ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the historical practices of livestock breeding, and the evident tensions between function and beauty. It explores empirical research on setting out some of the layers of a practical aesthetic register for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, and on what happens when the visual, or aesthetic, appreciation of animal bodies meets ostensibly very different, genetic modes of evaluation. Ritvo herself writes that such animals became embodiments of beauty and elegance, while for elite breeders, fancy cattle could be valued as precious jewels, and the animals were bought and sold with that market in mind. But in addition to the claim that breeding can have aesthetic aims, the chapter suggest that the aesthetic evaluation of an animal is also in part a product of breeding for function, so that how farmed animals are aesthetically appreciated emerges in part from or is structured by a functionalist sensibility.
