The sheep and goat keepers belonging to the Rabari community, in Gujarat, have faced huge changes in the last decades, regarding land uses and availability of pastures, a strong drive towards sedentarization, education and occupation shifts, and most importantly changes in the market economy, where the meat has replaced wool as the main output of animal breeding. The shepherds have adapted to these changing conditions, through different strategies, one of them being the introduction of new breeds meeting the meat demand. In this paper, we propose to look at the specific ways the Rabari shepherds manage the breeding of their animals, the strategies they implement in these changing times, and how these practices may impact the diversity in the livestock they keep.
Animal breeding appears to be strongly influenced by the networks of social interactions the shepherds belong to. The kinship network and the community create bounded social spaces within which animals circulate, at different scales. Exchanges of rams, for example, mainly happen between kin-related individuals. We will focus on the case of the Barado breed, recently introduced among the Rabari shepherds, to show how the spread of this new breed follows the same kind of networks and slowly spread across the community, illustrating how animals may circulate across geographical and social spaces. Within this setting, the shepherds implement different strategies, depending on their preferences or to respond to the market. Some may be seen as "conservationnists", as they are attached to one breed, associated with the Rabari identity for a long time. Others are diversifying, purposely keeping several breeds as a way to deal with different needs, that give them an ability to respond to changing contexts, some resilience. All are practices shaping in specific ways the diversity in herds of domestic animals.
