The use of electronic devices to tag and track millions of animals bred for human consumption has come to symbolize the loss of an intimacy that ostensibly once prevailed between animals and the farmers who raised them during an earlier, less mechanized era of food production. In the United States, people often contrast face-to-face animal–human relations on small farms with the alienated relations they attribute to the “modern” bureaucratic oversight that prevails on factory farms. Yet even the most high-tech surveillance schemes can generate their own forms of intimacy: techno-intimacies that produce “close” knowledge of animals from a technologically mediated...