Byproductive limits and bits of animal life

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that animal geography should extend its limits and analyses to the fragmented ‘byproducts’ and ‘bits of life’ that are made from animals. In so doing, we argue that a ‘byproductive lens’ is vital to an animal geography in the face of multiple and overlapping ecological crises. The paper opens by theorising byproductive animals and bits of life as increasingly important in the context of emerging biotechnologies. Drawing on our work with shrimp and chickens, we look at how animal byproducts (shells and eggs, respectively) are being put to work, remediated and rendered for pharmaceuticals, biomaterials and other novel industrial purposes. In doing so, we explore the limits of animal geographies through a byproductive lens, to argue that these animal derivatives are bits of life embroiled in bioeconomies, biocapital and biopolitics. We conclude by arguing that byproductive animal geographies offer generative insights for scholars interested in expanding the remit of animal geography’s engagements with scale and ethics, and for scholars engaging with animals across the social sciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal byproducts
• animal geography
• byproductive labour

Introduction

Animals have a long history within the geographical discipline, dating back at least as far as Scottish geographer Marion Newbigin’s (1913) Animal Geography. The place of animals in the discipline has been reconfigured on multiple occasions. Most recently, animal geographies have flourished within more-than-human perspectives. Despite these growing engagements with animals, there remain conceptual limits to animal geography, as this special issue documents in myriad forms. In this paper, we argue that geographers have an overwhelming tendency towards thinking and working with whole animals, limiting the scope and power of animal geography. While there have been concerted efforts towards thinking about, and with, individual animals (Bear, 2011), animal geography still largely operates according to an understanding of the animal as ‘a sovereign subject held neatly within a fleshy container’ (Squire, 2020, p. 6). We contend that a fixation on whole animal bodies hides the myriad animal derivatives, tissues, body-parts and byproducts which exhibit their own vibrant animal geographies.

Animal byproducts are ubiquitous. They have been used throughout human history, shaped the development of modern science, and are taking on ever greater prominence in the nascent biotechnological age (Onaga & Douny, 2023). Animal byproducts are widely used in contemporary pharmaceuticals, biomedicine, fashion, food, cosmetics, biofuels and for manifold industrial applications – although their animal origin is often obscured. By focusing on animal byproducts, we trouble the limits of animal geography and call for further interventions and thinking beyond the scale of the body or species. This paper thus reconsiders not just who counts as animal, but what counts as animal in animal geography via two case studies – shrimp and chickens – and the harnessing of their byproducts in biotechnology applications.

In the first section of the paper, we theorise byproductive animals, drawing on political animal geography and feminist political economy. In two following empirical sections we explore byproduction in shrimp and chickens: two distinct, yet emblematic, Anthropocene species. Drawing upon our respective research with shrimp shells (Dickinson & Johnson, 2022; Johnson & Dickinson, 2022) and on chicken byproducts (Oliver, 2022; Oliver & Turnbull, 2021), we uncover how these typically discarded animal materials are rendered – a term used by Shukin (2009) to refer to the ‘carnal business’ of boiling, grinding and recycling animal remains – into valuable biotechnologies. We subsequently bring these case studies together to think towards a byproductive animal geography that troubles – and potentially extends – our understandings of animals within geographical knowledge. We end by drawing conclusions about what this ‘byproductive’ perspective can bring to animal geography in a time of multiple ecological crises.

Theorising byproductive animals

Fragmenting animal geography

Animal geography traverses cultural, environmental, social and political realms of geographical thought and crosses scales of individuals, species and communities of animals. For the most part, the body – largely understood as the ‘corporeal whole’ of animals (Squire, 2020) – remains an unspoken limit of animal geography. The fragmented or rendered body becomes ‘less-than-animal’ (c.f. Philo’s ‘less-than-human’, 2017), and therefore beyond the limits of animal geography’s concern. We outline the case for theorising byproductive animals in animal geography by drawing upon posthuman feminist explorations of more-than-human bodily fragmentation, notably Smelik and Lykke’s (2010) notion of ‘bits of life’, and feminist political economy on the sustenance of labour and social life through ‘byproductive labour’ (Whitney, 2018). In doing so, we recast animal byproducts as important subjects of analysis for animal geography.

Within the landscape of animal geography, charismatic and familiar species typically dominate (Lorimer, 2007), whereas exploited, unloved or ‘abject’ (Fleischmann, 2023) species are often invisibilized (Arcari et al., 2021), with some animals effectively precluded from the animal category altogether (Oliver, 2022). To redress this imbalance, geographers are beginning to highlight unfamiliar or unloved animals such as slugs (Ginn, 2014), hoverflies (Gandy, 2019), bats (Caiza-Villegas et al., 2024) and sardinella (Pille-Schneider, forthcoming). While animal geographies have been rescaled and rethought beyond the charismatic – extending even to microbiota (Bradshaw, 2022) – there remain limits to what counts as ‘animal’ in animal geography, with the ‘corporeal whole’ usually constituting this limit. This is evidenced by the relative absence of animal parts including flesh, shells, bones, eggs, skin, feathers, furs and fats in geographical thinking about and with animals (notable exceptions include Bersaglio & Margulies, 2022; Bezan & McKay, 2021; Cole, 2016; Dickinson, 2022).

The exclusion of animal body-parts might be because they lack the affective pull or embodied ‘liveliness’ central to animal geography scholarship (Collard & Dempsey, 2013), but nevertheless this exclusion risks omitting important animal geographies simply due to their lack of a (whole) body. As Raven et al. (2021, p. 1537) have argued, the capitalist bioeconomy routinely oversees ‘the “technological melting” of a living animal, broken up into many “chunks” to be manipulated, studied and appropriated.’ These bits of animal life exhibit their own resolutely animal geographies, albeit pushing at the limits of what conventionally ‘counts’ as animal and despite the struggle of ‘bits’ to exhibit the kinds of agency and resistance typically anticipated when thinking of animals (Oliver, 2023). Attending to fragmented animal geographies ‘moves existing conversations beyond the binaries of dead or alive, and natural or artificial, to consider the substantive, nonlinear and dynamic matter of animals’ in their disembodied states (Onaga & Douny, 2023, p. 220).

Animal geographers have extensively studied animal commodities (e.g. Clay & Yurco, 2020; Kleibert et al., 2020), but less attention is extended to documenting material remainders or ‘byproducts’ of animals. Bersaglio and Margulies (2022) have analysed the mobilisation of northern white rhino reproductive cells in de-extinction projects, and Dickinson (2022) outlines how the materiality of sturgeon caviar shapes the geopolitics of illicit caviar trade in Europe. We build upon this emerging work from geographers who have begun to incorporate disembodied animal materials into the conceptual remit of animal geography. Where they exist, geographies of animal derivatives typically focus on the extraction of high-value primary commodities from animals including sperm (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2022; Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016), foodstuffs (Banoub, 2020; Dickinson, 2022) or cosmetics and medicines (Raven et al., 2021). These accounts variably document how ‘life-forms are reducible down to parts, components, extracts, oils and commodities … in the name of scientific and capitalist “invention”’ (Raven et al., 2021, p. 1257).

While we also consider how biotechnological fragmentation of animals is ‘symptomatic of a global capitalist system seeking new terrains for accumulation’ (Braun, 2020, p. 279), we refract these analyses back onto animal geography itself, arguing for expanded frames and scales of analysis through the lens of the ‘byproductive’. In this paper, we primarily speak directly to the limits of animal geography, but we anticipate interest from and build on work across cognate disciplines including anthropology, sociology, economics and science and technology studies (STS).

Byproductive animals

Within recent political animal geographies, animal labour has become increasingly important. Animal labour is variably formulated as conscripted (Wadiwel, 2018), pro-nature (Welden, 2023) or even affective (Singh, 2018), as well as entangled with conditions for human workers in animal industries (e.g. Blanchette, 2020; Stuesse, 2016). Feminist theorist Shiloh Whitney (2018) has, however, critiqued understandings of labour as productive and/or reproductive. Seeking to move beyond this distinction, Whitney outlines byproductive labour, as ‘a neologism to bring into view an affective economy and a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor [sic] in its paid and unpaid variants’ (p. 638). The idea of byproductive labour argues three things: that affective labour creates embodied byproducts; that byproductive work of metabolising affective waste is central to labour; and that marginalised subjectivity is a byproduct of this kind of labour (p. 637). Or, that affective labour has extraneous impacts that have hitherto been largely ignored but constitute a different form of embodied labour, and that this can be thought of as ‘byproductive.’ This byproductive labour is unintentional, but nevertheless real, and it is neither productive nor reproductive. Taking inspiration from Whitney’s embodied approach, we extend byproductive labour beyond the human to think not just about the affective ‘byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker’ (p. 637), but also about the physical byproducts that are embodied in, yet extraneous to, the productive and reproductive labour of animals.

To further theorise byproductive animals, we build on Smelik and Lykke’s (2010) figuration ‘bits of life’: a term deployed to ‘map changes and transformations’ to bodies that occur through the ‘fusion of the biological and technological’ in contemporary technoscientific innovation and experimentation (Smelik & Lykke, 2010, p. ix). This feminist lens interrogates techno-mediated reconfigurations of bodies to analyse how ‘life bits, whether carbon or silicon based, are transformed … fall apart into ‘components’ … decompose down to [their] molecular structures, which can be reassembled in new and unexpected ways and remediated in endlessly changing shapes’ (p. x). The concept critically engages with finer resolutions of technologically facilitated bodily fragmentation and also with the blurred boundaries that biotechnologies generate between organisms and technology (Braun, 2020). Although predominantly deployed to examine the biotechnological remaking of human bodies, bits of life also captures a posthuman condition of ‘fractured subjectivity’ (Smelik & Lykke, 2010, p. xviii). For example, Braun (2020) analyses the fragmentation of algal organisms into specialised biotechnological bits of life, including biofuels. Accordingly, bits of life can be extended to analyse the (bio)technological fragmentation of animal bodies, enabling a move beyond thinking about disembodied animal derivatives as inert objects or materials. By highlighting how animal ‘bits’ are transformed and put to work in biotechnologies, bits of life emphasises the ‘productive’, ‘reproductive’ – and even byproductive – capacities of fragmented animals.

Animal byproducts might be thought of as incidental materials that have been made into useful corollaries from the production of a primary animal commodity: foodstuffs such as eggs and dairy are framed as byproducts of meat production (despite being totally separate industries: Bell & Weaver, 2001). While foodstuffs typically retain their animal affect, many byproducts are transformed into applications that ‘render them unrecognisable’ (Onaga & Douny, 2023, p. 197). For example, waste fats become candles and soaps (Lowengard, 2023), fish tissues and flesh become oils (Probyn, 2016) and pig intestines become pharmaceuticals (Lutwyche, 2019). Through the production of these novel commodities, animal byproducts may be transmogrified or synthesised with other organic or inorganic materials in ways that engender ‘the disappearance of the animal body’ (Lowengard, 2023). Because animal byproducts are often unrecognisable from the organisms from which they derive, they are usually situated outside animal geography. However, we believe that these byproducts offer generative insights into the endlessly fragmenting geographies of animals – and thus the expansive potentials of animal geography analysis.

The material reformulation of animals into byproducts illuminates ‘denser, more geographically expansive, and more intimate’ (Moore, 2015, p. 12) relationships between animals, technology, and capital. To empirically illustrate our case for byproductive animal geography – or an animal geography of byproducts – we draw on two species: chickens and shrimp. Both are emblematic Anthropocene species that have been conscripted into intensive agriculture for protein production. Chicken is now the most commonly consumed meat globally, with the combined biomass of broiler chickens exceeding that of all other birds on Earth (Bennett et al., 2018); and intensive shrimp aquaculture has shown explosive growth since 1950 (Steffen et al., 2015), with global farmed shrimp production expected to surpass 6 million metric tonnes for the first time in 2023 (Sapin, 2022). These protein-oriented commodity trajectories of chicken and shrimp are well documented. Lesser known, however, is how ‘bits’ of chicken and shrimp bodies not immediately valued for food become secondary byproducts in the capitalist bioeconomy. The scale of what has previously been considered waste from chicken and shrimp industries – including shells, manure, feathers and unwanted body-parts – is currently being recast from an industrial problem to a solution for greener futures and circular economies.

In the next two sections of this paper, we follow shrimp and chickens through processes of biotechnological rendering and molecularization. We then bring these species together to argue that byproductive analyses of animal bits should expand the limits of animal geography, particularly when considering how capitalist biotechnologies are irrevocably reconfiguring more-than-human life on earth.

Shrimp shells

Each year around 3.4 million tons of wild shrimp are caught worldwide (Gillet, 2008), with an additional 5 million metric tons of shrimp produced by farms (Chase, 2022). Processing such vast quantities of shrimp for the food industry creates enormous amounts of biowaste. Between 45-48% of shrimp raw material is routinely discarded (Mathew et al., 2020), although some estimates place the figure as high as 60% (Nirmal et al., 2020). This fact suggests that globally around 3.5 million metric tons of shrimp waste are likely produced each year. However, shrimp shell disposal carries challenges. It is often prohibitively expensive to send shrimp shells to landfill or for burning (Yan & Chen, 2015), and improper disposal creates multiple hazards for human and ecological health (Mathew et al., 2020; Yadav et al., 2019).

Yet shrimp shells reportedly have enormous untapped economic and social potential as byproducts of the seafood processing industry (Amiri et al., 2022). Shrimp shells contain bioactive compounds, chemicals and proteins, including nitrogen, calcium carbonate, amino acids, lipids and chitin, which have a commercial value that is largely ‘being ignored’ (Yan & Chen, 2015). Efforts to convert shrimp shells into commercially viable byproducts have included animal feeds and organic fertilisers, but these markets remain niche and under-developed. Glucosamine is one shrimp shell byproduct which has successfully entered the mass market as a supplement for the therapeutic treatment of osteoarthritis and joint pain in humans and domesticated animals (Gray et al., 2004). Nevertheless, it remains difficult to ascertain exactly what quantities of waste shrimp shells are being revalorised as byproducts, and experts suggest the figure pales in comparison to the magnitude of raw shrimp material that remains unused and becomes waste.

A growing interest in sustainable futures and circular green economies has prompted biotechnology innovators to refocus their attention on harnessing the byproductive capacities of shrimp shell waste streams. One avenue of shrimp shell bioconversion that has garnered millions of euros of investment is the production and application of the biomaterial chitosan (Amiri et al., 2022). Chitosan is synthesised from chitin – a building material in crustacean exoskeletons – via a three-part process of chemical demineralisation, deproteinisation and deacetylation of shrimp shells. This synthetic rendering of shrimp shells removes unwanted animal proteins, tissues and minerals to obtain a powdered biomaterial with versatile physico-chemical properties and widespread biological functionality. Chitosan is biodegradable, biocompatible, antimicrobial, antibacterial, haemostatic, acts as a flocculant or chelating agent and forms films – to name a few of its multifaceted functions. Following its ‘rediscovery’ in the 1970s, chitosan is now used in over 2,000 commercial applications across biomedical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, food and industrial sectors (Philibert et al., 2017), including as a diet pill (Johnson & Dickinson, 2022), bioplastic packaging (Haghighi et al., 2020), battlefield wound dressings (Pozza & Millner, 2011) and agricultural formulations.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, scientists and biotechnology innovators have heralded promising futures for chitosan biotechnologies, branding chitin/chitosan the ‘undisputed biomolecule of great potential’ (Tharanathan & Kittur, 2003) and a ‘miracle biomaterial’ (Biswas & Biswas, 2023). Industrial production of chitosan is not only touted as solving the accumulating shrimp biowaste problem, but also as fostering advances in biomedicine and human healthcare or in displacing reliance on petroleum-based plastics and synthetic chemicals (Dickinson & Johnson, 2022). For example, TômTex, a biobased leather alternative crafted by Vietnamese designer Uyen Tran from shrimp-derived chitosan, is currently gaining traction as a pioneering material that can revolutionise the textile and fashion industries by reducing waste, greenhouse gas emissions, use of harmful chemical dyes and exploitative labour conditions. Marketed as ‘a new class of fabric that can mimic that classic leather feel without the environmental hazard’ (TômTex, 2022), TômTex promises to replace leather products and synthetic plastic-based textiles and clothes with a high-performance, biodegradable, and zero-waste material. TômTex made its runway debut at New York Fashion week in 2022 with a declaration from creators that ‘waste is the new luxury’ (TômTex, 2022).

Like raw chitosan, TômTex exhibits impressive versatility. The material can be customised into various styles and textures, including faux animal leathers and reptile skins, which perform an affective connotation of luxury that appeals to consumers – raising interesting questions about biotechnology-augmented animal commodification. Through their transformation into TômTex chitosan-based fabrics, waste shrimp shells perform both affective and physical dimensions of Whitney’s (2018) embodied ‘byproductive labour’. These chitosan bits of life are intended to perform affective byproductive labour by impersonating other animal bodies and materialities through their rendering and remediation. This ultimately serves to create novel – and reinforce existing – modes of animal commodification, whilst illustrating how the biotechnological fragmentation of animal bodies seeks effectively to transform waste into luxury commodities. Thus, while this shrimp shell-based material ostensibly provides an environmentally friendlier alternative to harmful leather materials, it is difficult to overlook the irony that a byproduct from the industrialised seafood industry is poised to replace another byproduct of intensive livestock farming.

A waste stream from the global seafood industry has thus become an unexpected locus of biotechnological innovation and been transformed into a biomaterial byproduct with seemingly infinite socio-economic applications and an estimated market value of $6.8billion in 2019 (Aranaz et al., 2021). The fragmentation and molecularisation of shrimp exoskeletons into chitosan bits of life such as TômTex reveals the byproductive function of shrimp bodies, whereby their shells become materially and semiotically transformed from waste into bioactive, economically and affectively generative resources.

Chickens and eggs

Today, chickens are raised and killed in staggering numbers: in 2020, over 118 million metric tons of chicken meat was produced across the world (FAO, 2023), representing 35% of the globe’s meat consumption. The growth of the poultry meat industry is relatively recent, with chicken being the fastest growing meat since 2000 (FAO, 2020). Contemporary chickens in both laying and broiler industries are almost unrecognisable to their ancestors, growing much larger and faster than a century ago and producing eggs at an ever-faster rate (Davis, 1996). The intensification of poultry farming has been traced by historians to The Chicken of Tomorrow Contest in the USA in 1948 (Mckenna, 2017; Rude, 2016), when the US Department of Agriculture and A&P supermarkets invited chicken breeders to showcase their advancements in breeding and hatching. The ‘winners’ of the competition, Arbor Acres’ White Rocks and Vantress Hatchery’s Red Cornish crosses, were eventually crossbred to create the genetic stock of chickens that dominate the poultry industry today (Coe, 2014). Alongside the intensification and scaling up of the poultry industry has come a significant increase in waste, which has led to perceived opportunities for innovation, turning these waste streams into novel biomaterials under a veneer of green circular economies.

Industrial poultry waste includes manure, bedding, feed, bodies, bones, flesh, eggs and wastewater (Kelleher et al., 2002; Thyagarajan et al., 2013). Given the intensive environments that chickens live in, these wastes are often toxic, with improper disposal having disastrous consequences for disease and the environment (Ritter & Chinside, 1995). In Britain, the demand for cheap chicken has seen the rise of intensive ‘mega-farms’ in rural areas, and in 2023 the River Wye catchment area garnered increasing media and popular attention due to its staggering declines in biodiversity and environmental damage after decades of chicken waste being poured onto the land as fertiliser (see, for example, Blakely, 2023). The river itself has seen drastic declines in fish and bird life, while the phosphorus from poultry waste is set to continue increasing in the area. Although chicken is posited as a ‘green’ alternative to carbon-intensive beef farming, the environmental damage of poultry farming is far more complex: the industry is responsible for water and land pollution (The Pew Charitable Trust, 2011), as well as contributing to biodiversity loss and potential pandemics.

With the rapid growth of the poultry industry, the amount of waste produced has also drastically increased. This is almost impossible to quantify, due to the rapid turnover of chicken production. With estimates of 400 million chickens being killed each week across the world, the amount of nitrogen-rich waste from manure and litter, as well as keratin-rich waste from eggshells, bodies and feathers is enormous (Lakshmi et al., 2020). However, the rise of biotechnologies and biofuels has meant that these waste products of the poultry industry are increasingly being recast as byproductive resources. Scientists and engineers have proposed, for example, that biodiesel production from the lipids and fats in chicken waste (the bodies of slaughtered laying hens) could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Bangladesh’s transport by over 70% (Barua et al., 2020), although these biodiesels are not yet in use. Feathers have also been identified as a potentially fruitful byproductive resource, with their high levels of keratin being explored as novel reinforcement biomaterials for plastics and microchips (Acda, 2010) as well as wound dressings (Shanmugasundaram et al., 2018). One study found that ‘good antimicrobial property, cell viability and negative cytotoxicity makes [feather biomaterials] an ideal candidate to be utilized in tissue engineering applications such as skin regeneration and wound healing’ (Nayak & Gupta, 2015; cited in Tarafdar et al., 2021, p. 8249). Perhaps most surprisingly, chicken feathers are being considered as reinforcements for cement composites (Acda, 2010).

Eggshells are one of the largest sources of chicken waste, and, while they have unique and potentially valuable compositions, they have mostly been readily and quickly disposed of (Baláž et al., 2021). About 95% of chicken eggshell is calcium carbonate, but it also contains phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, potassium, zinc and copper (Butcher & Miles, n.d.), while the diet and environments of chickens influence the make-up and quality of eggshells. The porosity of eggshell has become one of its compelling properties, with experiments on its potential use as an absorbent, a coating, a strengthening material and a natural protection against pollutants (Kınaytürk et al., 2021). The poultry industry processes upwards of 70 billion chickens annually (not including slaughter in the egg industry: Graham, 2023) and is set to be the fastest growing meat industry up to 2050 (Mottet & Tempio, 2017). Both broiler and layer industries discard ‘empty shells, infertile eggs, dead embryos (unhatched), late hatchings and a viscous liquid from eggs’ (Kanani et al., 2020), as well as the killing and discarding of around 7 billion male chicks in the egg industry (Krautwald-Junghanns et al., 2018).

Experimental biotechnologies are sifting through, separating and seeking to make chickens further productive, turning these Anthropocene animals into byproductive bits of life that are put to work in the affectively optimistic biotechnology industries. Biofuels, for example, made of the waste from the poultry (and wider food) industry are in turn used to promote eco-futures with little to no effort on the part of humans, notably in the use of ‘Eco-Friendly Jet Fuel’ (NASA, 2011). In fact, the promise of the making of waste into byproducts allows for imaginaries of futures where nothing much at all has to change.

The making of waste into byproducts is a far cry from earlier iterations of repurposing poultry industry waste, where the bodies of laying hens were turned into pet food or reconstituted chicken products (dog food or chicken nuggets). Like shrimp-shells, where chicken waste was previously an environmental contaminant, it can now be co-opted into a circular economy and greening discourses, all whilst creating viable new economic markets. The sheer scale of waste from the poultry industry is seeing several new flows of potential byproductive value emerge, whether in traditional uses such as pet food or as possible parts of circular economies. The chicken, already fragmented into parts for meat – breast, thigh, bone (Adams, 1990) – is now reformed in its post-productive life as a resource for biotechnological extraction and experimentation. The further fragmentation of chickens into ‘byproducts’ with a vast range of uses, often promising eco-friendly futures, moves them from ‘waste’ into economically useful streams while totally erasing chickens themselves as the source of these products.

Byproductive animal geographies

Despite vast amounts of scientific research into chickens, shrimp and their biomaterials, both species have, for the most part, escaped sustained attention from animal-geographical analyses. While discussions of myriad species and their relations with society, politics and the economy have flourished throughout the subfield (Hovorka, 2018), treatments of chickens and shrimp are notably lacking. In this section, we explore how spotlighting byproductive animals and their ‘bits’ through the case of chickens and shrimp can trouble animal geography’s limits beyond animal death and disassembling.

More-than-human turns have pushed geographers to rethink pre-existing categories and conventions, resulting in burgeoning literatures on messy, complex and ambivalent encounters with animals (Wilson, 2017). Accordingly, animal geographers have increasingly moved away from thinking with animals as undifferentiated populations towards considering animals as agentic individuals (Bear, 2011). Yet this move has reified a focus on animals as lively, vital agents, thereby side-lining important discussions on animal death and posthumous animals and their parts. Notably, the (after)lives of animals do not end with death, especially for those beings – such as chickens and shrimp – embroiled in industrial use and performing byproductive labours. Gillespie (2021) argues that in industrialised agriculture cows become differentiated ‘fluid’ commodities when living, soon-to-be-dead or once-living; and Bezan and McKay (2021) exemplify how – and where – animals remain, lingering beyond their deaths within environments, technologies, resources and cultural memory. Further, Dickinson (2022, p. 4) argues that ‘animal remains – and not just lively animals – are co-constitutive of political processes.’ These works extend considerations of animal geographies beyond the living and the vital, and into dead, decayed, disappearing and partial animal subjectivities. Yet, the legacy of animals rendered into biotechnological ‘bits’ and ‘byproducts’ remains significantly under-explored in animal geographies, perhaps due to the ongoing emphasis on identifying and defending the (political) agency of living animals, or on thinking with animals as ‘whole’.

To consider afresh the political-geographical implications of thinking with animal byproducts, we work with Radomska’s (2016, p. 75) assertion that bits of life opens new questions of ‘what life means in an ethico-political context’ as ‘bits of life, or life itself … become an object of technoscientific manipulations, political investments and ethical concerns’ that seek to control and preserve the living, extending the lively capacities of organisms beyond death. If bits of life opens new questions of ‘what life means’, it simultaneously provokes reflection on animal geographies across scales and beyond death. Smelik and Lykke (2010, p. xvii) contend that bits of life analyses attend to the biotechnological remediation of bodies, capturing how ‘bodies, bodyparts and embodied subjectivities are reproduced by the movement from one medium to another.’ Thus, by following how novel biotechnologies remediate the bits of life located within animal byproducts, we open space for animal geographies to engage beyond the life and death of animals themselves and consider how they are put to use after their death.

In biotechnological experiments with chicken and shrimp shells, the repurposing of waste streams serves a dual purpose: first, to extend the afterlives of animals for profit and, ostensibly, green economies; and second, to create novel opportunities to put waste to work. These bits of life, previously treated as waste, become fertile terrains to perform byproductive labour, remaking otherwise dead and post-commodity materials into lively, useful and profitable pools of bioactive resources. Yet these animal byproducts can have unexpected consequences in their remediated forms, thereby troubling human attempts to control and enrol bits of life in new markets.

For example, the practical applicability of chitosan has been limited – particularly in pharmaceutical contexts – by material inconsistencies between batches (Franzén et al., 2015). Scientists and processors surmise that batch inconsistencies can be caused by physiological differences in shrimp-shell composition between species (Morgan et al., 2021) and variations caused by ecological conditions and animal behaviours when living. Celebi et al. (2024) note that shrimp are prone to microbiological contamination from bacteria, algae and protozoa in their environments, and suggest that ‘bacterial residues on the shrimp surface also cause impurities’ in shrimp-shell tissues leading to ‘various technological defects’ in processed chitin. The animal and microbiological affordances of the shrimp are not, therefore, wholly dissolved following the processing of their shells into chitosan. Rather, animals and microorganisms become remediated in their transformation from waste material into biomaterial, thus further extending conceptualisations of the persistent animality of and in byproducts beyond narrow life/death dichotomies.

Animal geography has for the most-part overlooked how the breaking down of animals into parts can result in their remediation into new ‘animal’ configurations. For the chicken, discussions of disassembling are usually reserved for the processing plant, but there are myriad ways that chickens are broken down into parts and made byproductive throughout their life course. For example, in the egg industry, environmental conditions are manipulated and controlled to ‘enhance’ egg quality (Peralta-Sánchez et al., 2012). The content of human-consumed eggs is impacted by the dietary conditioning of chickens, which has been put to use in food supplementation for humans through the addition of Omega 3 to chicken diets. The breaking down of the chicken into parts (metabolic, reproductive) has thus been used to enhance human diets through egg consumption (Oliver & Turnbull, 2021). The fortification of chicken diets through the addition of calcium is leading to the production of novel food fortification products made from eggshell to target Asian markets, where large numbers of people suffer from lactose intolerance and therefore cannot consume fortified dairy (Waheed et al., 2020). Far from being an incidental occurrence, the entanglements of human diets and chicken’s labour are literally sustaining the health of human populations, remediating and invisibilising, but not obliterating the animal.

By thinking between the chicken and the shrimp, their byproductive geographies and their changing commodification and industrial uses, it becomes apparent that these species may be largely absent from geographical debate due to tensions over which species it is believed should be killed and which should be cared for. Both the chicken and the shrimp are killed in vast numbers as part of food systems, but this is (for the most part) overlooked as a necessary kind of consumption. As their place in different economic and ecological geographies changes, so too do the debates around care and killing in the worlds of the chicken and the shrimp. We argue that by thinking beyond intentional agentic politics (Hughes, 2016), animal geographies can follow and unpick the vibrant material affordances of animals exhibited through their bits, remains and byproducts. Examining remediated animal geographies beyond – and below – the whole moves beyond simplistic binaries of living and dead, while refusing to ‘dissolve’ or obfuscate the animal origins of byproducts (Onaga & Douny, 2023). Thus, despite scientific and capitalistic efforts to break animals down into ever-smaller fragments (Raven et al., 2021), and to remake them as novel, avowedly non-animal entities, a byproductive animal geography lens pushes back against the erasure of animals in the proliferation of their byproducts, simultaneously positioning these microscales of analysis as valid and generative.

Casting an animal geography lens on to these fragmented bits of animal life and their remaking into biotechnological byproducts allows for a rethinking, then, of how we might conceive of animals at scales below and beyond the ‘corporeal whole’, and from a remediated angle. Integrating byproducts into animal geography (re)asserts their animal origins and affordances, despite their rendering into novel biotechnological objects. In doing so, we push for animal geographies to reconsider the privileging of the ‘whole’ animal in order better to capture the ever-deepening intimacies between humans, technology, capital and animals in the Anthropocene. Thinking with shrimp and chickens beyond their lively bodies, and through the byproducts made from their waste bodily matter, moves beyond more typical political-economic and STS analyses of novel biotechnologies. Instead, we refocus the lens indeed firmly on to the animals themselves, whose bodies are not just implicated in, but are literally building, these nascent industries and economic markets. A byproductive angle thus rethinks animal vitality across the threshold between living and dead, and in ways that provoke a rethinking of the limits and scales of animal geography.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the extraction of byproductive labours from the bits of life produced from two industrial species: chickens and shrimp. These species are largely absent from mainstream animal geographies (with exceptions: see Liao, 2024; on shrimp and Hovorka, 2008, on chickens). Where chickens and shrimp have been included in animal geographies, it is rarely as political agents and even more infrequently through the lens of their byproducts (Miele, 2011, on free-range eggs being an exception). Yet their byproducts are essential in shaping the contours of chicken, shrimp and human lives in the Anthropocene. During contemporary environmental crisis, biodiversity loss and planetary change, animal geography offers fruitful avenues for ‘facilitat[ing] positive change’ in the world (Hovorka et al., 2021, p. 2). Animal geography has, understandably so, focussed upon the lives (and deaths, e.g. Arcari et al., 2021; Margulies, 2019) of animals in conservation (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2022), industry, homes (Caiza-Villegas et al., 2024), the wild, warfare (Forsyth, 2017), digital spheres and the spectral (Searle, 2022). This analytical exploration has usually tended to end, however, when animal bodies are disassembled and broken down into parts. This paper concludes by calling for geographers not to see this breaking down as the end-limit of animal geography, but instead to extend our analyses beyond these scales.

While shrimp and chickens may seem unconnected, attending to their byproduction allows for a shared analytical lens that can open broader conversations about the future of (political) geographical research with animals. For both the chicken and the shrimp, their worlds have been irrevocably transformed by their embroiling into Anthropocene industries. Chickens as we know them today would not exist without human enclosure, intervention and control; while rising shrimp consumption has seen them enclosed and subject to human manipulation via aquaculture practices. But it is not chicken or shrimp lives that are valuable to these industries: it is the remaking of their flesh into desirable (food) commodities, which produces an enormous amount of waste and a slew of environmental problems. Thus, expanding the remaking of these bodily wastes into reconfigured novel byproductive resources for green biotechnological innovation offers an expansion of Anthropocene industry through byproductive extraction.

Deploying a byproductive lens highlights the proliferating application of shrimp and chicken byproducts as novel biomaterials, and it extends the pre-existing limits of animal geography amidst global ecological change. As a subdiscipline committed to documenting the geographies and ethics of animal exploitation and commodification (Buller, 2016), it is time, we believe, for geographers to pay attention to animal byproducts and their novel geographies. As explored throughout the paper, we are witnessing vast amounts of animal ‘wastes’ being recast as pools of untapped (economic) potential to be transformed into biotechnological innovations which promise to secure greener, ostensibly more sustainable, socio-ecological futures. Presented as environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels, petrochemicals and other harmful materials, these biotechnologies outwardly appear as progressive feats of modern technoscience. Yet the narratives that endorse the environmental credentials of these biotechnologies largely overlook how such innovations rely upon and uphold exploitative and ecologically damaging systems of industrialised animal agriculture.

Rather than resisting, questioning or radically challenging Anthropocene livestock farming practices, the emerging biotechnology sector embraces animal wastes as an opportunity for economic growth under the veneer of sustainability. By bringing animal byproducts and biotechnologies firmly into the frame of animal geography, this paper documents how capitalist bioeconomies reclaim animal life from material excess; meaning that there is no death, only the constant remaking of bits of life into byproducts. This making of byproducts is extending and even surpassing the natural limits of these animals (c.f. Moore, 2015), endlessly transforming animal matter into novel biotechnological entities for the expansion of capital. A byproductive lens thus extends the limits of animal geography by provoking novel questions about the politics and ethics of animal commodification, and by critically unpacking the biotechnological fragmentation of animal bodies and the concomitant enfolding of these bits of life into circuits of economic exchange under the guise of sustainable socio-ecological futures.

A byproductive lens is therefore crucial in better theorising – and critiquing – animals’ potential (posthumous) existence and resisting industrial animal agriculture’s totalising projects. By revealing where and how animals become novel byproducts that are enrolled in Anthropocene socio-ecological narratives, we spotlight the explicitly animal origins of these new markets. By no means are we the first to emphasise how these novel markets are emerging: Alex Blanchette (2020) has followed the making of new markets for porcine plasma, while Merrill Singer (2009) has turned to the production of pathogens as an unintended byproduct of animal agriculture. Yet this broader framing of byproducts as new markets and innovation obscures that, primarily, these are products less to make waste useful and more to expand and grow new markets, untethered from the original animal.

We therefore conclude by stating that byproductive animal geographies offer generative insights for scholars interested in expanding the remit of animal geography’s engagements with scale and ethics. Incorporating byproducts and bits of life into an expanded realm of thought about animals should not, of course, be limited to geographers, but also has relevance to anthropologists, sociologists and animal studies scholars of all kinds. However, the rich history of animal geography in testing and pushing scholarly limits may provide a useful avenue for bringing byproducts in from the sidelines of animal thinking. In turn, this not only reaffirms the (often obscured) animal origins of byproducts, but expands the discipline’s engagement with extra-bodily, fragmented and microscale articulations of animal subjectivity. Through the examples of chicken and shrimp byproducts, we examine how their waste matter is rendered and remediated into biotechnological bits of life, which in turn reveal the overlooked byproductive labours that both species perform posthumously. Ultimately, a byproductive lens provokes novel questions about the hidden politics of animal fragmentation in the Anthropocene, while also attempting to redress the tendency of animal geography to omit animal byproducts. Even when rendered into biotechnological applications that hide their origins, animal byproducts remain resolutely animal. Thus, as the industrial uptake of animal byproducts continues apace, it is an opportune moment for animal geographers to (re)engage with these disembodied animal materials.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback which improved this paper. We also extend thanks to the participants of the ‘Animal Geography at its Limits’ workshop held at University of Edinburgh in May 2023. This paper was directly shaped by conversations at this workshop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).