Cattle Trails and Animal Lives - (Animal Voices / Animal Worlds) by Karen M Morin

About the Book

"Cattle Trails and Animal Lives can best be described as "early western Americana meets critical animal studies." This work shifts the narratives of the Old West cattle kingdoms from cowboys, ranchers, cattle barons, and other enterprising entrepreneurs to the lived experiences of cattle caught within the rural 'carceral archipelago' of the emergent US beef industry. The work focuses on these animals' forced movement over land and sea, their experiences, lives, and agency as formerly free-roaming animals who were captured, enclosed, moved, and eventually shipped by railroad to awaiting slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond. The spatial nodes and sites of the carceral archipelago include the open range, the ranch, the cattle trail, and the cattle town and the intense human carceral controls enacted within them through development of carceral structures, practices, infrastructures, technologies, and tools. The work further interprets how these animal lives are culturally re-narrated to contemporary audiences in museum exhibits featuring material carceral artefacts, through living history sites, through other touristic and artistic re-creations of historic cattle drives, and through Hollywood westerns. Together these not only perpetuate heroic myths of the Old West but normalize and even celebrate the carceral experiences of animals"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Cattle Trails and Animal Lives remaps the historical and empirical geography of the emergent cattle industry as a series of carceral sites and nodes in the American West, focusing on the experiences of animals living and eventually dying under intense carceral structures, practices, technologies, and tools. This work shifts the narratives of the Old West cattle kingdoms from cowboys, ranchers, and cattle barons to the lived experiences of cattle caught within the rural "carceral archipelago" of the emergent U.S. beef industry. The work focuses on these animals' forced movement over land and sea--their experiences, lives, and agency as formerly free-roaming animals who were captured, enclosed, moved, and eventually shipped by railroad to slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond. The spatial nodes and sites of the carceral archipelago include the open range, the ranch, the cattle trail, and the cattle town and the intense human carceral controls enacted within them. The work further interprets how these animal lives are culturally renarrated to contemporary audiences through living history sites, other touristic and artistic re-creations of historic cattle drives, Hollywood westerns, and museum exhibits featuring material carceral artefacts. Together these not only perpetuate heroic myths of the Old West but normalize and even celebrate the carceral experiences of animals.

Review Quotes

Morin's extraordinary book makes visceral the historical experience of cows who lived and died in the making of the settler colonial nation state. In a wholly unique analysis, we're transported through the archives, connecting us not only to individual animals as historical subjects but also to their contemporary ancestors who continue to be caught up in the violence of animal agriculture. This book movingly re-narrates the historical record, honoring those whose stories have, for so long, been all but erased.--Kathryn Gillespie "author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"

This book will make a significant contribution to the field of animal studies and be essential reading for scholars interested in the fields of food production, animal welfare, and environmental history.--Kristen Guest "Professor of English, University of Northern British Columbia"

About the Author

KAREN M. MORIN is Presidential Professor of Geography Emerita at Bucknell University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University (Toronto). She is the author of Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals; Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890; and Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West; and coeditor, with Dominique Moran, of Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past and, with Jeanne Kay Guelke, of Women, Religion, & Space: Global Perspectives on Gender and Faith.