Farm Animal Welfare and Sustainability
Hodge, Alison
Date: 21 December 2010
Thesis or dissertation
Publisher
University of Exeter
Degree Title
PhD in Geography
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with acknowledging farm animals and their co-presence in the
more-than-human space of the livestock farm, and with accounting for them responsibly in
sustainability debates. The enrolment of farm animals as actors in political agendas for
environmental sustainability, and farm animal welfare suggests that there ...
This thesis is concerned with acknowledging farm animals and their co-presence in the
more-than-human space of the livestock farm, and with accounting for them responsibly in
sustainability debates. The enrolment of farm animals as actors in political agendas for
environmental sustainability, and farm animal welfare suggests that there are new ways of
seeing and being with farm animals that permit their relational presence and recognise their
subjectivity. Indeed geographers have in recent years acknowledged animals and their
relations with humans, and they have begun to recognise the nature of animal subjectivies.
However, within the fundamental rethinking of animals that has been provoked by these
discussions, I suggest that farm animals have remained relatively invisible. Occupying
ethically confusing terrain, farm animals have nonetheless been visible in a set of
philosophical positions regarding their moral status, yet these debates present a rather
confusing picture in which the farm animal as an individual is conspicuous by its absence.
In seeking to redress the invisibility of farm animals within these debates, and recast them
in relation to humans and the broader farm ecology, this thesis attempts to set out an
epistemological and methodological framework through which farm animals might become
visible as individual fleshy beings. Drawing on the concept of agricultural stewardship and
new agendas in farm animal welfare science, it makes use of new methodological tools that
have emerged in the social sciences to conduct a relational study of the livestock farm; a
study in which farm animals themselves participate. It also considers how the divisions
that have been constructed between humans, farm animals and the environment can be reconfigured
as a more unified political science of the livestock farm.
Doctoral Theses
Doctoral College
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0