ABSTRACT
Market-driven pressures to minimize inputs and maximize outputs of animal bodies have led to increasingly industrialized agricultural practices in which technologies of control and modification are applied to ever-more-intimate aspects of biological being. The study of animal and plant domestication is amongst many fields in which questions of utility and need have been prominent. The acknowledgement of the importance of emotive ties between humans and animal domesticates takes a leap forward in Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto. A social life that encompasses domesticated animals, in this light, can be seen to rest more primordially on a kind of mutual dispossession than on the possession of animals by human actors; a letting go of customary precautions and boundary maintenance on the part of each participating species. The attempt to transform the biota and landscapes of Europe’s “settler colonies” through the introduction of plant and animal species from other regions was a vital and momentous aspect of the colonization process.
