Tim Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds (Yale University Press, 2013) certainly wasn’t the first book to detail what happens in slaughterhouses, but it set a standard for ethnographic work that’s sympathetic to the plight of animals. It’s an unflinching look at the human and nonhuman costs of killing animals at incredible rates; at the same time, it provides powerful tools for theorizing about how slaughterhouses prevent people from feeling responsible for animal death. You could, therefore, think about Gillespie’s new book as a prequel to Pachirat’s: it explores how cattle wind up in slaughterhouses, focusing specifically on the painful experiences of dairy cows, who tend to be neglected in many discussions of animal welfare. If taught side-by-side, students would walk away with a detailed and visceral understanding of the way that bovines are abused and ignored in our contemporary food system.

Though there is much to be learned from Gillespie’s book when it’s framed that way, there is at least as much to learn about the work of doing (what she calls) “multispecies ethnography.” She’s remarkably sensitive to the ethical, methodological, and existential questions that come up when doing this kind of research. She explores the difficulty of getting approval for research on animals that we readily kill. She works through the many ways that commodification gets in the way of understanding animals. She reflects on the gendered expectations that affect her ability to gain access to her research subjects, as well as the way that they affect what she feels pressured to witness. And she is highly sensitive to the transformative dimensions of research, making some kind of lived response — in her case, dietary change — feel entirely necessary.

You can read Gillespie’s book so that all this material is introductory or transitional, either setting up or creating seams between her observations of cows at auction, in dairies, and at farm sanctuaries. But I think this would be a mistake. Gillespie does the reader a remarkable service in making herself visible in the text, letting us appreciate the way that her experience of doing this work shapes the work itself. It’s rare to have such transparency, it’s a model for anyone concerned to avoid the illusion that scholars are impartial spectators. The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 is worth reading for many reasons, but it’s invaluable for this one.

© 2018 Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer teaches philosophy at Texas State University. He’s the editor of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford, 2015; with Ben Bramble) and College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You(Oxford, 2017). He’s also the author of several essays on animal ethics, moral psychology, and the epistemology of modality.