From Cattle to Beef Onscreen: Animal Rendering as Extraction in Industrial Livestock Films | Published in Media+Environment (2024)

Educational filmmaker Avalon Daggett’s Herds West (1955) (figure 1) begins with soaring music and a voice-over that proclaims: “The Southwest might seem a lovely place. Big and barren. Of not much use. An empty wasteland. But it does grow grass and from that grass flows one of America’s greatest production lines: the cattle of the beef industry.” Voiced by film and television actor Tom McKee, the narrator goes on to observe that this industry takes such supposedly useless lands and makes them “of value to the nation,” detailing how the landscape is transformed into a lucrative site for cattle grazing through the deployment of reservoirs, wells, and windmills. Thus altered, the Southwest becomes a productive part of the American economy.

This film, and others like it, participated in the creation of an imaginary of industrial and biological extraction in which bodies and land were seen as potential sites of profit. Beginning in the 1940s, participants in the meat industry began to use film to support its terraforming of land and extraction of materials and profits from animal bodies. Attesting to the ongoing influence of early theories of property by political philosophers such as John Locke, settler colonialism was here rearticulated within liberal capitalism as a process of “improvement,” which justified the ongoing occupation of land that would otherwise exist outside the national welfare (Wood 2012, 277). The disastrous ramifications of this approach continue to haunt us to this day, as factory farming and industrial agriculture render our planet less and less livable.

Herds West never mentions that these supposedly empty lands of the American Southwest were in fact long occupied by many Indigenous groups. As Choctaw historian Devon A. Mihesuah observes, these included “Cocopahs, Navajos, Apaches—Chiricahuas, Jicarillas, Lipans, Mescaleros—Havasupais, Hualapais, Mohaves, Pimas, Quecgans-Yumas, Tiguas, Tohono O’odhams, Yaquis, and Pueblo tribes—Acomas, Cochitis, Hopis, Isletas, Jemez, Lagunas, Nambes, Picuris, Sandias, San Felipes, San Ildefonsos, San Juans, Santa Clara, Taos, Tesuque, Zias, and Zunis.” Nor does the film discuss that these nations had found an abundance of food there, harvesting “piñon nuts, cacti (saguaro, prickly pear, cholla), century plant, screw beans, mesquite beans, agaves or mescals, insects, acorns, berries, and seeds” and hunting for “turkey, deer, rabbit, fish, […] and antelope” (Devon A. Mihesuah 2005, 35). This erasure is essential to Herds West, which uses tried-and-true aesthetics from the Western—sweeping orchestral music paired with wide shots of open vistas and vast plains—to present the grass, water, and wind of the Southwest as untapped resources whose value is lying in wait for the right enterprising industry to recognize and extract. Like many Westerns predating this nontheatrical film, for settler colonialism’s narrative of transformation and rationalization to function, the land must first be depicted as empty.

The cattle themselves are also rendered anew by the film. Rather than living, breathing animals, or even protein awaiting consumption, Herds West continually presents cattle as “the models of the production line.” Referencing the iconic American automobile industry, the film uses the term “model” to describe different breeds of cattle, which are defined by their capacity to subsist under unique circumstances, and individual animals, such as when the birth of a new calf is described as the creation of a “new model,” which will soon “start along the great production line.” In this sense, these cinematic cattle are not traditional livestock that need care, or even products that the industry produces, but rather machines that transform the “raw materials” of grass and water into profit. The film positions them as parts of an ongoing, nationwide process that ties together different regions of the country through the expansion of capitalization into even the most barren terrains. Within this logic, livestock became the means for terraforming and activating the economic value latent in the land.

Among the films made to promote factory farming in North America, Herds West is not alone in its emphasis on regional transformation. Simply put, factory farming denotes the use of such industrial techniques as standardization and automation to massively increase the production of livestock—a development that accelerated rapidly in the United States during the mid-twentieth century through the enhanced mechanization of slaughter in the 1920s, the implementation of large storage sheds for animals in the 1930s, and the increasing use of antibiotics in the 1940s and 1950s (McGreal 2019). In addition to Herds West, this essay examines three films, Cattle Country (Elizabeth Zinkan, 1944), Cattle and the Cornbelt (Leo Seltzer, 1949), and Know Your Meat (John R. Humphreys, 1945); each film focuses on a different section of the international beef industry—respectively, Canadian cattle ranchers, feedlot operators, and meat inspectors—but nonetheless they all speak in a consistent ideological voice. Together they represent a cross-section of industrial agriculture’s global aspirations as they operated across state and national borders. While none of these films were very widely distributed, and they were shown mostly to students or within the industry, they make up an important sector of what environmental historian Michelle K. Berry calls “cow talk”—a form of discourse in which the beef industry told stories about itself to itself, which served as a “cultural glue” for the industry as a whole (Berry 2023, 7).^[1]

Cattle Country, a film created by the National Film Board of Canada, begins by positioning the viewer within “the vast spaces of Western Canada,” where “hardy men” raise and breed cows. Similarly, Cattle and the Cornbelt begins with an illustrated map of Midwestern cities, in which small icons of penned cows represent the “great cattle markets where most of the meat that is eaten in the United States is bought and sold.” Even Know Your Meat—a promotional film about meat preparation and safety that has little to do with the actual raising of cattle—begins with an iconic image of grazing cows in the countryside, announcing: “Here is your evening meal, ready for the market.” Each of these films charts different phases and locales within the beef production line, from the landscape of the American Southwest and Western Canada where fields produce and reproduce well-fed cattle, to the markets of cities like Chicago where livestock is held and distributed, to the actual bodies of the animals themselves as they are transformed from living beings into packaged beef products. In each instance, animals and industry are positioned as part of the North American landscape, contributing to the wealth and progress of a nation.

Collectively, as works of propaganda, the films emphasize the meat industry’s transformation of the land as a positive development. From sweeping shots of cattle roaming the countryside to crowded scenes in which herds become veritable seas of bodies, these films interpret industrial beef as massive force capable of reorganizing entire ecosystems. But what was seen as an asset in the 1940s and 1950s has now become a central part of our global climate nightmare. In the intervening years since these films were released, the processes represented within them have only intensified, as have their ramifications for the surrounding environment. According to recent studies from the EPA, “industrial agriculture and land use” make up approximately 24 percent of methane gas emissions, making it one of the largest sectors of the global economy contributing to climate change (second only to “electricity and heat production”) (US EPA, OAR 2016). Within this context, livestock—what sociologist Alex Blanchette calls the “industrial hog” alongside the “industrial cow” and the “industrial chicken”—is a world historical force, terraforming the planet’s atmosphere through animals’ births and deaths, their eating and shitting, their consumption and transportation (Blanchette 2020). Questions of scale and the consequences of treating life as a resource to be extracted have long dogged industrial agriculture, existing at least since Upton Sinclair described Chicago meatpacking companies as massive machines that ceaselessly devour both human laborers and nonhuman animals. But since the emergence of climate change as a major political issue, these questions have taken on a new global significance, becoming linked to the disastrous effects of the Anthropocene. As ecofeminists like Greta Gaard have long warned, “eating such animals involves eating the planet” (Gaard 2016, 276).

It is therefore crucial that we recognize the raising, distribution, and killing of livestock as a form of extraction alongside other more recognizable forms such as mining or logging. Drawing from ecocinema studies and critical animal studies, this essay considers the theoretical relationship between extraction and animal life. I argue that the procedure described by Nicole Shukin as “animal rendering,” in which animal bodies are processed into both useable commodities and powerful images, is a crucial component of so-called “extractive media” (Shukin 2009). For the purposes of this paper, I define “extractive media” (especially within the context of nontheatrical film) as media that seeks to legitimize and expand the exploitation of natural resources as a social good. This media renders landscapes as spaces where extraction should take place. Pursuantly, I practice what Priya Jaikumar describes as “spatial” film historiography, which seeks to “shake out the processes through which states, institutions, economies, societies, and ideologies acquire an apparently objective status and self-evident territorial fixity” (Priya Jaikumar 2019, 8). Through these structures, land and its inhabitants become a territory to be mapped, controlled, and rendered onscreen. Herds West presents a spectacular image of both the American Southwest and the cattle that graze there, but both were also the product of generations of invasive state and industrial interventions that contorted their very forms according to national and economic ideals. In this way, we might say that the animal body and the land itself occupy a similar conceptual and aesthetic space in the films—and in profilmic reality—both representing terrains to be excavated for resources and rationally put to use for profit. These films demonstrate how factory farming, as an extractive industry, set out to transform living, breathing animals into both lively images of American agriculture and dead bodies on a massive scale, and how, in so doing, this same industry has wreaked a similar transformation on the landscape occupied by its operations.

The films I focus on in this essay were produced between two crucial texts about the American livestock industry: Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraking novel The Jungle, of 1906, and Ruth Harrison’s essential work of popular science and ecology Animal Machines, of 1964. Both of these works come at the beginning of—and indeed largely precipitate—major political programs seeking to curtail the meatpacking industry. Sinclair’s The Jungle catalyzed a reform movement around government oversight and food safety, culminating in the passage of the 1906 Food and Drugs Act. Over half a century later, Harrison’s text played an important role in the growing animals rights and environmental movements, which, along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, would eventually lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Cattle Country, Know Your Meat, Cattle and the Cornbelt, and Herds West were all produced well after Sinclair’s book had reshaped the politics and ethics of the meatpacking business—an event that would largely dictate what the industry felt it could or could not say about its own product—while not yet being on guard against the looming environmental critique that Harrison would shortly launch against them. Unlike earlier films made for the beef industry, such as Stunning Cattle (1901), Dumping and Lifting Cattle (1901), and Sticking Cattle (1901), made by Selig Polyscope Co. for the meatpacking giant Armour and Company, the act of slaughter itself is only ever obliquely referenced in these films (O’Brien 2023, 50). Continuing the triumphalist message and aesthetics of Depression-era sponsored documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936), these films reveal an unguarded enthusiasm for displaying the industry’s effects on the environment, even as they carefully sidestep and sanitize the activities within the slaughterhouse. The films I have selected for this essay thus represent a pivot point within the larger oeuvre of meatpacking films, as they shifted focus from the stockyards to the range.

It is notable that what these films present as one of industrial agriculture’s main benefits to society—that is, the profitable terraforming of land through animal management and consumption—would later become a major liability for them and the focus of their critics. Indeed, this overlap is not a coincidence. Instead, I would argue that it demonstrates a crucial aspect of the relationship between animal rendering, extractivist media, and the historical and contextual constraints on industrial practice. Although they disagreed about almost everything else, industrial agriculture’s promoters and critics agreed about what were the important aspects of the industry to focus on. These aspects—issues of scale, environmental transformation, and resource extraction—were endemic to the very activities of the beef production line. Following Shukin’s and Jaikumar’s leads, we can therefore see how the production of symbols from animal and land is necessarily tied to material processes, even in the case of films made to project an ideal vision for an industry. It is my contention here that Shukin’s concept of “rendering” should be applied more broadly, so that the aesthetic and material rendering of animals and landscapes are read as integral to the process of resource extraction. Here, extraction would become a semiotic-material process through which extractive institutions attempt to embed their own ideals into the very bodies of their subjects.

But this process is not a smooth or an unhindered one. As Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel argue, “relations between extraction as a concrete, physical practice, on the one hand, and extractivism as the cultural and ideological rationale that either motivates extraction or is the consequence of it, on the other, are necessarily complex and difficult to untangle” (Szeman and Wenzel 2021, 4). A cut of steak or an industrial farm may seem far removed from the animal or land from which they were derived, yet they still originate from these sources and retain the marks of their transformation process. As Jody Berland argues, even the most abstract images of animals—such as company logos—emerge out of very real material histories of environmental interaction (Berland 2019). The same is true of these films. The American Southwest of Herds West may be an extremely warped vision of the actual place, but the film does retain traces of how the forces of industrial agriculture responded to this actual place, what they envisioned could happen there, and how they sought to materially accomplish these pursuits. The same could be said of the cattle, whose bodies had been materially transformed by generations of breeding and whose image had become central to the pastoral Americana of how the beef industry marketed itself. Through these connections to the specificities of land and animal, production processes remain immanent to the filmed images, which contain meanings that cannot be aestheticized away. With an understanding of the material constraints and effects of these processes, we can find these counter-narratives and alternate meanings within even the most starry-eyed industrial films. It remains possible to return specificity to the land and animals that industrial beef sought to standardize, to impose what Jicarilla Apache philosopher V. F. Cordova labels an Indigenous sense of “bounded space” where identity and culture cannot be extracted from the land they exist within (Cordova 2007, 365). Herds West and other films like it from that time present a nascent image of today’s agricultural behemoths and their massive transformation of the planet, even as they seem to speak of a very different future than the one we currently inhabit. Land and animals may be aesthetically and materially manipulated, but not infinitely so—as our current era of climate disturbance and zoonotic disease attests—and insofar as these industrial agriculture fantasies of efficiency and control are about particular lands or animals, such limits can even be found in the expressions of these fantasies, as we will see.

“The Hog-Squeal of the Universe”: The Aesthetics of Death on an Industrial Scale

Early in The Jungle, Sinclair describes how one might experience a tour of a typical meatpacking factory in Chicago’s stockyards at the time. Based on his own experiences and interviews conducted in Packingtown, Chicago’s meatpacking district, Sinclair’s description is unflinching in its detailed observation of the factory’s unsanitary conditions, the plight of the slaughterhouse workers, and the gory dismemberment of thousands of animals that are killed there each day. But even as Sinclair wallows in the viscera and grime of the slaughterhouse, the corporeal increasingly leads to the abstract and the existential for him, suggesting that there is something about industrial slaughterhouses that requires one to think big. In a remarkable passage, he writes:

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? (Sinclair 1920, 41)

In this description, Packingtown presents blood and guts, pain and suffering at such a scale as to evoke the divine. Here, one listens to “the hog-squeal of the universe.” For Sinclair, the visceral experience of watching hogs indiscriminately killed by an unfeeling mechanized process, one that incorporates thousands of living, toiling, suffering creatures, pushes viewers to contemplate the corporeal and intellectual extremes of a world defined by modern capitalism and its efficient practices of extraction and assembly.^[2] Like Georges Franju’s later documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949), the transformation of living animals into dead meat here becomes a moment of existential horror, one that pulls at the very limits of representation and reason.

Going to watch animals be slaughtered on the new technology of the assembly line was a popular pastime in the earliest years of industrial slaughterhouses—one that evoked powerful feelings of wonder, fright, and awe. Like Sinclair’s characters in The Jungle, promoters of Chicago’s slaughterhouse yards grappled with how best to present the tremendous scale of their deadly operations. Reviewing the photographs used in guidebooks created to advertise Packingtown as a tourist destination, Jason Weems concludes: “The program that emerged for visualizing The Yards marked an attempt to simultaneously comprehend, celebrate, and disarm the massive-scale slaughtering system, and to rationalize its diminishment of living bodies (and beings) as inviolable wholes” (Weems 2016, 111). Such renderings evoke what some have called “the industrial sublime,” a critical framework for understanding how the seemingly horrifying worksites of industrial capitalism were transformed into positive images of human progress. Alex Blanchette observes that visitors to the slaughterhouse witnessed “scenes of exploitation, for hogs and workers alike, but they were seen by some as heralding human mastery” (Blanchette 2020, 2). As Brian Black notes, the fantastic scale of industrial operations “[n]o matter how squalid and unpicturesque” could be framed as “a model of the positive capabilities of human technology” (Black 1997, 290). Tourists went to Packingtown to be confronted by “the hog-squeal of the universe,” which was undoubtedly a terrifying experience, but also one that attested to the power of the industrial systems that could evoke it. As in most iterations of the sublime, the awe-inspiring and the simply awful were closely linked in the aesthetic experience of slaughterhouses at this time.

Nicole Shukin finds great significance in this double use of the slaughterhouse as a site of production and spectacle. For her, this example establishes a foundational link between two forms of what she titles “animal rendering.” The first involves the actual processing of animal bodies into products such as meat, hides, glue, et cetera. Indeed, as Shukin observes, even the very gelatin that coats film strips is manufactured from cast-off pieces of animals from the slaughterhouse, thereby predicating the existence of the cinematic image itself on the material rendering of animal bodies. The second refers to the transformation of animals into visual symbols or metaphors—the ways that they are configured as images. Here, the seeming “wildness” or “naturalness” of the animal is extracted in order to promote products, industries, and nations. Both forms emerge from the capitalist pursuit of maximizing profits, which can be seen in the example of the slaughterhouse tours. Here, the overwhelming sensory experience of the slaughterhouse—its dramatic sights, smells, and sounds—was a by-product of the production of meat that the factory owners sought to monetize. By charging admission to tourists, these owners operationalized the aesthetics of their industry, highlighting the size and scale of the meatpacking business and the mechanized coordination of its (dis)assembly lines to create a potent metaphor for rational progress. Within this context, animal deaths and animal bodies were doubly exploited as material and aesthetic products whose death produced profitable meals and squeals.

But, as we saw in the earlier passage from The Jungle, the sights and sounds of the factory were also ripe for appropriation by reformers, critics, and nascent animal rights activists. The historic battles over slaughterhouse hygiene and labor practices were waged not only through the passing of laws and the exercise of political power, but also through dueling aesthetic approaches. As Emily Kathryn Morgan argues, photography played a major role in the transformation of the slaughterhouse from a sublime picture of industrial progress to a revolting emblem of industrial excess and mismanagement (Morgan 2018). Crucially, this was not achieved by inventing a new image of the yards out of whole cloth. Rather, muckrakers like Sinclair reframed the meaning of what was already present in the industry’s own promotional materials, highlighting what was always already there. In their hands, what was a monument to the power of industrial progress became a monstrous and inhuman killing machine that swallowed up humans and animals alike, while packaging and selling rotten and diseased meat. But it did not take long for a new version of the industrial sublime to arise—one that did not rely on massive smokestacks or assembly lines for its power but rather attempted to harness the aesthetics of American pastoralism as a means of valorizing the national beef production line.

“Food Converting Machines”: The Industrial Sublime of the Beef Production Line

A popular aphorism from the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament evocatively helps to understand the beef production line. Early in chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah, it is written:

All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. (Isaiah 40:6–8, 40:1; 1 Peter 1:24)

Usually pared down as simply “All flesh is grass,” this section is meant to evoke a sense of commonality between all living beings who share mortality and who, in the face of God, are simply temporary. In Clifford D. Simak’s 1965 science fiction novel by the same title, All Flesh Is Grass, this concept is literalized when aliens arrive in the form of technologically advanced plants, reimagining fields of flowers and forests as convocations of hyperintelligent life-forms (Simak 2015). Whether a human or a lowly blade of grass, all living things perish, and in this way, they are equally subject to the divine laws that condition the world around them. But for ranchers and others in the beef industry of the 1940s and 1950s, the inverse could be said to be true: All grass was flesh. Looking out over a green meadow, they saw pounds of steak. The swaying grass became a seething sea of biomatter to be collected and refined through the ever-fattening stomachs of herds of cattle. This transformative vision connected Western landscapes to animal bodies to grocery aisles lined with products. It is here, to use Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel’s terms, that the act of resource extraction becomes the ideology of extractivism (Szeman and Wenzel 2021, 2). Rather than a symbol of shared impermanence, the equation of grass with flesh reconfigures natural cycles of life and death as a dynamic to be capitalized upon—harnessed toward the production of wealth and power. The landscape itself becomes subsumed in this new industrial sublime, one that appropriates pastoral imagery to fuel narratives of technological progress.

Michelle K. Berry describes the mid-twentieth century as a time of massive upheaval for the beef industry, especially the family ranchers whose identity was deeply wrapped up in a powerful sense of tradition (Berry 2023, 10). The introduction of powerful new technologies—from using bioengineered feed to deploying herbicides and pesticides like DDT—was rapidly modernizing the industry, increasing the size and scope of its power. This transformative moment for the beef industry might be compared to that of the late nineteenth century, when historian Joshua Specht claims that America was turned into a “red meat republic” in which the Western expansion of federal powers, the ongoing destruction and appropriation of Indigenous lands, and the growth of private industry and government bureaucratic agencies were all spurred on by the production of meat (Specht 2019, 2).

And yet this was also a period when various sectors of the beef industry saw themselves as besieged by opponents. As Berry describes the postwar period, it was “both the zenith and the nadir of family ranching” (Berry 2023, 10). Ranchers felt under threat from urbanization, federal regulation, and the burgeoning environmental movement. Similarly, the meatpacking industry continued to face widespread public opposition to slaughterhouse practices. In 1955 the newly formed Animal Welfare Institute established a legal advocacy organization called the Society for Animal Protective Legislation, which directed much of its early efforts toward legislating against cruelty in slaughterhouses (Animal Welfare Institute, n.d.). This work culminated in the passage of the 1958 Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which required animals to be stunned and killed quickly before being processed into meat. A 1956 editorial supporting these measures in the New Republic evoked the legacy of Upton Sinclair’s exposé with its title “Still the Jungle” (New Republic 1956). Its opening paragraph is unmistakably written to emulate Sinclair’s singular style:

Two HUNDRED and eighty million animals are slaughtered each year to feed Americans, and by primitive methods that cause great suffering. Cattle, like horses, are slugged with iron mallets. The first blow frequently fails to stun them, and, as they stumble, electric shocks force them to their knees so that they may be struck again and again. Calves, hogs and lambs are strung up by chains tied to their hind legs. When the chains slip, or legs are disjointed and broken, they crash from high conveyor lines to the slaughter house floors. The throats of the calves are severed by sawing motions; lambs are knifed behind an ear and slowly bled to death; hogs with slit throats frequently pass, still squealing, into scalding vats. (New Republic 1956)

Again, the cattle industry found itself in need of positive narratives to explain its work in the face of the directed headwinds of animal rights advocates and government regulators.

Both mediated and in-person experiences of animal slaughter became increasingly rare in American society after the 1910s. This is a testament to the powerful reform movement spearheaded by the likes of Sinclair, which introduced sensibilities to the public consciousness that continue to affect what kinds of imagery can be produced by the agriculture industry (Skvirsky 2020, 140–41). But the films under consideration here—Herds West, Cattle Country, Cattle and the Cornbelt, and Know Your Meat—demonstrate that industrial agriculture still managed to turn the production of meat into a spectacular image of rational progress, one that, in the previously quoted words of Weems, “simultaneously comprehend[ed], celebrate[ed], and disarm[ed]” factory farming and the beef production line. Instead of the mechanized slaughter of animals, these films focus on other stages within the production process, including the rearing of animals, their distribution in cattle markets, and the health and safety certification processes. These were the new frontiers of the industry, spaces where mechanization was being lately implemented. While works like The Jungle had already disabused the slaughterhouse of its sublime mystique, other forms of industrial production for the breeding and rearing of cattle were still relatively unknown well into the 1950s. The production line itself thus became the new site for understanding and imagining the meat industry.

Like Herds West, the 1944 documentary Cattle Country (figure 2)—number four in the Canadian National Film Board’s “Work and Wealth Series”—relies heavily on its voice-over and musical score to render the grasslands of Western Canada into an image of national identity and progress. Here, the beef production line is portrayed as an essential integrating device that more fully transforms remote regions into productive parts of a nation’s society and economy. The film primarily focuses on the first half of the line, when cattle graze, are fattened up on ranches, and are finally shipped to market. Extreme wide shots in Cattle Country depict long lines of cattle striating landscapes like telephone lines, evoking a linear process, connecting distant lands, that stretch as far as the eye can see. Beginning as an image of empty natural space, these shots are quickly transformed into images of the industrial sublime as the immense herds of cattle blanket the countryside and eventually completely fill the frame.

Crucially, what these lines lead to and from is White Canadian society, which in turn feeds into the global beef industry. The voice-over in Cattle Country pointedly observes: “This country, where the buffalo once roamed and the prairie wolves, is ideal range for the White man’s cattle.” And the film makes clear that “the White man’s cattle” integrates not only the land but also the Indigenous populations that live on that land. In one of the very first scenes of the film, we are introduced to the “hardy men” of western Canada, which include the otherwise anonymous “Indian cowboy.” This abstract figure of indigeneity joins the “ranch hand” and “the cattlemen” in their work transforming the landscape for the racial capitalism represented in “the White man’s cattle.” As such, the entire enterprise becomes one of national, rather than simply economic, importance—a means of further colonizing and settling the land, its ecosystem, and its inhabitants.

Akin to the earlier depictions of Packingtown, these films also manifest an anxiety around the issue of scale. The production line’s massive size is both crucial to the narrative of economic, industrial, and national expansion that the film is telling and immanent in the images of sprawling herds of cattle. As the voice-over in Cattle Country professes, “modern ranching is business on a large scale.” The vastness of the production process is a point of pride that Cattle Country, Herds West, and Cattle and the Cornbelt are all at pains to highlight. But this scale can also be daunting, and therefore each film is sure to personify the production line through individual characters—both human and animal—who are given brief narrative arcs. An example of this can be seen in a brief scene of a mother cow and her calf navigating a steep ledge in Cattle Country. Scored with jaunty music, the mother cow guides her child around a tricky obstacle within the landscape while the narrator encourages them in jocular tones, inviting the audience to sympathize with and laugh at their progress. Unlike the sea of bodies presented in other scenes from the film, these cows are shot in medium close-up, presented as individuals cut off from the crowd as they navigate the rocky landscape. The fact that what faces these animals on the other side of this ledge will eventually be their own death and consumption does not hinder the film in transforming them into characters of comic relief. A similar example comes from Cattle and the Cornbelt (figure 3), which concludes by telling the story of the Olson family and their prizewinning cow. The film focuses particularly on the family’s little boy, Bob Olson, as he acquaints himself with “farming today,” which “requires a great deal of care and scientific knowledge.” Embedded thus within the boy’s coming-of-age story, the raising of beef becomes a nostalgic, perennial endeavor rather than a technological or historical development. Through scenes like these, what might be terrifying about the beef production line is effectively constrained and tamed, made the subject of children’s stories and films.

The scale of the production line also introduces unwieldy new problems. Cattle Country describes how the “modern rancher” must systematically control for disease and parasites, spraying down the cattle with pesticides to remove larvae and flies. In Herds West, the pastoral scenes of animal grazing transition to shots of a massive feedyard that can hold many thousands of “heads” of cattle. The task of systematically feeding these thousands of animals multiple times a day is an immense one. Scientists specializing in nutrition were “enlisted” by the ranchers to develop a “concentrated diet” to efficiently and cheaply bulk up the livestock. These sequences feature incongruous iconography, with ranchers and scientists working hand in hand in the laboratory. In one striking scene, a rancher bedecked in work hat and overalls operates a room-sized switchboard controlling the mixing of feed ingredients (figure 4). Like Packingtown, the feeding operations of the production line are too massive to fit into a single image and therefore must be represented in evocative long shots filled by sprawling pens or symbolized in the wall of blinking lights on a switchboard.

Both Herds West and Cattle Country end with the fattened cattle being shipped to market, which is where Cattle and the Cornbelt picks up the story. Beginning with a drawing of the entire planet, Cattle and the Cornbelt transitions to an animated map of the Midwest, marking the locations of America’s enormous cattle markets. Evoking the turn-of-the-century imagery of the yards and the images of the feeding operations in the other films, it then fades into a bird’s-eye view of a massive stockyard, whose pens stretch out past the horizon of the shot. Cattle and the Cornbelt takes us as close as we will come to the actual slaughter of animals. After observing the selling and purchasing of livestock, we watch as they are taken away and then see an exterior shot of a packing plant. Yet, once we enter the plant, the cattle have already been slaughtered, eliding the actual act of killing them. Now they exist in rows upon rows of beheaded, disemboweled, and dismembered corpses, hung upside down in massive coolers. Here, crews of inspectors and laborers, dressed in butcher’s linen, scurry from body to body, inspecting and preparing the meat for shipment. In a recursive move, Cattle and the Cornbelt then moves back to the beginning of the production line, connecting the raising and fattening of cattle with another massive American industry, the growing of corn. The film thus emphasizes the packing plant as a node within a countrywide system of meat production.

Finally, Know Your Meat (figure 5) focuses almost exclusively on the process that occurs after the cattle are slaughtered. The film depicts the inspection of the beef, its grading, and its cutting for retail. This film was created by the Office of Price Administration and is unlike the other films I have discussed in that it was made for training specialists in inspecting and grading meat, rather than promoting the industry to a broad public. Shot in vivid color, it contains frank displays of animal corpses as dead products rather than as living embodiments of the pastoral. In sequences that evoke the animated maps in Cattle and the Cornbelt, Know Your Meat uses abstract animations of a cow’s body to demonstrate where the various cuts of meat are taken from. We also are shown close-up shots of different cuts of meat at various grades—running from prime to utility—and are taught how to identify “marbling” in the fat and muscle of the animal. In such sequences, the meat industry’s vision of the cow is inscribed into the very body of the cow, which becomes akin to the landscapes of the other films through the use of illustrations and close-ups. Details within the cow’s body are enlarged to a massive scale, occupying the entire frame of the film, and then are subsequently divided and organized through animated overlays. Like the landscapes in Herds West and Cattle Country, the very tendons within a cow’s body become economically meaningful and catalogued by the post-slaughter inspection process.

From Progress to Blight: An Environmentalist Rendering of the Beef Production Line

Cumulatively, the beef industry films use the sights and sounds of beef production to tell a story of rational progress, in which the growth of the industry becomes synonymous with technological modernity and the strength of the nation. But, just as earlier critics of the meat industry had done, it was not long before the aesthetics of the production line were reinterpreted by animal rights and environmental activists, who insisted on seeing the transformative ecological effects of cattle farming as a destructive development. In her foreword to Ruth Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines—which Hannah Velten identifies as “the first exposé of British ‘factory farming’” (Velten 2007, 167)—the famed ecologist Rachel Carson wrote, “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen. Yet the evils go long unrecognized” (Carson 1964, 31). In her inimitable style, she continues, “Gone are the pastoral scenes in which animals wandered through green fields or flocks of chickens scratched contentedly for their food. In their place are factorylike buildings in which animals live out their wretched existences without ever feeling the earth beneath their feet, without knowing sunlight, or experiencing the simple pleasures of grazing for natural food” (Carson 1964, 31). Under such conditions, Carson concludes that meat production has become a “fantastic operation” that severely threatens the health and well-being of both humans and animals, as well as raising pressing moral and ethical questions about humanity’s right to take the lives of other animals (Carson 1964, 32). Like Sinclair, Carson highlights the awful and terrifying aspects of meatpacking’s new industrial sublime, drawing attention to the gruesome aspects of industrial agriculture that the films worked so hard to contain and render as triumphant accomplishments.

For her part, Harrison focuses on the rise of what she titles “intensivism” in meat production, where “animals are assessed purely for their ability to convert food into flesh” (Harrison 1964, 35). In Harrison’s iteration, it is not only the process of handling the animal that becomes mechanical, but rather the animals themselves that are mechanized as much in their life as they are in their death. Here, the economic frontier is not the speed at which animals can be killed but rather discovering the cheapest and most efficient ways in which their bodies can transfer “feeding stuff into flesh” (Harrison 1964, 39). Like Sinclair, Harrison describes the result of this pursuit as the utter denial of animals’ experiences within the meat production line, to the point that “the animal is not allowed to live before it dies” (Harrison 1964, 37). Like Sinclair’s claim that “everything is used but the squeal,” Harrison here gestures toward an extreme form of extraction to the point of utter depletion. Animal life has been so ruthlessly exploited as to make one fundamentally question whether it is still a life at all.

In their writing, Harrison and Carson produce a counter-rendering of industrial agriculture, and its effects on land and animals. The scope and scale of the beef production line no longer signifies progress, but rather bloated horror. Scenes of cattle being mechanically fed to produce fattened animal bodies are no longer signs of efficiency, but instead create monstrous images of zombielike organisms who are not truly alive even before they have died. The frequent images in films like Herds West of a veritable sea of moving cattle (figure 6) become all the more disturbing when followed by scenes of cows and calves being hosed down with toxic insecticides. What was once a “pastoral scene” has now rhetorically become a “fantastic operation” that is as terrible as it is immense.^[3] Harrison and Carson retain the essential dynamics of the industry—its scope and scale, its transformative effects, its mechanized element—but the significance of these aspects has radically changed.

The Afterlives of Warriors at Peace: Survivance as Counter-Rendering

The narration for Avalon Daggett’s one-reel color film Warriors at Peace (1953), a film that is dedicated to recording the lives of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, begins with a dire proclamation: “Apache! In the early days, a… word of terror in the Southwest, in the lonely places, and in the frontier towns.” This start for the film—spoken over a soundtrack of deep, rhythmic drumming and images of Apaches wearing ceremonial masks (figure 7)—takes on an intentionally ominous tone that cites the popular image of Apache warriors raiding innocent American settlements in films like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). But the narrator quickly locates this violence and terror in the past when he claims, “The ghosts of this past stalk the Southwest, their memories are kept alive in the names of the country, in county, village, and town. But all is changed. The Apache stronghold in the mountains is now a memorial park.” These words—spoken over soaring strings and an image of a sign for El Cochise Motel that includes a caricatured Native American profile (figure 7)—create a set of binaries that will go on to structure the rest of the film: past and present, violent and peaceful, ritual and assimilation. As the title directly claims, the Apache were warriors once in the past, but today they are at peace.

According to advertisements for Warriors at Peace, the film “contrasts Apaches at work on their modern cattle ranch with the ancient Pollen-Blessing Ceremony for an Apache maiden.” As with many works of salvage ethnography, this contrast between the supposedly new and the old, the modern and the ancient, is a structuring dynamic in the film. As a reviewer of Daggett’s traveling program on Indigenous peoples of the Southwest wrote, the films “depict modern activities against a background of traditional patterns” (Tyrrell 1961, 63). Within Warriors at Peace, the “modern activity” on display is cattle ranching, which, as in the films made by the beef industry, is depicted as a modernizing force.

More than for Herds West, Daggett was known for travelogues like this one, many of which feature the practices and culture of different Indigenous nations. Distributed to elementary schools across the country and screened in her traveling lecture series on “Southwest Indians,” Warriors at Peace was brought by Daggett to Native reservations, where her lecture and films would at times precede a feature. (In a particularly bizarre example, she gave her talk and screening at the Supai community in Arizona as a preshow for a Tarzan film [Supai Weekly News 1957]). Visiting these supposedly remote reservations while filming and distributing her films was a major part of Daggett’s identity as woman filmmaker. The logo for her production company features a silhouette of a woman operating a camera with her dress dramatically flowing behind her (figure 8). Interviews and profiles from the time consistently contrasted her small frame with her adventurous on-location filmmaking (Sisler 1953, 1964). Like Osa Johnson, who shot wildlife films a generation earlier, Daggett was framed both as an intrepid woman pushing boundaries and as a domesticating force who tamed wild spaces (Chris 2006).

A full exploration of these films and of the ways that they interact with the Indigenous nations that they feature within them is beyond the scope of this paper. Daggett and her historical project are messy, conflicted subjects, worthy of a full examination. Nonetheless, her use of Apache cattle ranching as a signifier of progress in Warriors at Peace reveals an essential connection between the beef industry’s rendering of its environment and the settler-colonial project—one that extends the dynamic already present in films like Herds West and Cattle Country. While the so-called “ancient” practices of the Apache are pictured as parochial and set apart, the film’s narration specifies that the scenes of cattle ranching are meant to depict particularly modern activities that can connect the Apache people to the United States as a whole. In these scenes, the film shows Apache men, dressed as cowboys, herding, branding, and corralling cattle. Parts of the narration in these scenes still work to pacify and isolate the Apache nation within both the pastoral reservation and the ahistorical past (such as when the narrator describes how Apache ranchers have used “the pleasant reservation given them”), while others add an economic assimilationist frame (such as when the Apache are commended for their “business foresight” and their ability to get “top prices” for their herd). Together, these moments highlight the supposed peaceful tranquility of the reservation’s land as well as holding out the capacity for the Apache people to enter into American society through the market economics of beef and the distributed network of the production line. Both Apache life and Apache land are split between two versions of the sublime: an ancient, timeless pastoral and a massive, technological industry. They thus inhabit the fissures and internal contradictions of the industrial sublime as articulated in the beef industry films discussed above.

This rendering of land and animals—as products and entryways into the “modern” world—is an essential dynamic within the film’s settler-colonial discourse, one in which the United States’ ongoing occupation and exploitation of the Southwest is portrayed as a natural result of historical progress. In this way, resources and images of the Apache are extracted as part of the film’s ideological function. And yet the film also contains traces of other, unique aspects of Apache ranching that do not specifically place the Apache people within a progress narrative of “civilization” or “passivity,” but rather emphasize what was constructive and new about the way ranching was being practiced by the Apache people. The narrator observes that the Apache herds were not primarily used for individual profit, but were rather “owned by the entire tribe for breeding stock and tribal welfare.” Indeed, as the historian Peter Iverson has shown, the ranching done by the Apache in this area of Arizona was a means of establishing independence from the broader settler-colonial state and often incorporated passed-down knowledge of the land in order to generate new practices in ranching (Iverson 1995). Given this frame, one that is not at all intended by the film itself, the symbol of the so-called Native cowboy in this film might be read as an image of Apache identity and futurity rather than assimilation.

Like earlier reformers who rhetorically reframed the meanings of the beef industry’s aesthetics, so, too, have contemporary Indigenous studies scholars worked to reframe films like Warriors at Peace. Beginning in 2017, the Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project has been uploading educational films to their website and providing what they call “counter-narrations” recorded by Indigenous narrators. According to their site, the project “seeks to rebalance the historical record, intentionally shifting emphasis from external perceptions of Native peoples to the voices, knowledge, and languages of the peoples represented in the films by participatory recording of new narrations for the films” (“About | Tribesourcingfilm.Org” 2022). Thanks to this site, Warriors at Peace is now available online, including a counter-narration made by Cheyenne Bearfoot, who is Chiricahua Apache and a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her added voice-over commentary, Bearfoot insightfully identifies a number of misleading and ideologically contestable elements within the film, which misidentifies the name of the “pollen-blessing ceremony”; depicts the reservation’s river water as pristine, when it had in fact been polluted by nearby mining operations; and generally positions the Apache people as pacified and isolated within both the reservation and the past (Bearfoot, n.d.). Additionally, the site catalogues a list of “traditional knowledge” contained within the film, which corrects, reframes, and makes accessible the people, places, and things in each scene of the film. Through these practices, media products created to envision and enact settler colonialism become resources for future Indigenous knowledge production and action. What was once a tool for extraction is repatriated as a means of tribal survival and memory.

Conclusion

I have argued in this essay that industrial agriculture is a type of extraction. As such, the beef industry should be recognized as a crucial component within the extractive processes of the United States as a settler-colonial state. The dream of the beef industry, which is articulated in the films considered here, is one in which cattle terraform the land—thereby erasing the ways of life that developed within the previous ecosystem and forcing Indigenous inhabitants of the land to assimilate to a new economic and natural landscape. But at the same time, my analysis has shown that such rendering is always an incomplete process, which must navigate insurgent realities that can contradict it. As such, the films produced by the beef industry can be read against the grain for counter-narratives and counter-truths just as Sinclair, Harrison, and Carson did a generation earlier.

Watching Warriors at Peace from the present day, as industrial agriculture’s progress narrative begins to collapse in the face of mounting climate catastrophes, it is possible to see glimpses of what Gerald Vizenor describes as “narratives of postindian survivance” (Vizenor 1999). For Vizenor, such narratives are being written by Indigenous artists using postmodernist techniques, but given the argument laid out in this essay, it also possible to see such stories of survivance within the very heart of settler-colonial rhetoric represented by these films. To the extent that we consider such rhetoric as both a semiotic and a material process, as Vizenor clearly does, other counter-truths can subsist within their renderings. These are the truths that muckrakers like Sinclair, environmental advocates like Harrison and Carson, and Indigenous scholars like those at the Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project have worked and are working to construct and uncover. The very landscape itself is inscribed with such meanings, no matter how much settler colonialism works to erase them. For instance, while expansive shots of massive herds of animals blanketing the prairie were intended to depict the triumph of industry in films like Cattle Country, these images are now inextricably haunted by contemporary knowledge of industrial agriculture’s environmental impacts. Indeed, very similar shots of the sweeping scope and scale of the beef production line have been recently used in films like King Corn (Aaron Woolf, 2007) and Food Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008) to elicit feelings of horror rather than awe at the massive size of agribusiness. As much as extraction media claims to impose meaning and value where none would otherwise exist—turning the “barren” Southwest into productive terrain, transforming cattle into protean generating machines, and incorporating Indigenous nations into a modern capitalist market—it is also true that such media is simultaneously engaging in a massive, always incomplete project of silencing the meanings that long precede it. These meanings are latent in the image of the land, awaiting changes in context that will bring them to the fore.

As Vizenor reminds us, this attempted eradication will never be fully complete. He writes: “The shadows of tribal names and stories are the ventures of landscapes, even in the distance of translation. Tribal imagination, experience, and remembrance, are the real landscapes in the literature of this nation; discoveries and dominance are silence” (Vizenor 1999, 10). Factory farming’s various forms of the industrial sublime all attempt to render silent the land, the animals, the workers, and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Southwest. And yet in their very persistence—their “survivance,” to use Vizenor’s parlance—they continue to produce their own autonomous meanings. These meanings suggested alternate social formations beyond settler colonialism and industrial capitalism, formations in which other truths beyond profit are found in the act of watching humans, animals, and the land. These are truths that resist extraction, waiting to emerge in a world to come.