Aesthetic Fencing: Reflections on Securing Life from Chicago’s Bubbly Creek

This chapter reconsiders the meaning of life embedded into farm animal biosecurity. It argues that what North American industrial farms and slaughterhouses have tried to fence and secure is not only their animals’ biology and immune systems but also the public’s capacity to sense and experience the degradation of life within these operations. It develops through a historical reinterpretation of Chicago’s Bubbly Creek, a polluted river where the blood and organs of millions of animals were dumped between 1866 and 1919. While many have treated this despoliation as an unintended consequence of mass-producing death and flesh, this chapter instead considers how Bubbly Creek’s pollution was recycled as a means of keeping outsiders from engaging with industrial meat’s transformations of the nature of eco-biological life and industrialised human labour. It simultaneously uses Bubbly Creek as a means of interpreting European efforts to fence its territories and securitise wildlife, suggesting that these initiatives – like Bubbly Creek itself – function to distract attention from the state of vitality that capitalism has wrought.