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collection of minds
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The uplands of the Burren hills in Ireland are home to a number of feral goat herds. The herds that roam these hills are made up of a number of goat types. There are traces of the Old Irish goat, much hybridized with modern Swiss stock and other forms of released domestic goat. These herds are the subject of contestation and debate, concerning their effects on land, ecology, tourism, the local economy and the cultural landscape of the region. The seasonal movements of each herd amount to a choreography shaped by the particular topographies associated with mating, breeding and grazing. This choreography demarcates the territory of the herd, which may encompass many square miles.
goat herds focuses on two women, each of whom has a personal knowledge of and concrete relationship with one of the feral goat herds. These are unsentimentally practical women who engage consciously with the world in ways that do not cause harm. Their life-practices demonstrate values such as reciprocity, care and cooperation that are implicitly ecofeminist, rejecting the oppression of and violence towards non-human species that characterise human-animal relations under the extractive logic of capitalism.
The work from this episode is presented as a chapter in the publication one kind and another.
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