Cattle Trails and Animal Lives

An alternative origin story for the United States cattle beef industry

Cattle Trails and Animal Lives remaps the historical and empirical geography of the emergent cattle industry as a series of carceral sites and nodes in the American West, focusing on the experiences of animals living and eventually dying under intense carceral structures, practices, technologies, and tools.

Cattle Trails and Animal Lives remaps the historical and empirical geography of the emergent cattle industry as a series of carceral sites and nodes in the American West, focusing on the experiences of animals living and eventually dying under intense carceral structures, practices, technologies, and tools. This work shifts the narratives of the Old West cattle kingdoms from cowboys, ranchers, and cattle barons to the lived experiences of cattle caught within the rural “carceral archipelago” of the emergent U.S. beef industry. The work focuses on these animals’ forced movement over land and sea—their experiences, lives, and agency as formerly free-roaming animals who were captured, enclosed, moved, and eventually shipped by railroad to slaughterhouses in Chicago and beyond. The spatial nodes and sites of the carceral archipelago include the open range, the ranch, the cattle trail, and the cattle town and the intense human carceral controls enacted within them. The work further interprets how these animal lives are culturally renarrated to contemporary audiences through living history sites, other touristic and artistic re-creations of historic cattle drives, Hollywood westerns, and museum exhibits featuring material carceral artefacts. Together these not only perpetuate heroic myths of the Old West but normalize and even celebrate the carceral experiences of animals.