Livestock/Deadstock

Working with Farm Animals from Birth to Slaughter

Rhoda M. Wilkie

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781592136490, 9781592136483
• eBook ISBN: 9781592136506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The connection between people and companion animals has received considerable attention from scholars. In her original and provocative ethnography Livestock/Deadstock, sociologist Rhoda Wilkie asks, how do the men and women who work on farms, in livestock auction markets, and slaughterhouses, interact with—or disengage from—the animals they encounter in their jobs?

Wilkie provides a nuanced appreciation of how those men and women who breed, rear, show, fatten, market, medically treat, and slaughter livestock, make sense of their interactions with the animals that constitute the focus of their work lives. Using a sociologically informed perspective, Wilkie explores their attitudes and behaviors to explain how agricultural workers think, feel, and relate to food animals.

Livestock/Deadstock looks at both people and animals in the division of labor and shows how commercial and hobby productive contexts provide male and female handlers with varying opportunities to bond with and/or distance themselves from livestock. Exploring the experiences of stockpeople, hobby farmers, auction workers, vets and slaughterers, she offers timely insight into the multifaceted, gendered, and contradictory nature of human roles in food animal production.  

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Food Animals: More Than a “Walking Larder”?
• 2. Domestication to Industry: The Commercialization of Human–Livestock Relations
• 3. Women and Livestock: The Gendered Nature of Food-Animal Production
• 4. “Price Discovery”: Marketing and Valuing Livestock
• 5. “The Good Life”: Hobby Farmers and Rare Breeds of Livestock
• 6. Sentient Commodities: The Ambiguous Status of Livestock
• 7. Affinities and Aloofness: The Pragmatic Nature of Producer–Livestock Relations
• 8. Livestock/Deadstock: Managing the Transition from Life to Death
• 9. Taking Stock: Food Animals, Ambiguous Relations, and Productive Contexts
• Notes
• Glossary of Doric Terms
• References
• Index