Humane Disposability: Rethinking “Food Animals,” Animal Welfare, and Vegetarianism in Response to the Factory Farm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intensively industrialized animal agriculture, or factory farming, poses many challenges for our notions of “life” and how it should be treated. Factory farming’s mass instrumentalization and exploitation of animals potentially unsettles both our most basic notions regarding the justice of sacrificing certain lives in order to improve other lives, and our decisions about which lives belong to each category. This thesis examines the factory farm as a site that relies upon and produces particular lessons about life. The first chapter explores factory farming’s insistence that economically useful features of animals can be endlessly manipulated and optimized, summarily rendering disposable all other aspects of their lives. Recent work on “neoliberal” economic ideology identifies the emergence of similar conclusions about human life under neoliberalism, yet animal life remains largely un-theorized in this context. Meanwhile, the field of critical animal studies is generating a rich body of work theorizing our exclusion of animals from full ethical and political consideration, but has yet to grapple with how the factory farm brings to bear its own economizing logic that intensifies the “othering” of animal life. The resulting pedagogy of life reverberates throughout the range of cultural responses to factory farming. Chapter Two discusses factory farm designer Temple Grandin’s work in order to illustrate how attempts to situate the site within ostensibly non-economic narratives of life such as ecology, comparative epistemology, and spirituality reveal ways that those narratives can become complicit with the factory farm’s neoliberal pedagogy. Chapter Three examines current representations of vegetarian identity, demonstrating that even resistant responses can reinscribe the factory farm’s sacrificial economy. The thesis concludes that alternative futures for critical resistance to the factory farm depend upon a more thorough apprehension of its conceptual reach, and concerted pedagogical and ethical work through and beyond its framing of both human and animal life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".