For millennia, humans and domesticated animals have lived interdependently. In return for shelter, feed and care, animals have provided people with diverse material and symbolic resources within high-stakes mutualistic relationships. Farmers understand this interspecies collaboration within a lexicon of labour. Animals must contribute through reproductive labour, while farmers work hard to ensure they provide the conditions in which their animals can thrive. However, mutualistic collaborations are always susceptible to 'cheaters', where one partner enjoys the benefits without providing adequate reciprocation. When considering mutualistic collaboration on an ethnographic scale, industrial agriculture's reduction of animals to unidimensional commodities arguably constitutes such cheating. By analyzing the practices of nourishment, procreation, and protection on Australian heritage breed farms, where breed diversity and convivial interspecies reciprocity are valued above profit, this paper offers a case study of a more honest mutualistic collaboration. Since partner species tend to face a shared fate, I argue that protecting the integrity of these relationships is critical in an era where climate change and ecosystem decline are both hastened by and detrimental to agriculture.