Species of Time: sows, stockmen and labour

Rapid advances in the industrialisation and increased productivity of British livestock farming since the 1950s have been accompanied by public anxiety concerning a range of issues, especially the ethics attaching to livestock care, slaughter, and consumption. Drawing on ethnographic data derived from fieldwork on an indoor intensive pig unit, this paper aims to address the question of how to combine intensive farming with responsible care of animals, and focuses in particular on how stockmen mobilise the idiom of time in the construction of relationships with their livestock. Stockmen’s accounts of daily routines of care, control, and organisation reveal how elements of clock time, human time, and pig time are synchronized with industrial and technological itineraries. Insights provided by these accounts of overlapping varieties of time are used to suggest conflations of other kinds; between humans and non-humans, time and place, the industrial and the domestic - all of which emerge as fluid, or hybrid, rather than rigidly demarcated categories within the space of intensive livestock farming