Plastic cows: purity, pollution, and polymers

This thesis explores the intersection of animal welfare, human identity, and plastics through a case study of urban dairy cows in Mysore, Karnataka, India. Analyzing first how cows inform and reinforce human identities within a Hindu nationalist culture, the thesis next seeks to understand how socioreligious, political, and economic forces conspire to keep cows living in Indian cities. Then follows an investigation of urban cow welfare and management, and finally, concludes with research about the impacts of plastic pollution in cities to cow and human welfare. The thesis addresses the entangled relationships between animals, humans and plastics to illuminate the deleterious impacts to both animal and human wellbeing and our shared environment.
The concept of plasticity functions as a unifying theme in this multilayered analysis of dairy cows in Mysore. There are four expressions of plasticity that guide the study: (1) The rhetorical plasticity of animals’ symbolic cultural meaning, which addresses the recognition that animals inform human identities, and that humans give animals diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings; (2) genetic plasticity, which addresses the ways humans make animal bodies plastic through direct and indirect means; (3) behavioral plasticity, which examines the ways a species (here, cows) can adapt their behaviors to a range of contexts; and (4) material plasticity, which, in the context of plastic pollution and its impact on urban dairy cattle, examines the force of plastics’ pollutants on bodies that are connected by the food chain. This concept of plasticity contributes to scholarship in more-than-human geography, which addresses processes of social and material evolution and change.
Through an analysis of the history and lives of Indian urban dairy cows, this thesis contributes the following concepts to the discipline of geography. Anthro-animal identities, which proposes that some animals are used to internalize and reproduce human cultural identities, which can also inform competing ontologies about animals as well as reinforce social conflict between humans. The urbananimal pastoral, which postulates that some urban animals evoke sentiments of bucolic environments and lifestyles to urbanites, even if these animals are divorced from the landscapes they are seen to embody. The concept of the urban-animal contact zone suggests that the city is a site of both risk and opportunity for animals that inhabit urban environments. Finally, the thesis proposes that the ubiquitous polymer products known as plastics are leaky materials (Nading, 2017) which release chemicals back into the environment. Plastic petrochemicals travel in and through bodies through environmental exposure and via the food chain and should be viewed as both a solid and a fluid waste problem.
Through an analysis of human, animal, and material entanglements, this thesis explores: how animals co-constitute human social and political worlds; how cultural identity informs understandings of animal welfare, subjectivities, and placement on the landscape; and how beliefs about animals contribute to perceptions about pollution and purity, including how we understand and relate to plastic waste in the environment.

Advisor: Lorimer, J