This talk focuses on the crucial role of veterinarians in making animal death valuable, enabling productive life, and managing uncontrolled dying. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on dairy farms in the Netherlands as part of the ERC-project VetValues, and considering veterinarians as gatekeepers of the food chain, health practitioners, and governance actors, I articulate the “value-scapes” of food production that shape which animals die, when, and how, and whether death is desirable, a waste, or a warning. I highlight how veterinary expertise is shaped by diverse societal concerns like food security, public health, animal welfare, and ecological sustainability, and knotted into shifting and multifaceted formations of Dutch-European animality.
Else Vogel is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam working at the intersection of anthropology and STS . Her ethnographic research explores how veterinarians - professionals who crucially shape contemporary human-animal relationships - negotiate diverse concerns and contribute to changes in a livestock sector caught between the growing demand for meat, pandemic threats, pressing ecological challenges, and rising concerns for animal welfare. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project VetValues, a comparative ethnography of veterinary care in the EU.