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More sustainable ways of life: local knowledge and small-scale livestock farming

by Dr Ivana Teixeira
You can see the environment of the pampa gaucho and the beings that relate to it in the context of a small farmer’s rural property. The type of dwelling, some characteristics of the animals and the way of life of the small gaucho farmer. These are examples of a sustainable way of life, with docile animals raised on a small scale and on the kitchen doorstep. Healthy ecologies are human-animal relationships with less asymmetrical contours than those developed in the industrial farming of large herds.
Dr Ivana Teixeira is a Medical Anthropologist and Anthrozoologist, working as a postdoctoral researcher on the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene project,  to analyse the industrial slaughterhouses in the pampa gaucho region, from a multispecies perspective and ethnography. Focusing on human-animal relationship and human  health (PhD) and embodied effects of the Anthropocene in ecological and localised human-animal in industrial food-chain in the Anthropocene (post-doc).

Learning points

  • What are the characteristics of the lifestyle of the small farmer in the pampas?
  • The human-animal relationship present in this type of farming has crucial differences from those developed in Intensive Breeding. What is the human-animal relationship like in the video?
  • The sounds in the video refer to the context of an environment that is still preserved but at the same time threatened by the expansion of agribusiness. What sounds can you identify in the video?

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