Browsing by Subject "Cattle"
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Item And the ocean came up on land : perceptions of adaptive capacity of cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana(2013-05) Adams, Danica Claire; Dooling, Sarah; Moore, Steven A., 1945-Cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish is a social-techno-ecological system (STES) that is currently vulnerable due to changing social, technological and ecological conditions. In addressing ways to increase the adaptive capacity of cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish, I used a multiple, mixed method approach grounded in a critical constructivist framework. Constructivism is the idea that our relationship to facts is constructed by our social context. It is these perceptions that shape people’s actions. By looking at these perceptions through an emancipatory frame I was able to understand multiple interpretations of meaning, consciously address them, consider how they may have shaped our actions, and then alter those meanings and power relationships. In an effort to increase the adaptive capacity of cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish, my research focused on actions, why people perform those actions, and how to change them. This research connected the physical landscape of the marshes, the individual landscape of perception, and the conceptual landscape of resilience. If resilience is the ability of a system (cattle ranching in vermilion parish) to recover after a disturbance, adaptive capacity is when the actors within the system can influence that system’s resilience. I explored the history of cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish from three different, but overlapping perspectives – environmental, social, and technological. These perspectives compliment the information from interviews and 3CM sessions. These 15 interviews revealed the perception of 11 types of threats facing cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish. The body of literature surrounding resilience theory identifies traits of highly adaptive systems. The recommendations and suggestions outlined in Chapter 6 exist at the intersection of the actors’ perception of specific threats and the decidedly generalized traits of highly adaptive systems. These suggestions were geared towards increasing the adaptive capacity of cattle ranching in Vermilion Parish. Given these layered landscapes and their complexity, my recommendations were subject to feedback loops and long periods of integration. These recommendations contribute to the theoretical foundation detailed in Chapter 3 by identifying specific ways that the actors of this particular system may be able increase their own adaptive capacity.Item Estimating population histories using single-nucleotide polymorphisms sampled throughout genomes(2013-05) McTavish, Emily Jane Bell; Hillis, David M., 1958-Genomic data facilitate opportunities to track complex population histories of divergence and gene flow. We used 47,506 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to investigate cattle population history. Cattle are descendants of two independently domesticated lineages, taurine and indicine, that diverged 200,000 or more years ago. We found that New World cattle breeds, as well as many related breeds of cattle in southern Europe, exhibit ancestry from both the taurine and indicine lineages. Although European cattle are largely descended from the taurine lineage, gene flow from African cattle (partially of indicine origin) contributed substantial genomic components to both southern European cattle breeds and their New World descendants. We extended these analyses to compare timing of admixture in several breeds of taurine-indicine hybrid origin. We developed a metric, scaled block size (SBS), that uses the unrecombined block size of introgressed regions of chromosomes to differentiate between recent and ancient admixture. By comparing test individuals to standards with known recent hybrid ancestry, we were able to differentiate individuals of recent hybrid origin from other admixed individuals using the SBS metric. We genotyped SNP loci using the bovine 50K SNP panel. The selection of sites to include in SNP analyses can influence inferences from the data, especially when particular populations are used to select the array of polymorphic sites. To test the impact of this bias on the inference of population genetic parameters, we used empirical and simulated data representing the three major continental groups of cattle: European, African, and Indian. We compared the inference of population histories for simulated data sets across different ascertainment conditions using F[subscript ST] and principal components analysis (PCA). Ascertainment bias that results in an over-representation of within-group polymorphism decreases estimates of F[subscript ST] between groups. Geographically biased selection of polymorphic SNPs changes the weighting of principal component axes and can bias inferences about proportions of admixture and population histories using PCA. By combining empirical and simulated data, we were able to both test methods for inferring population histories from genomic SNP data and apply these methods to practical problems.Item Science, animals, and profit-making in the American rodeo arena(2015-05-04) Vaught, Jeannette Marie; Davis, Janet M.; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S.D.; Bsumek, Erika; Lewis, Randolph; Hunt, Thomas; Jones, Susan DThe Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) has grown in scope and popularity since the mid-1970s, cultivating large rodeo audiences with spectacles of human and animal athleticism, speed, and skill. While the sport is popularly understood as an outgrowth of “traditional” western culture and ranching practices, this dissertation argues that its modern iteration depends on scientific advancements pioneered in animal nutrition, reproduction, and injury treatment in industrial beef production and on the creation of new narratives about animals in the past and present. Through analysis of industry documents, oral history interviews, and popular western lifestyle publications, this dissertation shows how rodeo and its partners in the beef industry responded to changing consumer perceptions of animal welfare in food and entertainment. After charting the emergence of a network comprised of agricultural scientists, businessmen, and rodeo participants from the 1950s to the 1970s who successfully nationalized the sport, this dissertation investigates how reproductive transformations of cattle in response to declining beef demand in the 1980s emphasized the virility and power of bulls, and shows how rodeo used these technologies to make bull riding the centerpiece of its popular appeal. From there, the dissertation argues that the cultural redefinition of wild horses from 1950 to the present created new understandings of pain and animal welfare that played out in the rodeo arena’s dramatization of wildness against a backdrop of a growing horse crisis in contemporary America. Finally, an analysis of contemporary efforts to reconcile the growing practice of rodeo and agricultural animal cloning with rodeo tradition shows how rodeo continually reinvents its history to incorporate new scientific technologies while still marketing identification with the past. Taken together, these episodes show how professional rodeo, industrial beef, and veterinary science responded to changing public attitudes about nonhuman animals, continually producing both new animals and new histories that obscured the modern technologies fueling these transformations. In the process, the rodeo and its allies promoted conservative gender ideologies and political alignments, further enfolding innovation with tradition.