Tinkering with Relations

Abstract

Abstract In the Netherlands, vets play a key role in the continuation, regulation, and innovation of industrial livestock production. Extending studies of care in health care and farming and drawing on fieldwork with veterinarians, this chapter details how vets treat animals, coach farmers, perform animal welfare procedures, or otherwise try to achieve ‘good’ farm animal care. Describing the different roles vets take on in livestock production, it highlights that vets are not only juggling different forms of the good, but also are part of different practices of doing good—each with its own care and accountability relations, and particular promises, challenges, and limits. What emerges, is that while ethicists and animal activists elevate the relation to the animal as the primary ethical relationship, in practice veterinarians are entangled, and operate, in a web of relations. It is in tinkering with these complex relations, the chapter suggests, that a situated form of veterinary ethics is ‘done’.

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