This visual memoir probes the tensions and contradictions that inflect the commodity-based relationship between a farmer and his cattle on an Irish farm. A methodological exploration of how to attend to the politics of care that animate multispecies relationships on the farm, this article examines relations of intimacy, care, and contradiction materialized in the structural manipulation of bodies for economic purposes. The attentive focus on the everyday encounters between John and his cattle unearths how affective and conflicting multispecies entanglements mediate the farming of animals for food through rhythms of care, the spirit of the gift, and the logic of sacrifice.

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Through ethnographic attunement to the emotionally complex relationships between zookeepers and nonhuman animals, commodification in the political economy of Copenhagen Zoo produces a form of care characterized by coercive cooperation. Amidst the coercive constraints of captivity, keepers depict relationships as ranging from those of explicit coercion, where the animals are made to work, to those of cooperation, where the animals are perceived as working with. Within this context, zoo animals can be better understood as “cooperative commodities”, lively commodities that are perceived as cooperating in their commodification. The belief in cooperation also reframes potential moments of resistance as opportunities to respond and thereby lessen the emotional toll on zookeepers when maladaptive behaviors highlight the failings of their captive environment.

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This paper explores the #SaveBenjy Crowdfunder campaign to save a Charolais bull in the Republic of Ireland who expressed sexual interest only in weanling bulls and not the heifers he was expected to impregnate. The prominence and popularity of #SaveBenjy is anything but coincidental. In May 2015, the referendum on gay marriage sought to legalize same-sex marriage. Consequently, #SaveBenjy provides a timely lens through which to view Irish attitudes towards sexuality, while also raising important questions around nonhuman subjectivity and personhood. #SaveBenjy blurs the boundaries between nature and culture and thus, demands a new paradigm within which the nonhuman animal can be appreciated as being inherently and simultaneously natural and cultural.