Breed wealth: Origins, encounter value and the international love of a breed

Abstract

This paper offers a geographical framework for considering animal breeds as objects of knowledge and living entities, and uses it to explore how ideas of breed origin constitute breeds and affect interspecies relations, human relations and the making of value. It suggests how critical animal geographers could engage more fully with breeds and breeding through an expanded concept of breed wealth that includes the making of breeds as forms of “genetic capital” through the reproductive capacity of animals, the cultural value of breeds in terms of human collective identities and differentiations, and encounter value. This geographical approach to breeds and breeding involves not only engaging with the always situated nature of breed epistemologies, practices and relations, but also the geographical dimensions of what is predominately understood as a genealogically rather than spatially constituted category. A more-than-genealogical understanding of breeds draws attention to how place rather than pedigree alone is considered as constitutive of breeds, both in an evolutionary and immediate sense, despite the formal modern genetic definition of breeds and how geographical origination matters in the making of breed wealth across the multiple geographies of a breed as it is dispersed from its original “homeland.” Addressing a national and international “love of a breed” – Icelandic horses which are defined as a national breed but are the focus of interest and enthusiasm both within and beyond Iceland – this paper explores how the ethical complexities of love, care and power are worked through in different ways across these geographies. Breed wealth, I argue, is a dynamic relational quality inflected by the meanings attributed to the place of breed origin.