Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More-than-human Condition by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-11943-2
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Feeding ‘scientific hunger’: De-flocking, caring and killing bone sheep

In Fraser’s (1980, p. 178) book on farm animals, you can read that ‘sheep are usually awake for 16 hours per day. They drowse for about four and a half hours, far less than cattle. Slow Wave Sleep occupies three and a half hours, REM sleep occurs in seven periods for a total of 43 minutes’. What is known about an animal depends on the different practices which make it material it in different ways. Do bone sheep dream differently? What else makes them distinct from meat and wool sheep?

Six weeks before a project starts, the sheep that will be involved in it are selected on the farm. Normally, an average of 10–20 animals is needed. They have to be as homogeneous as possible in age, sex and weight since the structure of their bones depends on all of these factors. It takes a long time to select them. Then, the group is taken to the animal house at the research institute. The following four-week period is devoted to preparing the experiments. This time is mainly needed to adapt the sheep to their life in the stable:

You have to break their herd instinct, you have to individualize them and put them in single boxes. At the beginning of a project there is a lot of agitation and hustle in the stable. Sheep are not accustomed to that kind of closeness to humans. So you start making them familiar with yourself. Every day you have to go to every single sheep, feed it with some special candies.

(Interview, Lanker)

The most important practice to enact bone-sheep is to individualize them, to de-flock the sheep, that is to create singular, individually measurable and observable animals. It is interesting that it is impossible to describe the result of this process in correct English, since ‘sheep’ is a mass noun, an uncountable noun (Krifka, 1991; Nicolas, 2008). These nouns treat any quantity of a certain substance – be it water, sand, money, fish or sheep – as an undifferentiated unit. Correspondingly there is no term like ‘sheeps’ because mass nouns cannot produce singular and plural forms. Since sheep usually live in flocks the term ‘sheep’ is mostly understood as plural, or it contains the possibility of being plural or multiple (Law and Mol, 2008). For thousands of years flock sheep have been counted in a different, relational, non-individualizing way (Barry 1969; Ryder 1983, 670–71). De-flocking techniques make sheep countable, they transform sheep into another mode of existence, into another system and practice of being individualized and counted. Not in the realm of linguistics but in the reality of a research stable sheep become singular/plural, they turn into sheep/s.

During this process, sheep are counted and marked with different numbers. The AO project number is stamped in red numerals on the sheepskin. An external veterinarian comes along every week without announcing the visits in order to check if the sheep are fit. Blood and stool examinations have to be done.

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