layer’ to ‘walking bacon’, is a form of disappearance (Berger, 1980). There are three elements to this: one ontological, one methodological, the third ethical. Clearly, Descartes has a lot to answer for. By reducing animals to the workings of clocks, Cartesianism not only heralded the machinistic notion of the animal (thereby distinct from the thinking human mind) but in doing so exorcised them from our moral consideration. Hence, Larrère (2010) argues that rather than being solely metaphysical, this position is fundamentally practical for it provides a justification for their treatment as machines – and machines, we might argue, are by definition reproducible as identical units.

If Cartesianism paved the way with a radical mechanical model of the non-human animal, what has happened since in animal farming has been the gradual introduction of equally radical thermodynamic, cybernetic and genetic models, where energy balances and feed ratios set growth targets and body conformities, where animal corporealities and materialities become components in wider self-regulating pharma-zoo-technical assemblies, where species futures are pre-conceived through genetic manipulations that deny evolutionary change in favour of normative and heteronymous targets. Under a process of ‘mecanomorphisation’ (Despret and Porcher, 2007: 15), the animal is re-affirmed as a zoo-technical machine both physiologically and behaviourally where science replaces care (Rollin, 2003): orphans not only of ethology but also of history. Perhaps of sociology, anthropology and geography too … 

Talking of the modern ‘Chicken Little’, Haraway writes:

Our opportunistic bird is not against surrendering a pound of flesh in exchange for pecking rights in the natural cultural contractual arrangements that domesticated both bipedal hominids and winged gallinaceous avians. But there is something seriously foul in current versions of multi-species global contract theory. (Haraway, 2008: 34)

Coming back to the contemporary farm, the question is: where is the individual living animal? There are three issues here: how do we develop a set of ethical practices based upon the multitude of lives that occupy the modern farm; how do we nonetheless continue to see, differentiate and account for the individual in this multitude; and how do we balance the two?

Acknowledging individual animal lives, which is the problematic preoccupation not only of statutory animal welfare but also of the care relationships that develop between animal and farmer and stock-person, is a complex balancing act of the singular and the plural, the individual and the multitude, that is never adequately resolved. Over the last 30 or so years, we have seen a series of almost contradictory strategies for accounting for the individual farm animal within the multitude.

Multitudinous Ethical Calculation

As industrialized animal husbandry grew, so too did concern for the health and welfare of the animals contained within such systems (Woods, 2012). This was driven predominantly by a concern for the productive and the reproductive health of intensively confined animals to which, it must be said, there has been a growing addition of societal moral engagement. However, the mechanisms by which the quality of life, the health and the welfare of individual farm animals in intensive systems have developed – as an accompaniment to intensification – have been primarily (and to some extent entirely understandably) directed at the animal multitude, the group, the hypothetical ‘standard’ animal, rather than the animal as individual – in essence to the zoes and not the bios. The individual animal becomes a statistical entry point in what is a summative concern for flock, herd or housing unit welfare. Moreover, these are artificial, re-constituted groups: most modern herds, flocks, units are grouped by gender, by age group and by position within a reproductive cycle – not by any sense of inherent social organization. Ethology on a modern farm only goes so far.

Thus, within successful animal husbandry animal lives become identified and defined by mortality rates, pregnancy failures, disease prevalence, lameness, tail biting or feather pecking statistics, growth rates, longevity, reproductive success, yields, body conformity and carcass weights, to name but a few of the standard indicators. Cows and sheep are ‘named’ by machine-read tags and bar codes. A spike on a daily chart of somatic cell counts in milk yield will mark a cow as ill. What we have is a combination then of behavioural and somatic norms of what might be called the standard functioning of the animal as productive unit within the often stressful conditions and bio-physical parameters of the farm. Consequently, intervention becomes generic through preventative herd health planning rather than targeted curative treatment. Individual animals that do not ‘do well’, that do not conform to growth curves and body mass indicators, are frequently culled as being – in simple terms – a waste of food or of medical expenses (where the costs of treatment greatly outweigh the price paid for the animal or its products). Play, too much movement or excessive behaviour are seen as wasteful energy expenditure. In short, the individual animal disappears into a generic functioning ideal-type.

Thresholds, as well as behavioural norms, are set by food chain operators and companies: 9 per cent lameness in sheep is acceptable before some degree of veterinary intervention might be required, or 35 per cent in dairy cattle (the UK average); 12 per cent mortality rates in a salmon farm are well within the norms, 3–5 per cent in breeding pig farms. In general, the higher the number of animals concerned, the higher the threshold levels beyond which something needs to be addressed. On intensive poultry farms, dead broilers are removed from the broiler shed daily, easily exposed when the live birds move aside as the stockman walks through. In salmon farms the dead fish, unseen, sink to the bottom of the tanks, sometimes in piles up to five deep, to be scooped up, again usually daily, with large nets. Increasingly, surveillance techniques are employed to identify the non-conformists, the latest technique being optical flow patterns (Dawkins et al., 2012) which pick up skews in broiler flock movement as a means of identifying the proportion of animals suffering from such ailments as hock burn – who will then affect the flow of the flock as it moves through the poultry barn.

With the growth of herd and flock sizes – and that is the trend everywhere – the danger, in Temple Grandin’s (2005) words, is that of ‘bad becoming normal’. What is an acceptable level of lameness in dairy cows, and acceptable to whom: the farmer, the consumer, the lame cow herself? ‘Numbers’ – one returns to that statement by Despret – ‘help us to stop thinking’ (Despret and Porcher, 2010). And of course ‘numbers’ help us turn animals into objects that we can then kill. Following Dalla Bernardina: ‘We don’t kill animals because we treat them as objects, we treat them as objects so that we can kill them’ (1991: 35), not a biopolitics so much as a thanatopolitics. The increasingly automated surveillance techniques, whether they be the cell count data obtained through automated milking machines, machine-read ear tags or video triggers of deviant flock movement, are critical to this ‘thingification’ of the farm animal. Drawing on Nicole Shukin’s book Animal Capital (2009), we might argue here that the discourses, technologies and practices of the modern intensive livestock farm (or industry) hinge upon a ‘breaking’ and a ‘denial’ of ‘becomings’ (p. 31) where farm animals are, as Shukin, after Derrida, has it, kept in a ‘limbo economy of interminable survival’ (p. 39) where coping is all – where needs are met but wants are ignored.

Sentience and the Singular Animal

All of this is, of course, very mechanistic, very objective, very scientized. Ironically, it still depends very much on the individual animal revealing itself to be, in some ways, un-conforming to the standard functioning of its peers: the dairy cow that stands alone, the trout that swims away from the feeding point, the de-feathered chicken that doesn’t even stand up at all. These moments of individuality, however, merely define the animals as ‘wrong’, out of place, not fit for purpose.

Recent years, though, have seen a certain recrudescence of the individual farm animals, a sort of re-presencing or purposeful acknowledgement. There are a number of reasons for this: growing societal ethical concern for animal welfare as an issue (though this has arguably very limited purchase and is riddled with the classic paradoxes and inconsistencies that so define human/animal relations in general), the new popular anthropomorphism of the food animal (McHugh, 2011), the rise of the scientific consciousness industry (as the philosopher John Dupré (2012) calls it), and with it the emergence of a new ethology-driven welfare science. These are perhaps disparate drivers but they have two things in common: first, a greater or lesser re-centring on the individual animal (its behaviour, its sentience, its happiness, its anthropomorphized humanity) and, second, a persistent hierarchization and ordering of life.

Hence, within the field of animal health and welfare there has been an attempt to get beyond this mechanistic approach to livestock management with one that, at first view, gives greater place to the individual animal. The initially reluctant acknowledgement of farm animal sentience – now recognized within the EU under the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 – has, at one level, shifted attention from the functional performance of the herd, flock or whatever and the broader conditions of their husbandry to the subjective, feeling, embodied animal itself. These animal or ‘feelings’ based approaches to the welfare and life quality of farm animals have been important in legitimating a new ethology in animal welfare science (albeit, in Lestel et al.’s (2006) words, an ‘ethology of control’) and significantly influencing the way in which welfare is identified and assessed. This is a move that has seen many component shifts: from herd disease prevention to individual animal treatment; from environmental and ‘input’ assessments of welfare parameters to ‘outcome’ assessments of welfare conditions and positive benefits; from biometric evaluations of health and welfare to animal preference scoring; from notions of animal ‘coping’ and ‘conforming’ to expressions of animal feeling and ‘telos’; and from zoo-technical approaches to the more relational anthropo-zooic.

Novel techniques, such as avoidance testing, preference testing, qualitative behaviour assessment, body condition scoring and so on, have been developed by welfare scientists in recognition of the sentiency and the ‘feelings that matter’ of individual farm animals and in an attempt to understand what these might be. I think it is fair to say that this has partly revolutionized animal welfare practice over the last 20 or so years. It has informed the UK Farm Animal Welfare Committee’s (2009) definition of a ‘good life’ as one that combines an individual animal’s ‘needs and wants’ while, elsewhere, these often highly individualized notions of farm animal welfare have become almost commonplace in the various assurance schemes and advertising strategies that food companies and retailers are increasingly adopting to promote particular ranges (for example Miele, 2011). Having a happy life is now supposed to matter as an element in a consumer purchasing decision.

This re-discovered animal individuality and identity has certainly had a positive impact on raising awareness of the individual lives of farm animals and the quality of those lives (and in this has led to a number of recent gains in, for example, the banning of battery systems, sow stalls, tail docking, piglet castration without anaesthetic, and the like) – yet it raises a number of issues that merit consideration.

First, can we individualize the non-human animal without some degree of anthropomorphization – even within the scientific parameters of ethology – and, second, is not this new attention to the individual animal to some extent flying in the face of a new and less-centred understanding of the ‘thing or the self-in-relation’ and to the highly varied practices that constitute such relations-in-the-doing?

De-centring the Farm Animal

Anthropomorphization has always been the bête-noir of animal science, yet contemporary applied ethology, a growing awareness of animal sentience and the emergent vocabulary of animal feelings and emotions has given the idea of a more reflexive and responsible anthropomorphism (Johnston, 2008) or ‘critical empathy’ (Weil, 2012: 19) a new legitimacy in farm animal concerns (Vessier, 2010; Duncan, 2004) and broader animal studies. For Daston and Mitman (2005), recognizing and acknowledging animal individuality and subjectivity is partly contingent upon anthropomorphism, a mechanism for at least attempting to ‘think with’ rather than ‘about’ animals. In this, a ‘critical’ anthropomorphism offers ‘a potentially productive, critical tool that has similarities to empathy’ (Weil, 2012: 19), one in which ‘we open ourselves to touch and to be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing we can know their experience’ (Weil, 2012: 20).

Of course, there are also dangers here. One is the danger of this becoming seen as ‘poor science’, particularly in the science-ridden field of farm animal health and welfare that Marion Dawkins (2012) highlights in her latest book. We are not always very good at identifying animal feelings and emotions, particularly within farm animals, and are easily taken-to-task when using such arguments to promote specific actions that are likely to be strongly resisted by those working with animals in a productive setting.

Another danger is that while anthropomorphism is usually associated with the attribution of human ‘feelings’ and sometimes ‘thoughts’ to animals, in reality it goes a lot further. As Crist (2000) shows in her study Images of Animals, ethologists from Darwin to Lorenz and others use anthropomorphization very differently, bringing not just human ‘emotions’ to individual animals but human orderings and priorities to the entire animal world, creating both artificial proximity and equally artificial distance. I come back to Roswell’s ‘hierarchical scandal’: the elite status of the carnivore killer, the superiority of the great apes, the docility of the herbivore. Anthropomorphism is a very one-way street leading, inevitably, to the primacy of human orderings (Despret, 2005) and the reconstitution of the animal as partially human self. Writing about contemporary ethology, Dalla Bernardina (2012) says:

It relates the cognitive, juridical and ontological status of the animal. But it is silent on the future of this status once the animal, as a protagonist in this encounter, this history, these controversies is plunged into action, in real day-to-day life and thereby subsumed under the affects, the emotions and the more or less intentional strategies of the narrator. It is one thing to present an animal in the antiseptic framing of a zoological or ethno-zoological description, but an altogether different thing to place it within a narrative framework (as agent, agnostic, in struggle, in ambiguity … (2012: 68)

Let me turn now to my second concern, which is perhaps – rather ironically – an over-emphasis on the individual farm animal, the animal ‘self’. And there are two issues here too.

On the one hand, there is the problem that our newly-focused attention on individual animal feelings (as well as sufferings) is really one of re-classification and re-ordering animals into rigid behavioural types and behavioural repertoires that invoke standardized solutions and responses. Once classified, the animal again disappears into a behavioural standard or trope: ‘individuality is a strategic defence problem’ writes Haraway (1991: 212), which in Greco’s analysis invites two meanings – one, that there is no essential stability in individuality and, second, that different individualities emerge in different contexts or orders of necessity or practices of doing and being (Greco, 2006). Or as Law and Lien put it with respect to their work on salmon: ‘there is no salmon behind the various practices that do salmon’ (Law and Lien, 2012: 366).

On the other hand, this individuation can be overly reductionist (Larrère, 2005) – much as, in the same way, the animal machine trope is reductionist – for it lacks consideration of the generative social and environmental context within which most farm animals live. Writing on the impact of behavioural ethology on farm animal welfare, Christine Nicol (2011) observes that farm animals have preferred companions, have complex social behaviour, will spend time in social interaction at the expense of rest time and so on. These ‘wants’ (as opposed to ‘needs’) are increasingly being understood as socially contextualized rather than purely individual, yet they are not only increasingly denied within modern animal husbandry practice but also escape scientific investigation and consideration. As Despret has said in a number of papers, in trying to understand what animals ‘want’, the issue really is knowing what questions to ask them. In many contexts, they want to be with each other even, in some cases, at the moment of their ending.

Have we come full circle? Has the new animal-centring of contemporary ethology only brought us back again to a generic but nevertheless different notion of the ‘animal’ through some sort of generic normative individuation? This brings me to the final point I want to make.

Towards a Relational Sociability?

The growing obsession with the ‘feelings’ of the individual animal, which includes such anthropomorphized ideas as ‘happiness’ coupled with an ethological interest to nail down, as some inherently beneficial good, the ‘natural states and behaviour’ of farm animals, is certainly raising questions about how we treat and live with farm animals. It is being increasingly used to push forward a broader ethical agenda, underlined by rules, codes of practice, operating procedures and assurance of the livestock industry. Yet it is missing something very fundamental. A farm is a more-than-animal place, a more-than-human place, a place of constantly shifting multi-species interactions, practices, relations and adaptations. Animals ‘cope’ with this as individuals, as bodies certainly, but they also respond, act and enact as members of a shared community, linking self and other, the living and the material, the non-human and the human in a process of active socialization and ‘hybrid sociability’ (Lestel, 1996). This cannot be solely interpreted as a defensive mechanism of self-individualization (though it might be presented as some form of externally driven and imposed individualization) but might become, in the words of Campbell (2011), ‘an opening towards the relational’ (p. 119) and of ‘moving the self towards greater openness and relationality as opposed to defence’ (p. 156). In these movements, we move away, according to Gail Davies (2012),

… from the formal arena of bioethics and towards the ethical issues emerging in the work of Haraway and others as they seek to explore the political and ethical implications of ‘grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary (Haraway, 2008: 3).’ (Davies 2012: 10)

Unfortunately, some of the foundational literature of the contemporary animal turn leads us in the opposite direction. Lorimer (2010: 40) points out that the ‘ontological priority of the individual organism is largely disavowed in the work of Deleuze and Guatarri for whom vitality operates at an altogether different plane’. ‘Accordingly’, he continues (p. 41), ‘Deleuze has very little to say about individual animal welfare’. Certainly Deleuzian analysis has robustly challenged the basis of human-animal distinction, yet it has also, to quote Weil (2012: 13), ‘made it difficult, if not impossible, to proceed from acts of representation to acts of engagement’. For both Lorimer (2010) and Weil (2012), Haraway’s engagement with companion species (2003, 2008) offers an alternative, a ‘new mode of conversation’ (Lorimer, 2010: 41) with the non-human. However, to date, there has been very little of any similar flourishing relationality when it comes to farm animals. Herein lies a challenge for animal studies, for it implies new methodologies and new engagements (Buller, 2012a; Roe et al., 2011), drawing both on the social sciences and humanities and the veterinary/animal sciences and ethology. ‘If a non-human animal’s story is to be told or heard, this will require’, argues Turner (2002: 5), ‘a different type of listening than that to which humans are accustomed’.

Implicit here are two things: first, a recognition – often intuitive rather than analytical – of the degrees of shared experience, movement, affect, materiality, the ‘ordinary circumstances’ (Lorimer, 2010) between human and non-human individuals and, second, of how the de-centred relations that are thus established can become constitutive of a more practical, flourishing, convivial and empathetic understanding. It is for this very purpose that the French ethnographer Florent Kohler recently spent three months sitting in a series of fields with a herd of Blondes d’Aquitaine cows (Kohler, 2012). The resulting ‘empathy’ he developed for the cows should not constitute, he argues, an obstacle but rather a pre-condition to understanding.

The relationship between stockperson or farmer and individual farm animal has long been considered to be meaningful for both. Where it is found, it is based clearly, as Porcher (2002, 2004) has demonstrated, on inter-subjectivity and communication. Drawing on the work of Russow (2002), Anthony (2003) identifies three characteristics of the affective bond that might constitute such a relationship: it must be between individuals; it must be reciprocal and persistent; and it must promote the welfare of both parties. Indeed, there is much evidence that such a bond can lead to demonstrable increases in the latter’s health, productivity and welfare (Hemsworth and Coleman, 1998; Boivin et al., 2001; Hemsworth, 2007). In a sense, then, human and non-human animal individuals work together on the farm to achieve common goals, those of shared productivity and shared well-being. It can also entail shared suffering (Porcher, 2009), shared vitality (Young, 2005; Buller, 2012b), shared finitude (Wolfe, 2008). While a great deal of contemporary intensive livestock husbandry fails to provide the environment or context for such conviviality through mechanization and the increasingly forced distanciation of human and non-human (for example, Holloway, 2007), for the French farmers of Porcher’s work (2011: 14):

Animal husbandry implies a positive and lively relationship to animals. It is based on the desire to live with animals, to share their existence in its beauty and tragedy. It is based on friendship and joy, for animals are joyful and share their joy with their farmer, each in their own way.

Conclusion

In a recent television documentary, a farmer from the west country of the UK, who would soon lose his small and unprofitable dairy herd of 30 cows, was taken to visit a vast rotary milking parlour on a large American dairy farm. In the centre of the enormous circular machine, capable of holding over 100 cows at any one time, the farmer started to cry uncontrollably as the animals slowly passed before him. Assuming he was upset by the mechanization and seeming anonymity of this vast productivist roundabout, so different from the small stone-walled cattle shed of his former farm, the show’s presenter asked him if he was OK. ‘They seem so happy’, was his tearful response.

There are two registers of affective relationality in the farm. The first is that between individuals – individual human and individual non-human, a relationality that is often seen as essentially (and problematically) anthropomorphized yet one that underscores notions and practices of care and the new attention to psychological welfare and positive emotion in farm animals. However, quoting Midgley (1983: 130), who argued that ‘the barrier does not fall between us and the dog. It falls between you and me’, Milton (2005) offers, as an alternative to an understanding resting upon animals doing human things, the process of ‘egomorphization’: a mutual, interpersonal understanding based upon another (human or non-human) being like oneself. Here then is the potential for a lively and flourishing intersubjectivity born of shared lives and embodied experiences within the varied material affordances of the farm environment, the smells, the warmth, the cold, the proximity or the distance of others, the bumping and touch of bodies … and so on.

The second affective register operates at a slightly different scale, that of the mass, the herd, the multitude. Here too there are opportunities for individual wonderment, as the opening quotation of this article suggests. But herds and flocks also conceal. The animals within share conspecific and self-defining properties (Okrent, 2007: 89) becoming, in our eyes, de-singularized imitations of their prescribed species or breed type. We may continue to affectively anthropomorphize them, but here Milton’s insights achieve an additional pertinence. She quotes (2005: 266) Alger and Alger (1999), who assert that ‘anthropomorphism is best understood as a distancing concept intended to obscure the real intersubjectivity that exists between human and non-human animals’ (p. 203). In their massivity, these herds and flocks become metaphoric and, as such, killable. It is not only numbers that help us to stop thinking but also the hubris of our selective anthropomorphic conceit.