Carley MacKay join the research team in September 2019 as a PhD student at the Department of Geography, York University. Her research explores cow welfare in Ontario's grass-fed beef farming sector. She investigates how beef farmers understand cow welfare by analyzing the ethical, environmental, political, and economic factors that might impact these understandings. She also examines how farmers' conceptions of cow welfare shape their daily practices and relationships with cows, as well as how they effect the relationships, lives, and deaths of cows. Carley's work highlights that farmers and cows as entangled in complex interspecies relations, within which mutual dependence, care, calculation, and killing take place. She draws from debates in animal geographies, animal biopolitics, and critical food studies to conceptually ground her work; she uses semi-structured interviews, multi-species participant observation, and animal welfare document analysis as key research methods. Notably, she pays attention to the stories that farmers tell her about their cows and use these to build knowledge about the animals and the interactions she shares with them. Through these interactions, cows – as subjects who shape the research process – teach her about how welfare practices impact their relationships, lives, and experiences.