Livestock

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Livestock surround us in ways most people never stop to count. Cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats, horses, camels, yaks, water buffalo, reindeer, llamas, alpacas, rabbits, and guinea pigs all fall under this single word. Together, humans and the animals they farm make up more than ninety percent of the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates. That is a staggering share of life on dry land, claimed by one species and the creatures it has chosen to manage.

  The word livestock did not exist before the mid-seventeenth century. Before 1650, people used other words, and the concept itself was wrapped up inside terms like cattle, which once meant something far broader. How that language changed, and why, traces a story about how farming reshaped both the land and the way people think about the animals in their care.

  This documentary follows livestock from the first domestication events tens of thousands of years ago through the rise of intensive farming, the environmental consequences that now shape climate policy, and the ethical debates that are quietly shifting what millions of people choose to eat.

• 2. A Word Invented in the 1650s

  ›

  Between 1650 and 1660, English speakers put two ordinary words together and coined a compound that has endured ever since. "Live" joined "stock," and livestock entered the language at a moment when agriculture was reorganizing around new commercial pressures.

  For much of history, cattle and livestock were interchangeable terms. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the meanings diverged. Cattle narrowed to mean domesticated bovines. Livestock broadened to cover the full range of farmed animals. Two words that once described roughly the same thing ended up describing very different scopes.

  The legal definition of livestock has never settled into a single answer. The Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999, known as Public Law 106-78, Title IX, defines livestock only as cattle, swine, and sheep. A disaster assistance law passed in 1988 stretched the definition to include cattle, sheep, goats, swine, poultry including egg-producing birds, equine animals used for food or in food production, fish used for food, and other animals the Secretary of Agriculture might designate. The United States Department of Agriculture classifies pork, veal, beef, and lamb as livestock and groups all of them under the label red meat. Poultry and fish sit outside that classification. Fish products fall under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration rather than the USDA, which is likely why fish did not end up inside the livestock category.

• 3. Thousands of Years of Domestication

  ›

  Dogs appear in the archaeological record of Europe and the Far East from about fifteen thousand years ago, making them among the earliest animals to live alongside humans. Goats and sheep followed, domesticated in multiple separate events somewhere between eleven thousand and five thousand years ago in Southwest Asia. Pigs were brought under human control by around 8,500 BC in the Near East and around 6,000 BC in China.

  Cattle were domesticated from the Eurasian aurochs approximately ten thousand five hundred years ago. Chickens and other poultry may have been domesticated around 7,000 BC. Horses came later, with domestication dating to roughly 4,000 BC. Each of these events happened independently, in different places, with different wild ancestors.

  The driving force behind all of them was the shift from hunter-gatherer life to settled farming communities. Once people stopped moving in search of food and began growing it, the logic of keeping animals close changed completely. Breeding and living conditions moved under human control, and over generations the animals themselves changed. Many modern farmed animals are now genuinely unsuited to life outside human management. Their collective behavior, lifecycle, and physiology have shifted so far from their wild ancestors that the distance between a dairy cow and an aurochs represents thousands of years of selective pressure.

• 4. How Farming Systems Vary

  ›

  Traditional animal husbandry was organized around survival rather than surplus. The subsistence farmer expected livestock to supply not only food but also fuel, fertilizer, clothing, transport, and draft power. Killing an animal for meat was considered a secondary use. Wherever possible, farmers drew products from living animals: wool, eggs, milk, and blood. The Maasai, for instance, harvested blood from living cattle as part of their diet.

  The practice of transhumance organized entire communities around seasonal movement. Humans and their animals shifted between fixed summer and winter pastures. In mountain regions, the summer pasture was high in the hills; when cold arrived, everyone moved down to the valleys. This rhythm persisted across generations in many parts of the world.

  Extensive systems let animals roam widely. Ranching in the western United States involves large herds moving across both public and private lands. Similar cattle stations operate across South America, Australia, and other places with large land areas and low rainfall. Sheep in the uplands of the United Kingdom are turned out on the fells in spring to graze mountain grasses with no daily supervision, then brought down to lower altitudes late in the year.

  At the other end of the spectrum, intensive management has taken hold across much of the developed world. Dairy cows may spend their lives in zero-grazing conditions with forage brought directly to them. Beef cattle are kept in high-density feedlots. Pigs may live in climate-controlled buildings and never go outdoors. Laying hens are housed in barns under lighting-controlled conditions. Livestock farming has largely shifted toward this intensive model, which raises yields of commercial outputs while raising separate concerns about animal welfare, public health, and the environment.

• 5. Predators, Disease, and Trade

  ›

  Farmers in North America have long dealt with gray wolves, grizzly bears, cougars, and coyotes as threats to their herds. In Eurasia and Africa, the list of predators extends to wolves, leopards, tigers, lions, dholes, Asiatic black bears, crocodiles, and spotted hyenas. In South America, feral dogs, jaguars, anacondas, and spectacled bears pose risks. In Australia, dingoes, foxes, and wedge-tailed eagles are the common threats, with the additional complication that domestic dogs may kill livestock in response to a hunting instinct and then leave the carcass uneaten.

  Disease has always been the other major threat. Some conditions, like classical swine fever and scrapie, are specific to one population of animals. Foot-and-mouth disease affects all cloven-hoofed animals and has historically triggered government restrictions on the movement of livestock, quarantine rules, and import and export controls. Vaccines exist for certain diseases; antibiotics are used where appropriate. Routine addition of antibiotics to feed to promote growth was once common practice but is now discouraged in many countries because of the risk of contributing to antibiotic resistance.

  Marketing and transportation have followed their own evolution. Historically, herd animals were driven to market on the hoof, walking to town or to a central trading point. Truck transport has replaced that method in developed countries. Local and regional livestock auctions remain active. In Canada, the Cargill slaughterhouse in High River, Alberta, employs around two thousand workers and processes approximately forty-five hundred cattle per day, representing more than one-third of Canada's total processing capacity. Together with the JBS plant in Brooks, Alberta, and the Harmony Beef plant in Balzac, Alberta, that single facility is part of a cluster that covers about three-quarters of the Canadian beef supply.

• 6. Economic Weight and Social Meaning

  ›

  The value of global livestock production in 2013 was estimated at 883 billion dollars, calculated in constant 2005-2006 dollars. That figure does not capture the full economic footprint. Downstream industries include saleyards, abattoirs, butchers, milk processors, refrigerated transport, wholesalers, retailers, food service businesses, and tanneries. Upstream, the industry supports feed producers, equipment manufacturers, seed companies, and vaccine makers. Associated services range from veterinarians to nutrition consultants to shearers.

  In 1997, livestock provided energy for between an estimated twenty-five and sixty-four percent of cultivation energy in the world's irrigated systems. Around three hundred million draft animals were working in small-scale agriculture globally that year. In regions where machines are scarce, animals remain the engine of farming.

  Beyond economics, livestock carry social meaning that surveys consistently underestimate. A study of livestock ranching on national forest land in New Mexico found that ranching maintains traditional values and connects families to ancestral lands and cultural heritage. Ranchers cited a sense of place, attachment to land, and the value of preserving open space as recurring themes. In the United States, profit ranks low among the reasons people stay in livestock ranching. Family, tradition, and a desired way of life tend to be the primary motivators. Ranchers, as the study noted, have historically been willing to accept low returns from livestock production.

  The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, known as ICRISAT, has worked in Zimbabwe to help farmers make the most of their livestock herds, with market access proving a key lever for improving rural livelihoods.

• 7. The Environmental Bill

  ›

  Animal husbandry accounts for somewhere between twenty and thirty-three percent of the world's fresh water usage. Livestock and the feed crops grown for them occupy about one-third of Earth's ice-free land. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its newest report, states that agricultural emission increases between the 1970s and the 2000s were directly linked to growth in livestock populations.

  Cattle produce some seventy-nine million tons of methane per day. Livestock enteric methane accounts for thirty percent of the planet's overall methane emissions. Livestock are responsible for thirty-four percent of all human-related nitrous oxide emissions, generated through feed production and manure. The IPCC has estimated that agriculture as a whole, including livestock, food crops, biofuels, and other production, accounted for about ten to twelve percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in both 2005 and 2010, expressed as hundred-year carbon dioxide equivalents.

• 8. Ethics and the Factory Farm

  ›

  Worldwide, an estimated seventy-four percent of livestock are raised in factory farms, defined by the dense confinement of animals. When consumers are surveyed, a majority express opposition to intensive livestock farming. Yet the same surveys reveal that a majority are unaware of routine practices such as beak trimming, the separation of calves from their mothers, and gas chamber slaughter.

  Three quarters of American adults surveyed believed that the animal products they consumed came from animals treated humanely. That gap between belief and practice sits at the center of animal ethics, a branch of ethics that examines human-animal relationships and the moral consideration of non-human animals.

  Beliefs about the cruelty of livestock farming became the most commonly cited reason for turning vegan or vegetarian throughout the 2010s. The category of deadstock offers a measure of where those ethical lines are drawn in law. Deadstock refers to animals that have died before slaughter, sometimes from illness or disease. Selling or processing meat from dead animals for human consumption is illegal in many countries, including Canada.