The life and afterlife of the Craven Heifer: on the biography of a famed beast

The mania for agricultural 'improvement' in England at the turn of the nineteenth century extended in often paradoxical ways to livestock. At once the pursuit of perfection was a matter of yields – deadweights, number of progeny, milk volumes – and fitter and stronger animals. However, the same imperatives also encouraged the breeding of outlandishly large but often unfit animals. Such cattle, sheep, and pigs became status symbols, evidence of their owners' success, their celebrity further fuelled by paintings that distended their proportions in cartoonish ways and through being toured and exhibited to the public. (In)famous and ubiquitous yet curiously little studied, this paper takes one such famed animal – the so-called Craven Heifer, born on the Bolton Abbey Estate in 1807 – and through a study of its life, reception, and afterlife attempts to better understand the complex histories of celebrity farm animals.