Bovine History and the Linguistic Left Turn

The publication of Philinda Blank’s When the Cows Come Home and Chopwhittle’s Base on (Steer) Balls points to a disturbing trend in historical scholarship. Postmodernists such as Blank (and I should add her colleagues Empty and Null) have claimed to have discovered a whole new field for historical research and an entirely new set of actors. Their work, they say, will once and for all end the species-centrism that has “mauled all efforts at constructing a truly inclusive and democratic history.” Their claim, however, only demonstrates their lack of social science training, not to mention reading. Without having run a single regression on any data set, Blank asserts that she has found evidence of various (naturally Left-leaning) bovine social movements created by a thriving “cow-munity” (like “udder/ance,” one of Blank’s many violations of the language in this jargon-laden book). There are simply no data that support that assertion. It is politically driven history of the worst sort.

Meanwhile, Blank ignores the true bovine history—and the real, decades-old effort to write the history of animals done by social scientific historians. The Journal of Damn Few Articles has published (and this only covers recent issues) studies of how dairy cows in mid-nineteenth-century Lotsaluck, New York, produced more milk when “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” was sung to them, patterns of cow migration in fifteenth-century Tuscany in comparative perspective, a cross-cultural comparison of bovine suicide rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and mortality and fertility rates of cows from 1880 to 1930 that draws on the massive Bovine Use Sample (BUS) of the agricultural census constructed at the University of Minnesota, Bigfoot. The efforts of anthropometric historians (whom Blank repeatedly refers to as “anthropomorphic”) to chart the standard of living among cows, which went up precisely at the moment Blank argues that cow culture was being crushed and industrial discipline asserted, Blank dismisses as pseudoscientific hogwash funded by the dairy industry.

Social scientific historians have taken the lead in cross-species history: with few human actors, it wasn’t difficult to include non-human non-actors. Rational choice models apply equally well to animals as to humans. The political posturing and sad lack of rigor of Blank and her ilk stand as another example of how historical scholarship has been put out to pasture.