sentient genetics: breeding the animal breeder as fundamental other

Sentient Genetics: Breeding the Animal Breeder asFundamental Otherjecs_324 583..598

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Abstract: This article discusses some aspects of the discourses of genetics ineighteenth-century animal breeding as they affected animals, agriculturallabourers and breeders, with a specific focus on the work of the yeomanfarmer and master breeder Robert Bakewell. Bakewell’s celebrity as anagricultural innovator is discussed in the context of his class position. Whilethe potential malleability of animals appeared limitless in the light of newbreeding methods, the opportunities for the social mobility of humansremained subject to the apparently naturalised boundaries of their classposition.

Keywords: Robert Bakewell, agriculture, social class, animal breeding,sentience, yeoman, genetics, Arthur Young, hybridity, the Other

I. Introduction

The discourse of genetics is not one of mere accounting, as we are often led tobelieve, by enterprises such as the Human Genome Project and even by theappropriation of the term ‘mapping’ to describe genomic practices. Indeed,just as investigations into the discourse of mapping have easily revealed tiesbetween mapping and colonialism, for example, so the practice of mappinggenes internalises impulses of shaping, changing, manipulation anddocuments a desire for altering bodies that warrants further discussion. Thisneed for further discussion is particularly acute in the world of animalbreeding, owing in large part to the ethical issues that are raised whensentient beings are subject to the impulses and desires of shaping, change andmanipulation. The ensuing discussion ideally becomes less about what ‘wewant’ or ‘need’ in our animals and much more about what the animal wantsand needs. The discussion is also about context. For as we alter the animalbody and in this way practise a form of speciesism, we fundamentally disruptour own relationship to – and respect for – sentience as a principle, and wesimultaneously erase our own heritages and historical contexts. This is inkeeping with Donna Haraway’s insight that ‘to be a situated human being isto be shaped by and with animal familiars’.1 Along with acknowledging thiscomes the necessity to address what Matthew Calarco calls our ‘reductive and

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 4 (2010)

© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

essentialist’ tendencies when it comes to animals.2 In a very visceral way,through our manipulations of the twenty-first-century animal body and/orour tacit agreement with modern animal breeding practices, we disrupt ourability to be situated, we lose our bearings, our foundations, our backgroundsand fracture our own negotiation with sentience, including our ownunderstanding of humans as sentient.

A new discourse of sentient genetics would include and foreground self-awareness, a perception of the continuum of life and acknowledge empathyand affect to champion a broader and insightful genetic practice that ‘feels for’and ‘cares for’ the being being manipulated.3 One of the insights madeavailable here is that the history of animal breeding (and the methodologiesand metaphors we use to read that history) matters. Sarah Franklin hasperceptively raised this issue, and she applies the term ‘orientation’ to createan expansive genealogical perspective that internalises history andacknowledges intentional, shaped change rather than insisting that geneticsis purely linear, progressive and empirical.4 Read in this way, the historicaltexts of animal breeding reveal their embedded environmental ethics andwhat an environmental activist would call ‘damage methodologies’. These areestablished and becoming norms which describe, often factually, howhumans interact with nature. These norms are internalised as naturalbehaviours and engender contemporary practices – the very practices, suchas meat-eating, artificial insemination, agribusiness, molecular biology andcloning, that can be re-examined here through a specific historical moment.

II. Who is the Fundamental Other?

In this paper I focus on, or rather orient myself towards, the figure of theyeoman farmer and master breeder Robert Bakewell (1726-1795). Bakewellhad worked since the 1740s aggressively inbreeding livestock to fix preferredcharacteristics by genetically sculpting the animal body according to aprevisualised ideal. By the early 1770s his Dishley or New Leicester sheepbegan to be widely diffused ‘into various parts of the country on a significantscale’, and there the breed displaced or replaced ‘the previous lowland, long-woolled pasture sheep’.5 Bakewell’s sheep not only came to dominate themarket in the 1770s and ’80s; they also served to up-end centuries-old beliefsthat breed variations were always ‘environmentally induced variants’ – in thecase of sheep, that fleece quality and the overall size of a particular type ofsheep were environmentally determined, and that the nature of any breedwas governed by the conditions in its geographical location.6 Thisreorientation licensed completely new ways of conceptualising, managingand enacting breeding. With a new emphasis on the role of the breeder asagricultural innovator, Bakewell became a celebrity.

Bakewell’s celebrity was complicated by his class position, for he wasperceived as not quite a gentleman. Breeding animals apparently offered alimitless malleability for the animal, but clearly Bakewell’s social position and

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© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

status were less openly mobile. He did not even own his own land. IndeedBakewell’s philosophy that ‘like will produce its like’ becomes a container forhis own story. In an anonymous necrology published in 1800, for example,the author immediately connects Bakewell’s success to his father’s qualitiesand to his social position. Bakewell is described as having had only theminimal education ‘generally bestowed on people of his rank in life’, and hissuccess is attributed to ‘early professional initiation in husbandry’ by an‘orderly’ father who ‘was a man of a strong and inquisitive mind’.7 Bakewellis mainly distinguished from his father by his ‘experimental practice’, which isdescribed variously in the necrology as ‘the product of original genius’,‘eccentric’, ‘incontrovertible’ and ‘peculiar’. Indeed, the author bluntlyconnects Bakewell’s very physiognomy to his suitability to the ‘precisecharacter in life in which he chanced to be placed’, and this is echoed in CecilPawson’s twentieth-century biography of Bakewell, where Pawson implicitlyconnects Bakewell’s own ‘stoutness’ both to the positive character traits andthe distinguishing characteristic of his breed of sheep.8

The celebrated agricultural reformer and writer Arthur Young echoes thisview of heritable traits, emphasising in his appraisal of Bakewell’s farmingpractices the fact that his ‘improvement[s were] begun by his father, nowliving, and carried on and finished by himself ’.9 Young goes further, though, bydirectly addressing Bakewell’s social status to elevate his accomplishmentswithin the naturalised boundaries of his class position. There is never a senseof potential social mobility in Young’s assessment of Bakewell. Indeed, forYoung, Bakewell’s excellence is grounded in his tenant status and hisrelationship to his landlord. Bakewell’s works ‘are not the effect of a richlandlord’s determining to be a good farmer on his own land, but the honest,and truly meritorious endeavours of a tenant, performing great and expensiveworks on the property of another’.10 Young uses his particular assessment ofBakewell’s meritorious altruism and his overall satisfaction with Bakewell’shusbandry to extrapolate standards and principles to the ‘kingdom in general[which will be] benefited not a little’. Bakewell’s practice is deemed appropriateand to be emulated by others in his class. It also significantly includesBakewell’s ‘generous and considerate landlord’ and establishes an agriculturalideal from whichYoung desires the reader to take ‘Mr. Bakewell as a pattern’ sothat ‘such excellent farmers [will] always meet with the same encouragement’and presumably make no effort to disturb such patterns.11

This sweeping, optimistic orientation towards Robert Bakewell in-corporates his ‘stout’ fundamental otherness and in doing so implies anethical process that can be only partially explained by Emmanuel Levinas’sexhortation to contemplate the Other as a ‘fundamental category’. Levinasinvites us to step out of ontology to consider figures (such as the yeoman, Iassume), both in their cultural construction and in their potential wildness, intheir ethical relationships to us, in our infinite responsibilities to them; or, atleast in the way that the being of such figures disturbs categories andapparently clearly demarcated boundaries. Bakewell’s fundamental

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otherness encompasses and addresses the very conceptual and physicalactivity that made it possible for him to manipulate the animal body withinbreeding. This plasticity – whether animal or human – is dynamic and cannotbe completely controlled. But at some level I am interrogating how Bakewell,like the animals he engendered, was both able and not able to express ortransgress his otherness from an enclosed social or class position. As much asany of this discussion relates to the organisation of the class system in earlymodern Britain, we might consider what Brian Stross points out: that‘classification provided the basis for, as well as the justification of, the notionof hybridity and all things considered to be hybrids.’12 Lines, in other words,encourage and necessitate line-crossing. Robert Bakewell inhabited a hybridspace at the threshold of Mengelian genetics, where an intensive search wasunder way for a ‘law’ of hybridisation that would allow the breeder to predictthe results of a given cross.13 Bakewell’s yeoman social status incorporatesthis vision of hybridity and environmentally fits perfectly with the lateeighteenth-century ethic of enclosure and improvement through thevertically oriented ‘spiral of modern agriculture’ contained within aburgeoning laissez-faire agricultural capitalism.14

The ‘yeoman’ designation is a manifestation of the class and agriculturalhybridity in process from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth (andobviously beyond). Reading the text of the yeoman figure eco-criticallyreveals the intersection between the yeoman farmer and the natural worldand how the yeoman functions and comes to function naturally within thesystem of agriculture and within the historical period that we have come tocall, in all its contentiousness, the agricultural revolution. It is necessary torecognise that this new agriculture, which promised unlimited bounty andprofit, completely limited and systematised agriculture so as to make it almostimpossible to view either the yeoman or livestock as anything but containedor, dare I say, enclosed. But this suggestion to extend and alter systems is alsoconstricted, for, as Marc Ereshefsky points out, one of the barriers torethinking and even abandoning taxonomy to change ‘the way we representthe organic world’ is that the Linnaean system is ‘firmly entrenched inbiology, not to mention in popular culture’.15 And even further fromconsideration presumably – beyond reconceptualisation – is the animal thatthe Other shapes. Indeed, this lack of consideration for the animal isembedded in Levinas’s own theory, where consideration for the Other is heldto be an exclusively human potential because animals are thought to beincapable of overcoming or suspending their basic biological drives.16

This raises the very delicate question of whether the basic humanbiological drives that underpin the practice of animal breeding arise in theethically suspect notion that the animal body can and should be shaped toserve human needs. Additionally, or perhaps as a result of creating animals toshape and serve human needs, ideologies of containment or enclosurebecome manifest in the actual appearance of the Bakewell animal, in theheavy, barrel shape of both the Bakewell longhorn cattle and in his highly

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successful Dishley or New Leicester sheep. This idea that the animal body canand must be shaped by humans to greater effect, both economically andsocially, has great appeal and acceptance in the eighteenth century. ArthurYoung authoritatively asserts that Bakewell ‘has improved [breeding] muchin bringing the carcass of the beast into a truer mould’.17 Young not onlyinternalises the shaping of animals in imagery, but this image of the animalas carcass and as moulded carcass allows him to contextualise animalbreeding within a discourse that foregrounds a striving for profit as ‘truth’ sothat the ‘value [of the animal] lies in the barrel, not in the legs’: the animal isnever imagined as a living body but only as a ‘carcass’.18 The live animal isconceptualised as already dead. It exists to be manipulated at will, as long asthe required human value is created.

Additionally, Young quickly orients and then normalises what appearedonly a historical moment before to be an abnormal animal aesthetic. Thesubstantially larger Bakewellian beast is engendered from a risky breedingmethodology bound to produce live and sentient anomalies which must bemanaged. Young’s effusions help to integrate and locate that new animal as anew exemplar of viable and proper farm management behaviours. Further,Young elevates Bakewell’s strategy and Bakewell himself as the answer to thenew social problem of providing cheap cuts of meat and candle tallow for aburgeoning urban working-class population. The Bakewell animal thusbecomes Young’s idealised ‘truer carcass’ – the fatty, calorie-rich, quick-fixNew Leicester mutton, which typically held up to twelve inches of fat on therib and nine inches on the rump and which by all accounts was unpalatable.19

The grotesqueness of this new animal also becomes a symbol of Bakewell’syeoman ingenuity bursting out of its seams, a kind of absurdist allure forambitious breeders and farmers, a seduction in which anything is possible –even agricultural revolution, even class and species transcendence. Despitethe profound unnaturalness of Bakewell’s animals, Wood and Orel identify awidely practised slippage in which ‘the transition from free Nature todomestication [is seen as] “natural breeding”.’20

Such beliefs played well to the stud market, and Bakewell carefully ‘let’ ramsfor increasingly exorbitant fees as his and his animals’ reputations grew.According to Nicholas Russell,

when [Arthur] Young visited Dishley in 1770, Bakewell’s lead bull, Twopenny,was covering cows at 5 guineas a service and he had others let for the season atbetween 5 and 30 guineas. These were certainly exceptional prices, but theyprobably say more about Bakewell’s undoubted gifts of salesmanship and self-publicity than about his stock.21

Vítezlav Orel identifies the taboo against inbreeding as the basis on whichBakewell was able to accelerate his breeding work beyond the work of otherbreeders and innovate at a much quicker pace than his continentalcontemporaries, who were overtly censured by the Church’s opposition toconsanguineous mating.22 But Orel enacts his own strategic naturalisation,



using Bakewell and breeding history to illustrate ways in which religiousand other debates have constrained and continue to constrain breedinginnovations – innovations that in Orel’s view are inevitable. In particular, Orelutilises storytelling and the concise and compelling story of Robert Bakewellto illuminate the similarities between Bakewell’s innovations and the latetwentieth-century story of cloning as part of a seamless continuum ofscientific progress and inevitability. Orel recognises that Bakewell was ‘ontosomething’ and by bringing Bakewell into our present he concurs withMargaret Derry that Bakewell set a standard that still holds.23

Derry’s elaboration on Bakewell’s influence emphasises his earlyunderstanding of progeny testing, in which the value of the individualanimal is not inherent to that animal but rather determined by the successand superiority of his offspring on the male line. The implication is thatBakewell exercised the steady patience and confidence of a man who believesthat more than 200 years later his ‘offspring’ will affirm his methodologies,philosophies and practices. Adopting this trajectory, Orel directly connectsIan Wilmut’s cloned sheep Dolly (from 1997) to Bakewell, suggesting that increating Dolly, Wilmut plays with a ‘basic idea that was already known’ in alogical progression from ‘closed races’ to ‘inbred lines’ to ‘cloned lines’. Orel’slament is that ‘the public’ continues to fret about inbreeding in the face ofsuch logic and that such fretting is unnecessary and merely slows thingsdown.24 But while Ian Wilmut has certainly been called upon to defend thecreation of Dolly on a number of fronts, his class position was not the centralissue for the late twentieth century.

Any moral slippage attributed to Bakewell could be associated with whatI will loosely call the ‘breeding’ of Bakewell within the confines of hisrespectable class position, and can in turn be connected to, or at least seen asan echo of, several of his own animal breeding objectives. Almost byassociation, the yeoman farmer becomes a kind of catch-all figure orcontainer appropriated as a useful and malleable designation for the valuesand ideologies of the new agriculture. This is despite the fact that the mysticalrustic figure that Bakewell embodies had all but disappeared, ‘largely boughtout in the period of active building up of great estates in the later seventeenthand early eighteenth centuries’.25 But the myth of the yeoman must standand support a breeding poetic and a ‘truer mould’ for the animal that extendsbreeder and bred beyond anonymous breeder and animal. Bakewell and hisanimals became iconic, and Bakewell carefully managed this iconographyoften through naming.

The role of naming and highlighting individuals like Dolly, for example, is acontemporary rhetoric that masks the many questions that Sarah Franklinhas raised about who Dolly really is, slipping as she does ‘out of familiar kinds[...] syntactically noncompliant within the normal arboreal grammars ofreproduction and descent’.26 The focus on the male line in breeding throughprogeny testing is underlined in the naming of many of Bakewell’s animalsand their offspring. Cattle such as ‘Garrick’ and ‘Garrick’s Sister’, also owned

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by Fowler, have their relationship suggested in their names and work toentrench cultural gender values and advertise the heritability of finecharacteristics in the female line. Furthermore, ‘Garrick’ must refer to thecelebrated eighteenth-century actor and theatre manager David Garrick,famous for his Shakespearean roles such as Richard III, Macbeth andHotspur.27 This reference to Garrick in the body of the animal also gestures toBakewell’s famous sire ‘Shakespeare’, who, in Ron Broglio’s words, serves asthe ideal for British beef ‘[j]ust as the bard of England gave fame to the Britisharts’.28 The naming suggests a relationship. Elspeth Montcreiff reports that‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Garrick’ may also be related through the male line.29 Suchliterary allusion explicitly ties these animals to the public and culturalimagination in what Harriet Ritvo has called ‘a shift in at least the rhetoricalfunction of animal husbandry’, which she connects to nationalism andaristocratic self-assertion.30 There are also other kinds of naming utilised byBakewell that efface both allusion and illusion and draw attention moreforcefully to the ‘truer mould’ that Young refers to in the end-use value of theanimals. As Nicholas Russell points out, ‘[i]t cannot be without significancethat the names [Bakewell] gave to some of his rams, such as Shoulders, Bosom,Carcass, Campbells (hocks) etc. applied to certain conformation areas wherethe animals concerned excelled in Bakewell’s opinion.’31

But it is not only the breeder and the animal who breed and are bred. Theagricultural labour that largely enacts this reshaping is also shaped andnaturalised by it. Arthur Young’s specific observations of farming practices atBakewell’s Dishley farm underline and naturalise successful practices, andYoung tightly links animal behaviour to the behaviour of labourers even as hecarefully locates Bakewell in his proper place in the class hierarchy. Younghighlights Bakewell’s ‘spirited husbandry’ as ‘amongst the rarest instances[...] ever met with among the common farmers of England’, and his labour-management training and methodologies are incorporated into his record ofagricultural innovation.32 Young illuminates, for example, the ‘amazinggentleness in which he [Bakewell] brings up these animals’.33 Young alsotacitly endorses Bakewell’s prescient previsualisation breeding methodologywhen he analyses the construction of the ideal farm labourer and suggeststhat ‘their physiognomy may be of some use’; otherwise, hiring ‘muchdepends on your quick judging of the accounts the fellows give ofthemselves’.34 The operative word for Young in this regard is ‘docility’, butmuch of his text suggests that it is a quality not easily found or bred in farmlabourers. In his The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England, Young alsoemphasises Bakewell’s ‘general order’ and attentiveness to cleanliness. Hedescribes in detail Bakewell’s wintering barns ‘which are kept quite cleanwithout litter [... by] the men who are employed [to] keep the wholeconstantly swept down, and barrow the dung into the area of the yard that issurrounded by the sheds, and then pile up the dung in a square clamp’.35

Other commentators also connect docile farm labourers to farmarchitecture. When Nathaniel Kent characterises agricultural labourers as



‘these useful people’, he does so within a taxonomy that necessitatescontainment and entrenches an agricultural discourse in which distinctionsin language between ‘improvement’ and ‘better regulation’ collapse.36 Notonly does Kent encourage an actual architectural containment, with hisproposals for improved cottage design and his insistence in linkingarchitecture and behaviour with an outpouring of sentiment for the ‘poorfamily who has only one room’,37 but he also further systemises the utility oflabourers as breeders who provide ‘the greatest support to the state as beingthe most prolific cradles of population’38 and aestheticises the regulatedworking estate with its ‘proper number of inhabitants’39 as an ‘ornament to acountry’.40 Indeed, Kent’s regulating impulses are primarily directed to and atgentlemen. By categorising gentlemen ‘as guardians of the poor’ and ‘theirfriend[s] and protector[s]’41 and by extrapolating a process through whichdeserving cottagers are integrated into capitalism based on their ‘industriousdisposition[s]’,42 Kent creates a class system within the labouring class inwhich demonstrably better labourers access better cottages and eventuallythrough continued best practices are transformed into farmers who could‘raise more potatoes and carrots than be sufficient for their ownconsumption’,43 keep a cow and send produce to market, raise a sow, ‘or twostore pigs [who would] double the market price’ – the reward of industry.44

There are additional breedings and reshapings within this milieu. Thebreeder also deliberately breeds pupils, acolytes and imitators – in Bakewell’scase, George and Matthew Culley, ‘bred in the bone’, who reproducedBakewell’s pure Dishley sheep in Northumberland. George Culley ‘stayed atDishley in 1762 as part of a tour to earn his trade of farming’. Once he and hisbrother Matthew returned to their farm in Northumberland, they began tohire Bakewell rams and ‘systematically attempted [...] to develop a secondarycentre of pure Dishley stock in the northern counties’.45 According to John R.Walton, the Culleys also drained ‘low-lying marshy land in the Till Valley’,introduced four-course rotation and crossed Bakewell’s rams with Teeswaterewes to create the ‘Border Leicester’.46 The Colling Brothers schooled byBakewell ‘applied their new knowledge to the popular [cattle] breed in th[eir]area [...] refin[ing] the [Bakewell] Longhorn by selective inbreeding as well asvery limited out-crossing with Scotch blood, producing an animal that provedto be far hardier, a better breeder, capable of a higher milk yield and of beingfattened to even more immense proportions than the Longhorn’.47 There isalso an aristocratic breeding dynamic that Harriet Ritvo has described, inwhich Bakewell’s breeding influence is self-managed so as not to disturb classboundaries. Ritvo cites several instances of Bakewell’s cultivation of ‘thearistocratic amateurs who patronized stock breeding’ and suggests thatBakewell worked sensitively even in consulting with King George III ‘tomaintain [breeding’s] status as an elite pastime’.48 Clearly, Bakewell mustappear sufficiently gentlemanly and convey superior authority as hesimultaneously defers to a greater authority confusingly founded oncompletely different terms from his own authority. The irony of bloodlines at

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the centre of his practice and embodied in his animals could not have beenlost on the yeoman breeder functioning without benefit of inherent breedingor aristocratic bloodline himself.

This delicate hybridity of the self-made man and the not-quite gentlemanshines through in John Boultbee’s portrait of Robert Bakewell, RobertBakewell at Dishley Grange (Fig. 1). Here Bakewell as successful yeoman farmermodels, in his rotund profile, a ‘healthy’ gentlemanly ideal, and we see thatideal reproduced in uniform sets of animals – the same breed/type/shape(with some variation in size). Maintaining the status of Bakewell’s Dishleysheep becomes almost as important as creating the sheep in the first place.How Bakewell achieved all this on his small farm in Leicestershire is also amatter of breeding and a matter of sleight-of-hand, in which Bakewelldemonstrated his apparent ability to breed ‘purely on the basis of appearance,adjusting it with crosses about which he was notoriously secretive’.49 Indeed,Bakewell’s celebrity accelerated the idea of better breeds and standard breedscreated largely through a physical and genetic ‘traffic in animals’, whichbecomes entrenched as a fact and as a methodology. At one level, the animalbody is imagined as a miraculous potential, a plasticity of flesh that effaces theidea of inherent value, subjectivity or the concern for suffering orindividuality – and all of this in the alleged ‘age of the individual’. On theother hand, the obsessive record-keeping of bloodlines and the rooting ofpedigree as practice tacitly supports a level of marketable and heritable traitsas rare and singular. In the Bakewellian animal, the breed type becomes breedline, concentrating value and breed wealth in the specific body of one

John Boultbee, Robert Bakewell at Dishley Grange, 1785, oil on canvas,© National Portrait Gallery, London



animal and by extension in the hands of one increasingly wealthy celebritybreeder.50 The deeper societal ambivalence around late eighteenth-centuryindividuality is highlighted by this genetic discourse especially in the waysthat individuality could be both granted and disallowed in the labouringclasses, colonised others and animals. Standardisation and homogeneitytrickled up as well – a consequence of the very market drive thatmanufactures conformity and which was identified in Britain at least with akind of cultural superiority in which ‘a Peasant or Mechanic in Englandwould be found to exceed [a Peasant or Mechanic in France] in Value by atleast three to one’.51 Perhaps some of the ambivalence is rooted in the statusof the labouring classes, colonised others and animals as consumer goods.

For this miraculous monocultural practice needed to be institutionalised atsome level, simply because it was so clearly profitable. One could ‘obtain moremoney from each tup over several seasons than could be obtained by direct salein any one season’.52 And if Bakewell’s burgeoning status as a wealthy andimportant farmer up-ended social strictures, Bakewell’s Dishley sheep alsoup-ended the idea of a sheep’s function and what it should look like.As examples of the ‘perfect butcher’s animal’,53 Bakewell’s sheep appearedgrotesque, distinguished, as George Culley describes them, ‘by their fine livelyeyes, clean heads, straight, broad, flat backs, round (barrel-like) bodies, veryfine small bones, thin pelts, and an inclination to make fat at an early age’.54

Interestingly, this meant that Bakewell’s sheep’s unusual appearance neededto be integrated into the aesthetic categories set aside for sheep in order tonaturalise his breed further and allow it to embody the contemporaryunderstanding of the signifier ‘sheep’. In his The Rural Economy of the MidlandCounties; including the management of livestock, in Leicestershire and its environs(1796) William Marshall distinguishes between ‘picturesque’ beauty and‘positive beauty’ in his description of Bakewell’s Dishley sheep. In essence,what Marshall does is to create a whole new category of beauty as a way ofintegrating Bakewell’s animals into that aesthetic category. When Marshallcannot actually justify the beauty of the Dishley sheep, he insists that in orderto appreciate the ‘comparative merit’ of this breed, ‘peculiarly pleasing to theeye’, the animal must be placed ‘in the several lights in which it may be viewed’and that it must be viewed through a judgement of ‘how far the principles ofimprovement have [...] been [...] applied’.55 Marshall’s new aesthetic contextfor the Dishley sheep (as beautiful) allows him to normalise the breed even as itenables him to skirt around issues inherent to the production of this ‘look’.Marshall’s new categories, or the ‘several lights’ in which we view the animal,are interesting in the way that they reorient the conception of the beautifulaway from Edmund Burke’s small, smooth and polished beautiful, his light anddelicate beautiful ‘founded [...] on pleasure’,56 towards a use-value hierarchythat moves quickly past ‘Beauty of Form’ to place its weight on ‘utility of form,proportion of Offal, quality of flesh and fatting quality’.57 These aestheticdesignations literally turn our heads. That Bakewell could so accuratelyreproduce his breed without apparent scientific procedures appeared

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miraculous and gives an impression of breeding as a practice naturallysanctioned to create uniformity. Integrated into the rubric of progress, theplasticity of language comes into play, and the very term ‘breeding’ is bred tosynonymise with ‘monoculture’ and embody an industrialised, agribusinessmodel that then logically represents the vision of the future.

Acknowledging this means acknowledging that the act of ensuring thatBakewell’s Dishley sheep sits at the centre of the farm animal kingdom isalmost as important as creating the sheep in the first place and constitutes akind of rhetorical or ideological traffic in animals that, for example,normalises a meat-centred culture and supports the real or actual traffic inanimals. And such a traffic in animals is what Michael McGinnis might call a‘sombre choice’, one that endangers ‘place, cultural diversity and the healthof the bioregion’58 not to mention the well-being and status of the animalas moral agent, especially in any postmodern reconceptualisation ofpresubjectivity as ‘radically nonanthropocentric’.59 There is some sense thatan attempt to discuss bioregionalism simply in relation to domesticatedanimals is entirely misguided, yet Michael S. Quinn’s reference to modernbreeds of cattle as ‘placeless creatures’ is deeply disturbing, particularly in thecontext of any sentient genetics that aspires to care for animals.60

As an environmental discourse, bioregionalism posits a strong, oftenmetaphorical relationship between natural regions and cultural coherence.In our example, bioregionalism would designate Bakewellian ram-letting asan inherently anti-bioregional practice because it implies and promotesuniformity across geographical regions by ‘letting’ a ram travel to anotherregion to impregnate and generate ‘likeness’ elsewhere and separate from anatural world that would inevitably produce variation. The idea of a traffic inanimals, underpinned by a traffic in breeders, begins, then, to breed andundermine bioregional identities as well as to orient land-use and influenceecologies. But towards the end of the eighteenth century the idea of rightbreeds and standard breeds becomes increasingly entrenched as a fact. This isa radical realignment on many levels: ideological, scientific, visual, culturaland environmental. If, according to Nicholas Russell, ‘[t]he contemporaryview in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that fleece quality andthe overall size of a particular type of sheep were environmentally determinedand that the nature of any breed was governed by conditions in its geographiclocation’, then standardisation completely reoriented ways of thinking aboutplace.61 There are, of course, both precedents and ironies in the traffic inanimals. As Roger Wood and Vítezlav Orel reveal through their study of earlynineteenth-century meetings of the Brno Sheep Breeders’ Association,climatic influences were seen as one of the causes of ‘imperfect heredity’,62

even as ‘all emphasis [in developing pure races] was placed on the blood (ofboth sexes) and the potential it carries’.63 Furthermore, a number ofEuropean breeders argued that inbreeding was natural to bioregions and thatit had been ‘the normal, primitive mode of reproduction’, which merelyneeded acceleration and perfection through human intervention.64 In the



new breeding-centred environment one place very opportunely becomes likeanother, to confound once again our ability to view the Other as afundamental category in its infinity, in its wildness. Any frustration with theidentity of the Other can be downgraded, treated only as an opportuneproblem awaiting regulation, systemisation and resolution by ‘a newmethod’. Integrating the Other is integral to the very shape of farmingthrough enclosure, four-field crop rotation and the practice of ram-letting.Optimism is further optimised through a mythologising process meant toelevate and naturalise the processes in the bodies of figures such as the barrel-shaped animal and the yeoman farmer through architectural containmentand the management of workers.

III. Who was the Yeoman Farmer?

Not only did the yeoman become a kind of ‘catch-all’ figure or container for thevalues and ideologies that would become corporate agriculture, but thatyeoman, existing in reality less and less, became a figuration appropriated as auseful and malleable designation. For example, the yeoman as category servesneatly to mask the reality that the vast majority of arable land stayed in thehands of the manorial lords and was not part of any real ‘free market’.65 AsRobert C. Allen suggests, ‘by the end of the eighteenth century only 10 per centof England belonged to owner-occupying farmers’, so the decline from 1688,which Allen estimates was as much as two-thirds occupied by the peasantry,was ‘precipitous’: ‘The eighteenth century witnessed not only change, butrevolutionary change.’66 Statistically, through the eyes of agrarian historians,the yeoman seems to play a very minor role in eighteenth-century agriculture,yet his symbolic role is disproportionably elevated. The yeoman-bred animalsare inculcated into this logic of representation as well as serving both asreflection and symbol. In his work on US horse-breeding, for example, JohnBorneman asks, if the ‘[yeoman] is a figure modeled after the Jeffersonian idealof the democratic American who gains individual strength, sustenance andsocial and political power through a relationship with the soil’, and whether itcan be ‘mere coincidence that the Morgan [horse] look matches thecharacteristics ascribed to the archetypical Jeffersonian yeoman farmer’,which are ‘the sum total of perceived American virtues’.67

Untangling and isolating a fixed identity of the yeoman farmer since thefirst appearances of the term in English in the fourteenth century has beennearly impossible. Generally, though, the term ‘yeoman’ refers to a workingfarmer – a designation between tenant and gentleman farmer; one of thelegales homines, or free-born Englishmen who paid, for example, inOxfordshire in 1785, an annual tax of from 6 shillings to £20, representingestates of from about one acre to about 300 acres.68 W. M. Baskervill assertsthe yeoman to be a special class: ‘a body [of freeholders] which, in antiquity ofpossession and purity of extraction was probably superior to the classes thatlooked down upon it as ignoble’.69 William H. Hulme also emphasises the

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yeomen’s separation from mere labourers by their pre-eminence, their pursuitof wealth, their good houses. By Hulme’s definition, ‘yeomen may not becalled masters and gentlemen, but goodmen [...] they are exempt from thevulgar and common sorts’.70

Robert Bakewell’ status as a ‘goodman’ breeder is underpinned by hisquintessential yeoman identity. Bred within the confines of his respectableclass position, his impeccable farm practices, even his celebrity could beproperly contained within the yeoman designation as an echo of several ofhis own animal breeding objectives, methodologies and philosophies,summarised by Nicholas Russell as: a) the creation of a profitable meatanimal; b) fast, efficient, maximum meat, with more fat; c) strong selection ofbreed stock; d) breed characteristics are heritable; e) close inbreeding (‘likebegets like’); f) performance testing; g) progeny testing.71 This containmentwas essential, especially at the end of the eighteenth century, when socialmobility allowed intelligent and ambitious commoners latitude to move intopositions of influence and financial independence.

IV. In the Spirit of Improvement

If I view and have viewed the animal breeder and the bred animal as shapedby a kind of cultural genetics, it is possible to go beyond considering theconstruction of figures such as Bakewell and his Dishley animals to considerthe poignancy of the altered subject and how the beings of such figuresdisturb categories and apparently clearly demarcated boundaries betweenhuman and animal. If classification begets hybridity and such radicalunruliness warrants our attention, breeding us backward into a fullerhistorical, environmental understanding of the complex conditions ofproduction of the yeoman matters. His continuing roles in shaping theideologies of twenty-first century agriculture – standing bright, proud,displaying his ‘stability in determination’, his ‘goodman’ nobility and pre-eminence – underline the predominance of shaping in the context of strategicnaturalisation. Indeed it is Bakewell’s existence and his mystique in itsentirety, his wholeness, that arrests us – and this passes to a consideration ofthe wholeness of eighteenth-century livestock too. The traces of theirrepresentational physical presences should give us pause in a twenty-first-century environment, in which the reproduction of the animal body hasbecome increasingly disembodied and fractured. Our capacity for sentience indealing with these fragmented animal subjects implies accompanying rolesand responsibilities, including feeling for the Other. There is a sense ofoppression and containment in contemporary breeding practices thathumans too often and too readily fail to face. But face-to-face encounters withour simultaneously sentient Other gestures to the possibilities of a new, morefluent arrangement, a sentient agriculture where, as in an ethic of care, thedistinction between caring about and caring for animals generates newsenses of relatedness and new sentiences.72



NOTES1. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

2008), p.47.2. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heideigger to Derrida (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p.4.3. See, for example, Diane Curtin, ‘Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care’, in Carol J. Adams

and Josephine Donovan (eds), The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethic (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2007), p.94-5.

4. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress), p.3.

5. Nicholas Russell, Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early ModernEngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.196.

6. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.193-7.7. ‘Robert Bakewell’, The Annual Necrology for 1797-8; including, also, various articles of

neglected biography (London, 1800), p.199-200.8. ‘Robert Bakewell’, p.200; Cecil H. Pawson, Robert Bakewell: Pioneer Livestock Breeder

(London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1957), p.26.9. Arthur Young, ‘Letter II’, in The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England, vol. I (London,

1771), p.124.10. Young, Tour, p.134.11. Young, Tour, p.134.12. Brian Stross, ‘The Hybrid Metaphor: From Biology to Culture’, Journal of American Folklore

112:445 (1999), p.255.13. Roger Wood and Vítezlav Orel, ‘Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early

Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel’s Later Work’, Journal of the History of Biology 38

(2005), p.251.14. The ascending spiral of agriculture is: more crop=more stock; more stock=more

manure=more crop.15. Marc Ereshefsky, ‘Species and the Linnaean Hierarchy’, in Robert A. Wilson (ed.), Species:

New Interdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p.302, 286.16. See Calarco, Zoographies, p.56.17. Young, Tour, p.112.18. Young, Tour, p.112.19. Jeanne Schinto, ‘Good Breeding: British Livestock Portraits, 1780-1900’, Gastronomica

(Summer 2004), p.31.20. Wood and Orel, ‘Scientific Breeding in Central Europe’, p.260.21. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.147.22. Vítezslav Orel, ‘Cloning, Inbreeding, and History’, Quarterly Review of Biology 72:4

(December 1997), p.437.23. Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since

1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p.9.24. Orel, ‘Cloning, Inbreeding, and History’, p.439.25. G. E. Minguay, ‘The Agricultural Revolution in English History: A Reconsideration’, in

Essays in Agrarian History, vol. II, ed. W. E. Minchinton (Newton Abbot: David and Charles,1968), p.17.

26. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures, p.28.27. Peter Thomson, ‘Garrick, David’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004); online edn, accessed 9 June 2010.28. Ron Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830

(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), p.169.29. Elspeth Moncrieff, Iona Joseph and Stephen Joseph, Farm Animal Portraits (Woodbridge:

Antique Collectors’ Club, 1996), p.170.30. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p.47.31. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.213.32. Young, Tour, p.124.33. Young, Tour, p.113.34. Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Kalendar; or, A Monthly Directory for all Sorts of Country

Business (London, 1771), p.315.

596 ANNE MILNE


35. Young, Tour, p.121.36. Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, 2nd edn (London, 1776), p.241.37. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.242-3.38. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.243.39. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.255.40. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.251.41. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.253.42. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.248.43. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.248.44. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p.252.45. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.210-11.46. John R. Walton, ‘Culley, George’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004); online edn, accessed 9 June 2010. Sarah Franklin points out that thisdirect descendant of Bakewell’s New Leicester, the Border Leicester, ‘remains one of Britain’smost recognisable breeds of sheep and one of its most influential breeding stock’. See Franklin,Dolly Mixtures, p.102.

47. Montcrieff, Joseph and Joseph, Farm Animal Portraits, p.175.48. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, p.52-3.49. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures, p.103.50. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures, p.103.51. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p.x.52. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.204.53. Montcrieff, Joseph and Joseph, Farm Animal Portraits, p.206.54. Anne Orde (ed.), Matthew Culley, George Culley: Travel Journals and Letters, 1765-1798

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.105.55. William Marshall, The Rural Economy of the Midland Counties; Including the Management of

Livestock, in Leicestershire and its Environs, vol. I (London, 1796), p.346.56. Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the

Beautiful ([1757] London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), p.124.57. Marshall, Rural Economy of the Midland Counties, p.357.58. Michael Vincent McGinnis (ed.), Bioregionalism (London: Routledge, 1999), p.62. A

bioregion is usually defined as a small physical geographical area, typically a watershed region.These areas are also sometimes called ‘natural regions’.

59. Calarco, Zoographies, p.10.60. Michael S. Quinn, ‘Corpulent Cattle and Milk Machines: Nature, Art and the Ideal Type’,

Society and Animals 1:2 (1993); http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa1.2/quinn.html.61. Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.193-4.62. Wood and Orel, ‘Scientific Breeding in Central Europe’, p.254.63. Wood and Orel, ‘Scientific Breeding in Central Europe’, p.246.64. Wood and Orel, ‘Scientific Breeding in Central Europe’, p.260.65. Stone and Stone note very little entry of new owners in the eighteenth century. They

found that scarcely any rich industrialists – let alone yeomen – were buying country houses.Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.92.

66. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, p.85.67. John Borneman, ‘Race, Ethnicity, Species, Bred: Totemism and Horse-Breed Classification

in America’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30:1 (January 1988), p.32.68. H. L. Gray, ‘Yeoman Farming in Oxfordshire from the Sixteenth Century to the

Nineteenth’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 24:2 (February 1910), p.301.69. W. M. Baskervill, ‘The Etymology of Yeoman,’ Modern Language Notes 10:8 (December

1895), p.239.70. Hulme, ‘Yeoman’, p.222.71. see Russell, Like Engend’ring Like, p.199-205.72. Curtin, ‘Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care’, p.94-5.

anne milne is Assistant Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario.She is the author of ‘Lactilla Tends her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women inEighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 2008).



sentient genetics: breeding the animal breeder as fundamental other

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