Speaking about Farming Embodied Deliberation and Resistance of Cows and Farmers in the Netherlands

In this chapter, I compare the political voice of cows and farmers in the Netherlands by considering practices of deliberation and resistance in the context of an ongoing debate about the future of farming. I do so to get a better grasp on their respective political exclusions and investigate possibilities for change. To conceptualize political voice in a multispecies context, I draw on insights from political animal philosophy showing that relations between human political systems and nonhuman animals are political and that animals are political actors. To analyze the cows and farmers’ oppressions, I use a multi-optic lens that does not reduce one form of oppression to another, but rather sees different forms of oppression as interrelated and woven into the same larger power structures. In the chapter I first describe how farming in the Netherlands is changing and the effects of these changes on cows and farmers. I then look at the political voice of cows and farmers, focusing on embodied deliberation and resistance. I conclude by showing that even though there are parallels and points of connection in the oppression of cows and farmers, there are significant differences in their positions, especially because the latter group has more political voice than the former.