Jabriel is an awesome, imposing creature. His humped figure, size and weight represent everything that is prized and revered in a bull. He is quite literally the top of the pyramid in Brazil’s vast, complicated and money-driven cattle industry.
Jabriel is what can be described as a “luxury bull” – his genes so perfect that he lives protected in the farm of a lab in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais where his sperm can be used to father as many as 600,000 heads of cattle. A bull like Jabriel is worth up to $1m.
“You feel very weak next to an animal like this, I was quite frightened to be so close to this animal. It’s a huge animal,” says photojournalist Carolina Arantes, who took the arresting portrait of Jabriel. “I think it reflects the energy of the business – the power, the heaviness and the size and the force.”
Arantes, who is now based in France, spent three years travelling back and forth to her home country to document the secret and often spectacular world of luxury cattle farming. Her project, entitled Holy Cow, traces the rural capitalists and their designer cattle that make up this billion-dollar industry.
Veja o artigo completo em: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/10/the-million-dollar-cow-high-end-farming-in-brazil-photo-essay
Comments