Methane dispensers or bio-bynamic beings?: polysemous meanings of domesticated ruminant bovines

• Autores: Todd LeVasseur
• Localización: Ecozon@ [Ecozona]: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, ISSN-e 2171-9594, Vol. 7, N. 1, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Animal Humanities), págs. 112-127
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.37536/ecozona.2016.7.1.983
• Títulos paralelos:
  • ¿Dispensadores de metano o seres bio-dinámicos?: significados polisémicos de los bovinos rumiantes domesticados
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen
  • español

    Este trabajo analiza los animales pensantes a través de las humanidades animales, centrándose en los significados conflictivos atribuidos al ganado domesticado: ¿son destructores del medio ambiente, o salvadores del planeta? Al investigar los tropos narrativos, especialmente aquellos basados en las visiones del mundo, a veces rivales y superpuestas, del ecologismo religioso, la agricultura biodinámica y la agricultura sostenible, se explora la interacción iterativa entre cómo las vacas son concebidas y gestionadas en relación con las interacciones entren el ser humano y la naturaleza. Las preguntas de gestión pueden incluir: ¿Quién puede matar a una vaca, cuándo, por qué, y con qué propósito? ¿Cómo deben ser criadas y tratadas las vacas? ¿Tienen las vacas su propia forma de inteligencia, e incluso de inteligencia espiritual? ¿Son las vacas la principal causa de la desestabilización del clima y la deforestación, o pueden ayudar a evitar el cambio climático? ¿Deberían ser las vacas ser el punto de entrada en el abolicionismo animal? La investigación de las respuestas conflictivas a estas y otras preguntas es importante, ya que si los seres humanos han de tener algún tipo de hábitat funcional que permita el florecimiento de las formas de vida humanas y no humanas en las próximas décadas, es importante cómo los seres humanos conciben, gestionan e interactúan con otras formas de vida, especialmente en el contexto de la religión y la agricultura. Métricas emergentes sugieren que la narrativa, los entendimientos éticos, religiosos, familiares y biológicos de la evolución no humana en el Antropoceno naciente será fluida y controvertida. Por lo tanto, los especialistas deben estar preparados para interpretar significados emergentes que se pueden atribuir a otras formas de vida en un planeta frente al cambio climático. La investigación de las vacas—su trabajo, sus impactos ambientales, su papel en la conformación de las sociedades humanas y la disponibilidad de calorías, el arte de interactuar con ellos en los campos agrícolas—presenta la oportunidad de reconsiderar al ser humano en un mundo de límites.

  • italiano

    This paper approaches thinking about animals via the animal humanities, focusing on the conflicting meanings ascribed to domesticated cattle: given the amount of biomass cattle currently occupy on earth, are they destroyers of the environment, or saviors of the planet? By investigating narrative tropes, especially those grounded within the at times competing and overlapping worldviews of religious environmentalism, biodynamic agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and Vedic/Hindu cosmologies, this paper explores the iterative interaction between how cows are conceived, and thus managed, in relation to human-nature interactions. Who can kill a cow, when, why, and for what purpose? How should cows be raised and treated? Do cows have their own form of intelligence, and even spiritual intelligence? Are cows one of the leading causes of climate destabilization and deforestation, or are they able to help avert runaway climate change? Should cows be the entry point into animal abolitionism? Investigating the competing and conflicting answers to such questions matters, for if we are to have any form of functional habitat that enables the flourishing of human and non-human lifeforms in the coming decades, then how we conceive of and manage and interact with other lifeforms, especially in the context of both religion and agriculture, matters. Emerging metrics suggests that our narrative, ethical, religious, and biological understandings of our evolutionary kin in the dawning Anthropocene will be fluid, contested, and in flux, and as scholars we must be prepared to interpret and analyze emergent meanings that will be ascribed to other lifeforms on our climate changed planet. Investigating cows—their labor, their environmental impacts, their role in shaping human societies and providing calories, the art of interacting with them on agricultural fields—presents a chance to rethink the human on a world of limits.

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