The proposed research on Agricultural Animal Science in the US involves multiple methods: historical research at four American archives, oral history, observation at multiple lab sites (including a cloning lab).
The research will result in a dissertation and a trained professional.
A historical analysis of archival primary sources revealed that changing approaches to large animal science significantly impacted how Americans viewed animal entertainment, especially in the context of changing attitudes towards meat consumption, from 1965 to 2005. Using multilayered primary historical data collected from several archival repositories, the researcher demonstrated that professional rodeo, as a site of "spectacular livestock," became the entertainment arm of the beef industry. On the one hand, rodeo became an outlet for nostalgic identification with agrarian livestock husbandry, and on the other, it showcased its use of state-of-the-art veterinary advancements in care for performance animals to deflect larger concerns about industrial animal welfare. The relationship between animal science and public policy is closest in the food animal sector, where scientific research about the animal body connects directly with federal regulation, food safety, and agricultural policies – and with millions of meat consumers. This historical investigation revealed that the research undertaken by animal scientists in the second half of the twentieth century both changed and responded to the influences of cattle raisers, corporations, politicians, consumers, and animal welfare activists. Agricultural animal scientists played important roles beyond the laboratory. By using an interdisciplinary STS approach to study how they conducted their research and how their expertise was used to define and defend animal value in cultural venues, the researcher reconceptualized the interplay between culture and science at the highly contested site of the animal body, and demonstrated the importance of the agricultural animal to public policy and public politics. The findings from this study will help academics and the public understand how scientific management of industrial and entertainment animals contributes to a paradox: that individual animals receive improved care as a result of scientific and veterinary technological advancements, but that progress in agricultural animal science as a whole, in a successful effort to increase the efficiency of food-animal production, has also created widespread dangers to animal and human health. The interdisciplinary methods used in this research – archival, ethnographic, and oral-historical – functioned together to contextualize the work of scientists and the culture in which they worked. Further interdisciplinary research can be applied to a wide range of scientific topics in order to critique narratives of scientific progress that may be too easily accepted. Such inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation will contribute better cultural understanding of the function of science in society and how it affects the day-to-day lives of Americans.
