Abstract :
[en] This book is about cows — past, present and future. Often positioned as both
symbols and scapegoats in environmental debates, cows inhabit our societies as biological and cultural figures, entangled in histories, economies and imaginaries. If you ask around, someone is likely to have a cow story. Paying attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle traces of bovines in everyday life, our research seeks to follow the small narratives that lie in the vast infrastructures of agro-industry and biotechnology.
To where and to whom do cows belong?
Distant from the pastoral landscapes they are often associated with, bovine lives play out in the liminal spaces of science, capital, and culture. This inquiry into cows’ existence actually started through another research project conducted in the medical genomics unit at Liège University Hospital. Cows appeared everywhere: in wallpaper decorations, in the schedules of scientists who split their time between the biomedical research centre and the Walloon livestock agency, and as financial assets of the biomedical research centre itself. They were present in the scientific
instruments and, in turn, shaped methods and knowledge in human medicine.
These overlaps brought into question the fragility of the human-animal boundary, and cows emerged as a recurring, even obsessive, pattern.
Genomic technologies promise not only to heal humans but to shape the ideal animals of the future. Thus far, social sciences have mostly taken an interest in the medical domain through the Human Genome Project and its big promise of improving disease prediction and healing. Yet, livestock genomics is witnessing fast-paced developments with the promise to improve breeding programs by targeted selection, from maximizing meat and milk yield to understanding antimicrobial resistance in livestock as a global threat for both human and animal health. Philanthropic and corporate actors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
have invested heavily in livestock genomics. One such venture recently pledged over £40 million to an Edinburgh-based lab to design “the perfect cow”. These developments are not isolated. An everyday genomics infrastructure has emerged, routinely used in late capitalist societies for the selection and reproduction of bovines. In other words, cows have been progressively incorporated within industrial systems through standardization processes, where animal lives are shaped
at the confluence of biology, zootechnics and bioinformatics.
