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Not in my port: The “death ship” of sheep and crimes of agri-food globalization

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Abstract

We examine crime that emerges from the global restructuring of agriculture and food systems by employing the case of the Australian “Ship of Death,” whereby nearly 58,000 sheep were stranded at sea for almost 3 months in 2003, violating the Western Australia Animal Welfare Act of 2002. This case demonstrates that the acceleration of transnational trade networks, in the context of agri-food globalization, victimizes animals and constitutes a crime. Herein, we examine this case in depth and show how economic restructuring, driven by a “logic of capital” orientation, can exert pressure on the state causing it to fail to enforce its own regulations and in this way engage in criminal actions.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the editor and three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Social Justice annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin and the International Rural Sociology meeting in Trondheim, Norway.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resource Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Wynne Wright

  2. Department of Sociology, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Stephen L. Muzzatti

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  1. Wynne Wright
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Correspondence to Wynne Wright.

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Wynne Wright is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University specializing in agri-food systems and political sociology. Her current interests lie in social change in the agri-food system and it's influence farm families and rural community culture.

Stephen Muzzatti is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada specializing in critical theory, crime, and the mass media. He is Vice-Chair of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology.

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Wright, W., Muzzatti, S.L. Not in my port: The “death ship” of sheep and crimes of agri-food globalization. Agric Hum Values 24, 133–145 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-006-9056-7

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