The Zebu attracted attention at this time as a result of the findings of the FAO’s first World Food Survey , which undermined their health and limited their ability to fulfil their human-designated roles. Investigators identified at least twenty eight distinct breeds, whose diverse sizes, shapes and productive capacities reflected their adaptation to particular climates , their living conditions, locations and roles within agrarian systems varied greatly, as did their physical state. Numbering more than 100 million in India alone (which held nearly half of the world’s population) It was made more difficult by the Zebu themselves. It was disrupted by political events such as the Partition of India,Īnd the end of British rule in 1947, which impacted on the provision of agricultural services and the presence of technical expertsĪble to attend to the Zebu. Surveying them was a lengthy and painstaking process that took seven years to complete. ![]() These indigenous, humped-backed cattle ( Bos indicus) provided crucial sources of draught power, food and income to the area’s human inhabitants. Living on the Indian subcontinent were exhaustively identified, enumerated and evaluated by officials working for the newly created Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). Within these, experts in human health, veterinary medicine and agricultural science came together to survey the situation, and plan interventions that would create new bovine bodies and new experts capable of supporting their provision of health and nutrition to humans. ![]() Enrolled by the United Nations and its agencies in their campaign against hunger in the developing world, cows inspired the formation of new health structures that aimed to tackle their unproductive bodies. Moving from interwar Britain and its empire to the post-war international stage, it explores how developments in nutritional science and veterinary medicine combined with economic depression, wartime food shortages and the aftermath of war, drew attention to the undernourished, unhealthy bodies of both cows and humans, and suggested connections between them. This chapter is concerned with diseased and undernourished dairy cattle, and how they came to be perceived not simply as threats to agriculture but also as contributors to world hunger and ill health.
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