Livestock/Deadstock

Working with Farm Animals From Birth to Slaughter (Animals Culture And Society)

By: Rhoda M. Wilkie

Narrated by: Robert J. Eckrich

The connection between people and companion animals has received considerable attention from scholars. In her original and provocative ethnography Livestock/Deadstock, sociologist Rhoda Wilkie asks, how do the men and women who work on farms, in livestock auction markets, and slaughterhouses, interact with - or disengage from - the animals they encounter in their jobs?

Wilkie provides a nuanced appreciation of how those men and women who breed, rear, show, fatten, market, medically treat, and slaughter livestock, make sense of their interactions with the animals that constitute the focus of their work lives. Using a sociologically informed perspective, Wilkie explores their attitudes and behaviors to explain how agricultural workers think, feel, and relate to food animals.

Livestock/Deadstock looks at both people and animals in the division of labor and shows how commercial and hobby productive contexts provide male and female handlers with varying opportunities to bond with and/or distance themselves from livestock. Exploring the experiences of stockpeople, hobby farmers, auction workers, vets and slaughterers, she offers timely insight into the multifaceted, gendered, and contradictory nature of human roles in food animal production.

Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Animals and Society Section of the American Sociological Association, 2011.

©2010 Temple University (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"The volume offers a unique insight into the often contradictory nature of animal production and care." ( Anthrozoos)

"For labor and environmental sociologists, Livestock/Deadstock is essential." ( Labor History)

"Rhoda Wilkie's excellent Livestock/Deadstock provides a remarkably in-depth account of the co-assembled lives of stock animals and stockpersons." (Henry Buller, University of Exeter)

livestock AND deadstock

The author is a woman from the UK. I would have been very happy to hear the voice of a woman from the UK tell me about her experience in the near industry of that place.

instead I endured hours of taking my a man from North America whose main focuses throughout this work were enunciation and an incredibly irritating emphasis on the word AND.

Perhaps that conjunction transgressed upon the narrator and his family and this was the opportunity he took to seek revenge.

Maybe he teaches grammar and instructs his pupils to avoid that word, to use more colorful options.

I doubt the latter is the case given how monotonous and dry his reading was otherwise.

One thought I entertained was that the author requested such a tone so as to avoid criticism of being overly emotional. That's my attempt at giving the benefit of the doubt and it is still unsatisfying.

Regardless of explanation, this was a difficult audiobook to get through AND I would recommend reading it yourself instead as the material itself seemed to be very informative and thought provoking.

Fantastic

I loved this book as it given a lot of insight to the process in which meat is brought to the supermarket. It explains the interaction between the emotional ties to labor and the detachment of raising and slaughtering live stock. There is a sensuous explanation of the market and the background to how the theater of selling livestock and the attitudes arises. I live in the USA and the sociological parallels to hobby. farmers in the USA and the UK are striking. I can now better understand Hobby farmers and the decisions that they make regarding killing livestock and caring for animals that would have otherwise die do to serious birth defects. This book is great for anyone who wants to be a hobby farmer or a big cattle producer because it helps people to identify with their respected community.

Distracting narrator

The narrator made this book hard to concentrate on; boring and flat. The content is interesting except the author repeats themes and actual entire sentences too often and the scope of the subject is small considering the mass of the subject. I felt less like this was a sociological study and more like an opinion piece. It has good information about the state of animal welfare in small farms but too small of a scope to come to any conclusion

Too clinical and filled with misandrism

While the book can be quite informative, I feel like it does two things that hold it back. One is how clinical the book is, which pushes away the casual reader and the other is the author's outdated and uneducated views of men and women, which pushes away the more analytical reader. Viewing the world through that weird lens that so many people do, where they bemoan capitalism while placing the worth of a person in their ability to earn capital had me rolling my eyes. I've heard the song and seen the dance of how I'm an evil and horrible person inherently because I'm a man too much to want to listen to a misandrism prattle on about in my free time. Further, the way in general that they refer to the people that work in these jobs, as if they are enemies for her to infiltrate the ranks of, is part of the dry, clinical problem, where the author feels robotic.