This essay first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Choice (volume 63 | issue 2).
Cattle are among the most influential and significant protagonists of modern history. Starting ten thousand years ago, the domestication of the Bos taurus (taurine cattle) in the Fertile Crescent and later, its humped cousin, the Bos indicus (zebu cattle) in South Asia, gave rise to societies and cultures centered on pastoralism. The flesh, milk, fat, skin, and other components of these animals found their way into nearly every aspect of human life, from food and medicine to clothing, shelter, and fuel, while structuring land and labor regimes and social relations. The centrality, indeed the inextricability, of bovine cattle from old-world civilizations emerges vividly in religion, art, and cultural productions featured in full-color images in the book Cow by Hannah Velten, which traces human uses of cows, oxen, and bulls since domestication.
The principal framework governing human attitudes toward cattle has long centered the utility of their bodies. As illustrated in Catrin Rutland’s The Cow: A Natural & Cultural History, much of the knowledge about bovine evolution, anatomy, breeding, and behavior reflects this commodification of bovines. In the most literal sense, cattle provided labor and food. As documented by Meir Shahar in Kings of Oxen and Horses through a case study of Chinese Buddhism and by Jeremy McInerney in The Cattle of the Sun on ancient Greece, the significance of cattle as draft animals has left lasting imprints in religion and culture, well after mechanization has largely displaced animal labor. One of the most visible traces of our relationships with bovines has centered on the transformation of cows into beef—a practice glibly celebrated in many a survey of cattle’s significance to humans across time and place, including Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World by Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser and Beef: A Global History by Lorna Piatti-Farnell.
Beyond their labor and flesh, though, cattle have played a pivotal role in processes of conquest and colonization. The arrival of cattle to the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century fundamentally altered the course of human and animal histories across the Hemisphere. As Helen Cowie explains in Animals in World History, after domestication, the so-called Columbian Exchange—the movement of a wide array of floral and faunal species, especially large domesticates like cattle, across the Atlantic—inaugurated a new period in world history. Taking this watershed as a point of departure, this essay highlights recent books in the humanities and social sciences that engage the historical, social, cultural, and ethical debates arising from human exploitation of cattle since the arrival of those animals to the Americas in the 1490s.
Research on cattle comprises an expansive constellation of fields, with links to a wide array of topics and themes—environment and climate, health and nutrition, animal welfare, land use, social justice, ethics, public policy, and so much more. Its geographic scope is truly global, and it touches almost every academic discipline, from literature to STEM, and from education to business. Here, I aim to situate books on Latin America and its diasporas within a field largely dominated by U.S.-focused scholarship. To bring into focus the social, cultural, and ethical considerations surrounding cattle and their hemispheric trajectories, the vast repertoire of books on cattle ranching in the United States is treated only superficially as it relates to social movements and broader developments in the Americas. Moreover, this essay observes a certain disciplinary privileging of history, anthropology, and philosophy. The substantial literature on veterinary, business, and marketing perspectives on beef and cattle falls beyond the scope of this survey. Books published in English in the last decade or so receive priority here, though occasional reference to classic or otherwise crucial texts with earlier publication dates will appear for context. Following the growing scholarship on animal ethics, I pay special attention to the exploitation of cattle for beef—the primary driver of immense bovine suffering, extractivism, and environmental destruction—though the dairy industry also appears sporadically for its connections to veal production and rendering (processing of deceased animals and slaughter byproducts into “usable” materials, such as pet food).
This essay is the first in a two-part series on bovine relationships with humans. It focuses on the historical evolution of cattle raising and consumption since colonial times. Organized roughly along chronological lines, this essay first explores works on cattle in colonial Latin America before addressing the more extensive bodies of work on the periods historians call “industrialization” in the long nineteenth century—when ranching expanded and technological development transformed the production, distribution, and consumption of beef—and “intensification” from the 1930s onward, when unprecedented demand for beef drove the concentration and corporatization of cattle production and processing and the consolidation and expansion of a global cattle supply chain in which Latin America played a central role.
Bonnie A. Lucero is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean at Texas Christian University. Her most recent monograph is Race and Reproduction in Cuba (2022), published by the University of Georgia Press. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “The Land of the Skinny Cow: Beef Politics in Cuba, 1927–1963.”
