15th & 16th of June 2023, Online Conference

Epizootics Beyond Veterinary Medicinethe Farm: Historicales and Ethnographic

Approacheses of mass death of Non-Domesticated Animals

The third annual conference of The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic
Emergence of Zoonosis project, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St
Andrews. Convened by Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva and Christos Lynteris

Diseases occurring in groups of non-human animals, in other words, epizootics, have been
the concern of both veterinary and human medicine since the end of the eighteenth century.
Positioned at a pivot of the entanglement between farming and medicine, historians have
shown how “cattle plagues” as well as diseases of horses played a key role in the
development of veterinary science. Historians and anthropologists of herding in colonial and
post-colonial contexts have also shown how epizootics in domesticated animals has played
significant roles in the entanglement of the governance of human and nonhuman life in the
Global South. Less examined, however, have been histories and ethnographies of epizootics
beyond their locus par excellence, the farm, and beyond farmed animals, or more broadly
beyond the domestic/domesticated animals, such as cows, sheep, pigs, camels, horses and
goatsdisciplinary bounds of veterinary medicine. While over the past twenty years the
renewed interest in emerging infectious diseases and disease spillovers from animals to
humans has led to renewed attention to animal health, the hegemony of the One Health
agenda – which more often than not applies concepts and analytical frameworks developed
with respect to domesticated animals to the full range of animal life – and its adoption in the
medical humanities and social sciences has further led to vet-centric distortions of both the
historical and the ethnographic record of epizootics. Recognising the importance of this trend
and its corresponding studies

, Tthis conference asks how our understanding of and our approaches to epizootics may be
transformed if we instead focused on mass death among non-domesticated animalson
perspectives other to veterinary approaches to animal health, such as rats, wild birds, boars,
and even insects. The conference intents to call attention especially to disease, illness and
mass death events among wwhat wehe can heuristically call “not-for -profit” animals, i.e.
animals not raised and kept as pets or for profit, whether through their labour or their
products or parts (milk, meat, blood, fur, bones, etc.), their spaces, behaviour, and interaction
with humans as well as with “for-profit” animals. . Steering away from and challenging the
domesticated/wild dichotomy, but taking it ethnographically seriously, we are interested in
exploring how a focus on epizootics through the lens of non-domesticated and/or “not-for-
profit” animalsbeyond veterinary medicine can unsettle, trouble and advance our
understanding of the ways in which animal and human health have become interlinked in
different historical and ethnographic contexts.
 
Classifying epizootics. What counts and what does not count as an epizootic? How was the
concept of epizootics historically (re)-constructed? What sorts of mass death of non-human
animals come under this framing and what remain outwith it? What animals are included and
excluded from the framework of epizootics? What are the causes and results of classificatory
frameworks of epizootics, both as regards understandings of non-human death, and the
classification and hierarchy or non-human animals?
The idea that epizootics precede human epidemics. How did this idea emerge and in which
ways was it developed and/or contested in different epistemic, social and epidemiological
contexts? By which means has the correlation between epizootics and epidemics been
achieved? What kind of medicalisation of spatialities and temporalities has this correlation
fostered? What cultural practices has it pathologized in different contexts? How has the lack
of epizootics in outbreaks of human diseases by otherwise zoonotic pathogens, such as Ebola
or SARS-CoV-2 been made sense of? How has the existence of epizootics not leading to
human epidemics been explained?  
 
The observation of epizootics. What were the spaces outside the farm
where epizootics could be observed and studied (urban spaces, zoological gardens, non-
farmed rural areas)? Who observed the epizootics besides veterinarians? How
were epizootics imagined or deducted when they could not be directly observed? How were
the loci of the epizootics integrated in veterinary, medical and epidemiological or public
health conceptualizations that framed diseases as part of a given space? How did such
approach interact with or challenge veterinarian approaches to pathogenic spaces?
 
The idea that epizootics form a natural self-regulating mechanism. How
have epizootics of wild animals been configured into population self-regulatory mechanisms?
In which have “plagues” of animals been associated to epizootics among the same species?
To what extent and in which ways have such configuration been imbued by ideas of a
“balance” in nature? What application has this idea (“Elton’s law”) had on the ground? In
which ways have humans tried to artificially replicate this supposed natural mechanism
(myxomatosis, Danysz virus etc), and what were the consequences of such
anthropogenic epizootics?  
 
Interactions between veterinary-led ideas of epizootics and epidemiology-led ideas
of epizootics. How did ideas about epizootics developed principally by veterinary scientists
in response to diseases in farm animals, such as foot and mouth, rinderpest, chicken cholera
or porcine plague, interact with ideas about epizootics developed principally by
epidemiologists and medical doctors working in response to zoonosesdiseases in humans,
such as plague, typhus, hantavirus, or Ebola? Were these independently developed framings
of epizootics ever synthesised, and how? Have the studies of epizootics in non-farming
contexts, for instance in the case of plague or rabies, interacted or reshaped veterinarian
knowledge? 
 
Ideas and practices around epizootics outside biomedicine. How has the mass illness
and/or death of non-human animals been perceived and rendered meaningful or actionable
outside biomedical contexts? What sort of non-human agencies have such phenomena
afforded within the context of such non-biomedical approaches? In which ways has colonial
medicine interacted with such approaches, and/or try to assimilate them within its own
system of knowledge? More broadly, how have non-biomedical approaches to epizootics
interacted with biomedical ones? 

The idea of epizootics jumping between “wild” and “domestic” spaces. How have
epizootics in supposedly “wild” and “domestic” spaces become interrelated? How has this
relation impacted ideas about the “origins” of infectious diseases? How have ideas of
“wildness” impacted perceptions of immunity to diseases across the domesticated/non-
domesticated animal divide? How has the role of humans as catalysts or even intermediary
hosts of this exchange been configured in different contexts and what has the impact of such
framings been for animal management and conservation?