The Mechanical Calf: On the Making of a Multispecies Machine

In the late nineteenth century most people obtained their milk still warm from cows kept no more than a few miles away, whereas the final decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the first fully automated robotic milking systems. Much has been written in human-animal studies about the impact upon animals of the ever more elaborate and exacting technoscientific apparatuses of industrial agriculture. Such work provides the context for this chapter, which examines a critical historical-sociotechnical juncture that preceded and enabled the subsequent developments in dairy technologies that culminated in automated milking systems, namely the long-frustrated and belated emergence of the earliest mechanical milking machines. By examining this historical case of the making of a human — technological — animal hybrid in detail, this chapter foregrounds the importance of attending closely to materiality, mediation, biocorporeality and agency in analyses of the relational assemblages from which dairy milk emerges.