A Standard of Breeding: Animal Gender and the Atlantic World Meat Trade

This paper explores the use of pedigrees as instruments of bodily and gendered standardization in circuits of international livestock breeding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Trans-species notions of gendered difference—concepts of gender formed by and through interactions between human and non-human animals—were foundational to the development and proliferation of standardized pedigrees and, thus, to the codification of gendered difference within the vast infrastructures of meat-making that spanned the Atlantic by the early twentieth century.

Pedigree registries, first adopted by breeders in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century, were increasingly promoted by government agencies and breeding associations in the late nineteenth century to “improve” livestock and ensure national access to a burgeoning global trade in purebred animals: as a record of ancestry, pedigrees both practically determined which animals were bred and provided proof of bodily quality transferable across vast distances. 

In order to be registered, animals needed to conform to bodily standards established by breed associations, standards, in turn, structured by gendered difference. For example, breeders scrutinized the bodies of sows and cows for “feminine” qualities that gave evidence of “matronly” character and “docility.” Meanwhile, breeders debated what constituted a “masculine brow” for bulls and boars, positing that physiognomic analysis yielded insight into the “prepotency” and “virility” of males. Debates like these about what constituted a standard animal body hinged on ideas of gendered difference that were never reducible to animal bodies but instead were constantly in dialogue with human gender.