ABSTRACT This article examines how the commodified body of the cow is formed through the accrual of materialized touches. Focusing on the notion of legitimate touch, it shows that legal definitions of permissible bodily interference are saturated by scripts of care and future (economic) promise, which legitimize intimate bodily interventions over nonhuman animals' bodies. Drawing on research on live cattle imports in Turkey, the article analyzes two modalities of touch, namely indeterminate and promising forms, to document how tactility can both suspend the assumed categorizations of animals involved and reproduce the imperatives of (re)productivity. While indeterminate touch is indicative of the unruly potentials of multispecies labor and affect, promising touch draws from and reproduces scripts of future productivity and care. A comparison of these two reveals the extent to which tactile interventions over animals' bodies are aligned with broader regimes of value, gendered labor, and (re)production of the cows for/as a commodity. The analysis argues for the significance of bringing tactility into critical analyses on industrial animal agriculture to both foreground the multiplicity of sensoria operative in industrial production and extend the discussion beyond the biopolitical allocation of killability.
Zeynep Gizem Haspolat (2026) studied this question.