The Production of Animal Life: The Early American Cattle Business

Abstract

In this chapter, I describe the lives of and the business surrounding cows in the early years of the nation, including the role that cows played in colonization. I also examine the growing function of American corn, the plant one might argue that has colonized us all. Along with corn’s impact, I explore shifting notions of time from what historian E. P. Thompson calls “natural” time to the clock time that came with industrialization. Finally, I investigate the journey of cows at the end of their lives when they travel to slaughterhouses to be transformed into meat. Here we see an early biopolitical way of thinking about cows, as colonists began to control and attempt to enhance animal life, to make more cow, more meat, and eventually, more money, in less and less time. Both Thompson and Foucault illuminate how transforming the ways humans relate to time, enhanced human and cow capacity to produce more (not only meat but most things), more quickly.