Veterinary Anthropology in Bhutan: Negotiating State Policy, Buddhist Ethics, and Ritual Worlds in Animal Health and Production

Abstract

This ethnographically grounded study of veterinary anthropology examines how Bhutan’s veterinary livestock production and local animal health practices function within the eco-social environment of Bhutan’s Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom. A Bhutanese form of veterinary culture is revealed, shaped by ongoing negotiations and adaptations in Bhutan’s eco-social world. Bhutanese state veterinary personnel promote bioveterinary, industrial livestock development programs and navigate ethical tensions around intensified animal production and slaughter in a Buddhist society where killing animals is morally problematic. These state development agendas are resisted or reshaped by Buddhist ethical frameworks and national identity politics, embodied through religious practices such as animal liberation and anti-slaughter movements. In alpine regions, yak herders sustain herd health and productivity through plural strategies that combine state technologies, ethnoveterinary medicine and ritual practices, maintaining multispecies and more-than-human relations of health within Himalayan cosmologies. The thesis introduces the heuristic ‘Economy of Karma’ to interpret decisions about animal-related acts such as animal production and killing. Material benefits are weighed against anticipated karmic consequences and future-life outcomes. It argues for decolonised livestock development policy, showing how Eurocentric bioveterinary hegemony can conflict with Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness sustainability goals and, together with polarised public debate, narrows policy imagination and marginalises pluriversal perspectives. Appendices include a lexicon of Western Bhutan’s herder vocabulary, an ethnoveterinary survey, a bibliography of sixty-six traditional Tibetan veterinary and husbandry texts. This research offers the first veterinary anthropology study in Bhutan and the Tibetan cultural region, analysing transcultural perspectives of human-animal relationships of health.