The Romantic Cow: Animals as Technology

Cattle exist in a transitional space between nature and culture. Domesticated for thousands of years and selectively breed for meat, milk, and docility, they are shaped by culture. Yet, ideally, roaming the countryside and feeding at will, they are also nature. Since the 18th century, agricultural technologies intersecting with economics and aesthetics reshaped the physical appearance and material body of cattle and their cultural signification as part of the picturesque. From 1710 to 1795, cattle, as beef, nearly doubled in size (Youatt 257). This beefing up of beef had an aesthetic dimension, depicted in the many cattle portraits which projected an artistic ideal toward which grazeirs were also breeding their animals. Finally, Jenner's cure for smallpox, a cross-species infection involving cattle and humans de-centered the human, or at least the humanity of the human, the techne and poesis expressed in the cultural manipulation of the agri-cultural. William Gilpin's rules for painting in Observations on Cumberland and Westmoreland convey the poesis of cattle. After describing the Lake District scenery and advising how to organize it into the picturesque, Gilpin moves south through Derby and takes up drawing animals within the picturesque landscape. Specifically, he recommends cattle more suited to picturesque drawing than horses: "In the first place, the lines of the horse are round and smooth; and admit little variety: whereas the bones of the cow are high, and vary the line, here and there, by a squareness, which is very picturesque.... Nor are the lines only of the cow more picturesque, it has the advantage also in the filling up of those lines. If the horse be sleek especially, and have, what the jockies call, a fine coat, the smoothness of the surface is not so well adapted to receive the spirited touches of the pencil, as the rougher form and coat of the cow. (253) Gilpin prefers the roughness of cattle, the sharp edges, boxy shape, rugged coats and even recommends the proper coloring, the number, and grouping for landscape painting. Gilpin's observations on technical details--including the size and shape of the head, chest, and shoulders of cattle (255)--coincides with characteristics William Youatt describes in The Complete Grazier (19) to judge the value of cattle. Given the geography of Gilpin's last chapter, the subject of drawing cattle is appropriate. Some twenty years before, Robert Bakewell made the Leicester region famous by his innovative breeding practices at Dishley Grange near Derby, where his experiments changed animal husbandry and contributed to a British agricultural revolution. To improve the form, flesh, and propensity for fattening cattle, he developed "in-in" breeding, breeding cattle within the same family lineage. By mating close relations, he helped to insure the purity of the line, and, if an offspring did not meet his standards, eliminated it from the breeding stock. Having an ideal type to breed toward allowed Bakewell to read the body of cattle and discern which characteristics were worthy of developing and which were to be eliminated, which animals where to be breed and which were to be sent out to pasture. In the ideal type, technology and art meet. The ideal type set the standard from within one's mind and from within culture's demand for what sort of animal was needed--more meat here, less bone there, and so on. While the ideal was derived from artistic models, in practice it changed the animals from within their very bodies. In cattle portraiture, art both copied animals and created this breeding ideal for graziers to follow. For example, George Garrard's Description of Oxen, commissioned and sponsored by the Duke of Bedford and Lord Egremont, was officially recognized by the Board of Agriculture. His models, engravings, and descriptions were to provide "a sort of standard whereby to measure the improvements" of cattle both in the present and for future generations (Varieties of Oxen "Introduction"). …