Anne Galloway (Victoria University of Wellington) - A Good Death? Home-killing and practices of care

Anne is currently visiting Exeter Geography, from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand where she is a Senior Lecturer in Culture + Context Design and leads the More-Than-Human Lab. Anne's research examines intersections of people, nonhuman animals and technologies, and explores creative methods for public engagement around related matters of concern. Anne also spends as much time as possible at her rural home, where she shepherds small flocks of rare-breed sheep and ducks. web: morethanhumanlab.org | twitter: @annegalloway

A Good Death? Home-killing and practices of care
Over 50 billion farmed animals are killed every year, but in affluent, Western contexts it is a very small number of people who actually perform these killings, or witness these deaths. And despite a wealth of scientific and industry research into the act of killing farm animals, little social science or humanities research has attended to their actual deaths. The relative invisibility of farm animal death points to culture in conflict; Vialles (1994) has argued that consumers demand meat production “must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent).” Rather than providing ethical justification for—or condemnation of—killing farm animals, this ethnographic project seeks to “stay with the trouble [of] living and dying together” (Haraway 2010), and understand what people actually do in order to provide an animal with what they consider to be a ‘good death’. Complementing a growing body of social and cultural studies of slaughterhouses, this seminar examines on-farm killing as a means by which farmers, veterinarians, and homekill service providers practice care—or what Mol, Moser and Pols (2010) describe as “local solutions to specific problems [that] may involve ‘justice’ but other norms (fairness, kindness, compassion, generosity) may be equally or more important.” Through a series of anecdotes that explore entanglements of people, animals and places, I aim to open discussion on the challenges and opportunities for conducting this kind of research today.