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Meyer-Glitza, Patrick (2019) Cattle farming without slaughter as an agricultural care system. Case studies from Europe and India.PhD thesis. Berlin: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.SUMMARY“Over the recent years, vegetarianism and veganism have increasingly become a subject of public debate. However, even vegetarian nutrition, through consumption of milk products, leads to the slaughtering of dairy cows that are no longer productive or have been sorted out, and of their male offspring. Thus, vegetarians are indirectly co-responsible for the slaughtering of cattle. For lacto-vegetarians, cattle husbandry without slaughtering (here ‘CWS’, in German ‚ROS’) could be a solution to the dilemma of consuming milk products while not being willing, for ethical reasons, to kill animals. Based on this, the following questions arise: What would cattle husbandry without slaughtering look like in practice? What are the biographical motives behind such farming, and under which ethical aspects is it pursued? In the literary section of this treatise, historical and religious (hinduism) aspects of cattle farming have been outlined. The key issue of the literary section was how CWS is situated in the context of bioethical theories. Other aspects are the longevity of dairy cattle and farms with similarities to CWS and examples of CWS itself. The interviews with the animal owners and/or the heads of animal husbandry in a total of five cases have been carried out and reviewed using qualitative methods of interpretive social research (mostly Grounded Theory, but also biography research and detailed sequential analysis). The five example cases, representing a large part of the parent population at the time of the investigation, have been analyzed and described. In a case comparison, the five cases have been compared to each other in terms of their respective biographical developments, their ethics and their animal husbandry systems (‘system that works’) and also in terms of their conventions (‘économie des conventions’) […] The care-based approach, which is reflected especially in the sanctuary function of the farms, is combined with the agricultural system, resulting in the agri-care-system. The care convention, along with the convention of animal husbandry without slaughtering, put this CWS framework in a wider context. Dilemmas like castration of oxen, euthanasia, killing of wild animals and insects through cultivation of land and feeding of cats cannot be solved by CWS, but CWS can help to alleviate the ambivalence of human handling of domestic and farmed animals. .“ (p. 216/217)Download link 