If the functions of bodies today are to be known, it is no longer a matter of exploring faces or laying hands on the shell of the skin. Rather, the body is apprehended through media and their contiguity to quantification. What was inside—intimate to the body, a wet and squelchy realm to be known through measurement, touch, observation, incision, postmortem analysis—is turned outside by the invasive but bloodless force of digital intervention, or made external in some hands-off kind of way. Developments in the management, improvement, streamlining, augmenting, and salvaging of bodies have often been trialed on a particular bodily species—namely, cattle. To see into the future of how human bodies may reticulate with the emergent techniques of body analysis, it is advisable to look at cows, because their bodies are the testing grounds of the new pastures, the vanguard of bodies disassembled, reassembled, invested in, and exchanged in the integrated circuit of agribusiness. Human bodies leech into cow bodies, cows into humans.
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