%0 Journal Article 
%A LeVasseur, Todd
%T Methane dispensers or bio-bynamic beings? Polysemous meanings of domesticated ruminant bovines

%D 2016
%@ 2171-9594
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/25299
%X This paper approaches thinking about animals via the animal humanities, focusing on the conflicting meanings ascribed to domesticated cattle: given the amount of biomass cattle currently occupy on earth, are they destroyers of the environment, or saviors of the planet?  By investigating narrative tropes, especially those grounded within the at times competing and overlapping worldviews of religious environmentalism, biodynamic agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and Vedic/Hindu cosmologies, this paper explores the iterative interaction between how cows are conceived, and thus managed, in relation to human-nature interactions.  Who can kill a cow, when, why, and for what purpose?  How should cows be raised and treated?  Do cows have their own form of intelligence, and even spiritual intelligence?  Are cows one of the leading causes of climate destabilization and deforestation, or are they able to help avert runaway climate change?  Should cows be the entry point into animal abolitionism?  Investigating the competing and conflicting answers to such questions matters, for if we are to have any form of functional habitat that enables the flourishing of human and non-human lifeforms in the coming decades, then how we conceive of and manage and interact with other lifeforms, especially in the context of both religion and agriculture, matters.  Emerging metrics suggests that our narrative, ethical, religious, and biological understandings of our evolutionary kin in the dawning Anthropocene will be fluid, contested, and in flux, and as scholars we must be prepared to interpret and analyze emergent meanings that will be ascribed to other lifeforms on our climate changed planet.  Investigating cows—their labor, their environmental impacts, their role in shaping human societies and providing calories, the art of interacting with them on agricultural fields—presents a chance to rethink the human on a world of limits.

%K Cows
%K Religious  environmentalism
%K Religion
%K Climate change
%K Authentic  religion
%K Animal studies
%K Vacas
%K Ecologismo religioso
%K Religión
%K Cambio climático
%K Religión auténtica
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala