CattleDAO: Ledgering Urban Care for Fringe Hooves

CattleDAO asks what forms of governance emerge when the urban stray cow, a being inhabiting infrastructural margins and bureaucratic blind spots, is recognized as a civic participant.

In Ahmedabad, their lives congeal the contradictions of Indian urban modernity: continuously present yet institutionally ignored, sacred yet abandoned. Their survival depends on residual infrastructures of faith, mobility, and neglect – entanglements that resist market logics. To engage the stray cow is to inhabit the uncomfortable fringes of interspecies coexistence.

Blockchain here becomes a counter-infrastructure, a possibility for collective responsibility to become legible and durable. Through smart-contract-based care tokens, CattleDAO tests how decentralized coordination might sustain interspecies solidarities: veterinary visits, feeding, and sheltering are documented as care-based obligations rather than property claims.

The residency will result in an open-source, browser-based prototype linked to Pavan’s existing Ahmedabad stray cow registry. It rehearses »as-if« civic futures where cows become nodes of accountability, and the ledger becomes a more-than-human archive of care. CattleDAO explores blockchains as polymorphic tools for emancipatory governance, in which the city learns to respond to those beings it has long rendered invisible.