Basque ethnography at a glance

Tagged sheep. Luis Manuel Peña. Labayru Fundazioa Photographic Archive.

Urban, modern and extremely high-tech society tends to proudly look down on the rural world. It belongs in the past, you might think, where outdated and obsolete traditional values are still upheld. Yet, very few ever stop to consider the productive activity of farms today, specifically the realities of modern industrial farming methods on the front line of society, as it were, where ‘experiments’ are conducted with a focus on the control of individuals and maximization of production, which sooner or later are suspiciously applied to human societies.

We shall give some examples. All farm animals that make up a valued asset we call livestock are identified by means of alphanumeric codes and chips of various shapes, sizes and a choice of implantation techniques. The birth of a lamb or a calf triggers a cascade of endless checks until it dies or is slaughtered, and even beyond. Swarms of civil servants follow its every move creating overwhelming levels of bureaucracy. The information contained in cattle microchip implants, example given, includes age, sire and dam, identity of its breeder, stable of origin, travel documents duly completed, offspring, milk production details, diseases suffered from, medication administered, feed intake, feed composition and butch number, and even the registration number of the slaughter truck. The slaughter of the animal, when it comes, requires a considerable amount of paperwork and further checks, and once slaughtered, the unnecessary bureaucratic overburden continues as data is created right through to when the meat is consumed at a typical cider house.

Neck collar tag on cow. Luis Manuel Peña. Labayru Fundazioa Photographic Archive.

The milking robot calculates each dairy cow’s weight and notifies the breeder when the animal is losing weight. The cow also carries a pedometer for recording the number of steps it takes over the course of a day. Any changes observed in its stepping behavioural pattern are continuously monitored, too little walking meaning it might be ill, and increased step frequency being a good indicator of heat stress. Should this be the case, the breeder may select the sperm to inseminate it by accessing computer databases that match the morphological and production characteristics of the said cow with stored genetic features of donor bulls. The program identifies the most suitable sperm for fertilization and that which meets the farmer’s prospects of improvement.

The latest development in livestock management is the GPS tracker, which paradoxically tracks cattle wandering ‘free’ in the mountain and informs about their movements. This latter case is unusual, because farmed animals live their lives on factory farms now and are kept for ever enslaved in large warehouse-like buildings. Surprisingly enough the concept of animal welfare has developed simultaneously, another cohort of civil servants managing it and thus creating still more bureaucracy. If you live in the city, you might, after reading this post, look at the countryside, particularly the industrialized countryside, in the light of what is to come.

Oh, and one more important point: animals never lose their basic instinct to resist and fight back microchip implantation; you, in turn, do not only ‘freely’ accept surveillance technologies but are prepared to pay good money for them, because chances are you have a precious smartphone in your hand or in your pocket.

Luis Manuel Peña – Ethnography Department – Labayru Fundazioa

Translated by Jaione Bilbao – Ethnography Department – Labayru Fundazioa