“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in the opening to her essay collection The White Album (11). The ways we choose to tell stories – the perspectives from which they are told, the elements of the plots that are included or excluded, the generic structures in which those plot elements are arranged into a narrative, and so on – constitute their meanings. They are, Didion writes, the ways in which “we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” into “ideas” of a moral or ethical nature that form the basis of how we think and behave and therefore live (11).

Didion’s phrasing suggests that “to live” as individuals requires fitting our actions into coherent narratives, which re-codes the phenomenological “phantasmagoria” of our sensory experiences into systems of thought that make our worlds navigable and bearable. But as literary critics have long observed, there is also an essential social component to storytelling that bears directly upon our ability to thrive within our environments. Circulating stories of social others – figures marginalized within a given culture by race or class or gender or sexuality or disability – can redefine the value of those identity categories. In the process, these recodings can help to change the political, moral, and ethical nature of that culture to their benefit.

With varying degrees of success, storytelling’s capacity to effect social change has been enlisted in more recent years by literary and cultural critics working within the emergent field of human–animal studies to extend political and ethical consideration to nonhuman creatures. As Susan McHugh argues in her work Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human–Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction, “Thinking about animals as inseparable from human lives constitutes [human–animal studies’] key break from ‘animal studies’ as initially and precisely defined by the natural sciences: laboratory-animal experimentation on the basis of which human medical experiments are justified” (8). Through analyses of stories that oppose the assumption that “there is a rational, objective, or really any way to transcend everyone’s basic condition of cross-species entanglements” (8), McHugh advocates for “the power of storytelling to not just relate but also instill a community’s values, shaping perspectives on history” (187).Footnote ¹

Along similar lines, in Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life, David Herman distinguishes between two types of “storytelling traditions”: anthropocentric narratives, which “shore up, reproduce, and even amplify human-centric understandings of animals and cross-species relationships,” and biocentric stories, which “reframe the cultural models or ontologies that undergird hierarchical understandings of humans’ place in the larger biotic communities of which they are members” (4). The latter, he argues, “prefigure and help make possible ways of living on which the continued survival of the earth’s entire biotic community arguably depends” (26). Working from the general premise that telling ourselves these stories might enable our entire biotic community to live, a wide-ranging set of cultural critics including Peter Singer, Donna Haraway, Neel Ahuja, Carol Adams, Anna Tsing, and Cary Wolfe have shown us how the narratives of creative artists whom they champion might counterbalance or even replace older, destructive, patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric modes of storytelling.Footnote ²

Following the popularization of the term by Singer, Wolfe classifies these older narratives as elements of the “discourse of speciesism,” a model of thinking that supports “the ethical acceptability of the systematic ‘noncriminal putting to death’ of animals based solely on their species” (7). He takes the phrase “noncriminal putting to death” from an interview given by the celebrated French theorist Jacques Derrida that considers the ethical problems of consuming animal flesh. Within the context of the argument (and, for that matter, many foundational ecofeminist arguments that undergird present discussions such as Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat),Footnote ³ this practice becomes a synecdoche for modern systems of power that govern not only human–animal relationships in the present period but also relationships between humans. Adams, for example, casts animals as a perpetually absent referent within Western discussions of meat consumption, which recode terms like “butchering” and “meat” into metaphors for human experience. At the same time, “in descriptions of cultural violence women are often the absent referent,” with terms such as “rape” commonly “transferred from the literal experience of women and applied metaphorically to other instances of violent devastation, such as the ‘rape’ of the earth in ecological writings of the early 1970s” (22). These interrelated processes come together in Adams’ account of Metis, the mythological titaness who is raped and then devoured by Zeus, to illustrate how “androcentric culture … view[s] the sexually desired object as consumable,” which legitimizes violence directed toward both animals and women (29).

This manner of rendering animals killable may not persist; as Adams argues, in some future period after the demise of “patriarchal consumption,” the new culture that replaces it might “release Metis, and all who have been swallowed, from the belly of Zeus …, restor[ing] wholeness to our fragmented relationships with each other and the other animals” (181). Anna Tsing invokes a similar image at the beginning of her powerful work The Mushroom at the End of the World: “The time has come for new ways of telling stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature [as separate categories of being], all creatures come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the structures of a parochially imagined rationality” (vii). Or as Wolfe writes, after the demise of speciesism, we may “look back on our current mechanized and systematized practices of factory farming, product testing, and much else that undeniably involves animal exploitation and suffering … with much the same horror and disbelief with which we now regard slavery or the genocide of the Second World War” (190). We may, in other words, tell new stories (or, in Adams’, Tsing’s, and Wolfe’s cases, deliver new arguments) about our present treatment of animals so that they may live longer, healthier, and happier lives with us.

What will these stories and arguments look like? As Wolfe suggests, one possibility would be to begin by associating factory farming practices with human horrors including slavery and genocide, thereby motivating people far removed from agricultural settings (and, it should be noted, far afield from human–animal models of ecological entanglement) to consider the formal relationship between the treatment of animals in the present and the treatment of marginalized and oppressed humans in the recent past. This controversial move dovetails with his suggestion that speciesism

Wolfe’s biopolitical extension of the killing of animals to the treatment of human “others” is, of course, a rather sizable leap that throws into relief the differences as well as the similarities between the ethics of animal rights and the ethics of human rights.Footnote ⁴ After all, Derrida takes pains to note that in his use of the phrase that Wolfe borrows, putting to death is “as real as it is symbolic when the corpse is an animal,” while it is only “a symbolic operation when the corpse is ‘human’” (Reference Davis“Eating Well” 112). Adams also notes that the similarities between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals are visible in certain everyday language choices, which also depend upon the symbolic logic of the absent referent:

In both cases, marginalized human communities are not consumed in any way other than metaphorical by a non-anthropophagic state, setting limits on the value of the supposed “stakes” of eating meat for people removed from the immediate concerns of animals.Footnote ⁵

If the question of killing animals for food or clothing does not map easily onto the necropolitics of state-sponsored killings, other kinds of stories and arguments might be pursued that, in keeping with human–animal studies’ insistence upon ecological framework of entanglement, more closely link the suffering of human and animal populations while still preserving these critics’ emphasis on the “noncriminal putting to death” of animals as privileged marker of the ethics of speciesism. McHugh’s aforementioned work Love in a Time of Slaughters tells one such set of stories, “advancing conversations about the difficult realities of massive deaths of humans alongside other species, conditions that confound metaphorical and other controversial comparisons” (7). While McHugh’s work considers the killing of animals within the necropolitical contexts of colonial struggle, the present book tells other – though certainly related – kinds of entangled stories, revealing the ways that biopolitical practices of the last 300 years have altered the nature and scope of animal diseases, generating not only large-scale animal suffering through death-driven policies of containment but also a great deal of direct and indirect human suffering. The stories that we might tell ourselves about these widespread animal disease outbreaks – what veterinary scientists call “epizootics” – and the policies we adopt to contain them offer fruitful ways to strengthen ethical and political discussions in human–animal studies.

My motivations for seeking out and analyzing these kinds of stories are historical as well as theoretical, because there has never been a more pressing time than now to seriously consider animal diseases and their effects upon human health and well-being. To slightly modify Adams’ and Wolfe’s projections into the future, cultural and natural historians of that time will undoubtedly look back upon the twenty-first century as the era of pandemics – and not just of the human kind. Since the late 1990s, the fungal disease chytridiomycosis has devastated amphibian populations, rendering at least ninety different species of frogs, toads, and salamanders extinct and leading researchers to characterize the outbreak as “the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease” (Reference LuiScheele et al. 1459). Since 2006, the fungus associated with white-nose syndrome has killed tens of millions of bats in North America, pushing species such as the northern long-eared bat to the brink of extinction. Since 2013, billions of sea stars along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico have died of a mysterious wasting disease in the largest outbreak of marine illness in recorded history. Since 2018, outbreaks of deadly African swine fever in Asia have led to the managed killing of hundreds of millions of pigs – roughly one-third of the total world population of the species. In 2020, the deadliest avian flu in recorded history began to sweep across several continents, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of domestic and wild birds and raising fears of crossovers into the human world.Footnote ⁶ These epizootics have indelibly altered global ecosystems, transformed world economies, and contributed to what researchers have classified as the “sixth mass extinction event” in our planet’s history (Reference BanerjeeBarnosky et al. 51).

If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, what can and what should literature tell us about these catastrophic animal diseases, which throw into relief the fact that much of the world upon which we depend to live is dying? How can literary history shape our understanding of similar moments in the past – moments when our cattle or our horses or the birds outside our windows suddenly stopped behaving as we always knew them to behave, stricken down by sudden, widespread plagues? What does this difference mean for how we understand familiar animal behaviors within our shared environments of the present? How does their sudden suffering, made palpable to our humanity most vividly in literature, help us to understand our related sufferings and the sufferings of our fellow human beings when the health of our interspecies community is threatened? Can literature remind us that animal diseases and the suffering that they cause have a history as rich and troubled as our own, one that is structured by the same conditions that rendered so many of our lives healthier as our species moved into the modern era? What are we to do with this divergence? Can a literary history of animal disease help us to reconsider our own anthropocentric history and its destructive tendencies in this light? Can it encourage us to rethink the perspectives that still shape the way we manage these diseases today? Can this reconsideration, in turn, encourage us to see the management of human health and sickness – the biopolitical problems that have drawn so much critical attention in recent years – in a different way?

These questions are the inspiration for this book. In the following pages, I present a sustained literary history of animal disease and animal disease management. This focus does not mean that the discussion exists apart from the concerns of human–animal studies more generally, but it does mean that those concerns are necessarily modified when they are considered alongside literary as well as veterinary history. Consider, for example, the decades-old question of the nature of biopolitics alluded to by Wolfe. As Michel Foucault proposes at the end of the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1976), the birth of biopolitics in Western societies was constituted by a fundamental change in the nature of sovereign power from “an ancient right to take life or let live” to a new power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (“Right of Death” 43). Whereas premodern sovereign powers expressed their authority negatively through execution or confinement, Foucault argues that new sciences devoted to the study and management of human populations expanded the domain of governmentality to the proper cultivation of human life. This transformation, he argues, coincided with transformations in Western attitudes toward death brought about, in part, by changes in eighteenth-century epidemiological and agricultural history:

Curiously, given the brief mention of disease and agriculture, Foucault devotes little to no attention in his larger biopolitical genealogy to events that bring together what he frames as separate biological phenomena: “starvation and plague” or “epidemics and famine.” More precisely, his origin story leaves underexplored three interrelated developments in agriculture just before the French Revolution that serve as both precursors for and, I argue, necessary preconditions to his model of the modern political optimization of human life: the attempted optimization of milk- and beef-producing livestock through selective breeding and international trade, a series of devastating rinderpest epizootics, and a subsequent dramatic expansion of bureaucratic policies for managing this animal disease. These developments meant that while human populations certainly flourished on the continent during this period, with Western Europe rising from an estimated 68.8 million in 1700 to an estimated 114.6 million in 1820,Footnote ⁷ they did so against very strong headwinds. While human epidemics may have waned during the eighteenth century, rinderpest and other animal diseases most assuredly did not, killing an estimated 200 million head of European cattle from 1711 to 1796. Feeding the growing human population therefore became an immense challenge for European governments. Not only did the loss of cattle reduce valuable protein supplies for a hungry population; it also jeopardized the agricultural gains made possible through the invention of more efficient plows by depriving farmers of oxen to drive them.Footnote ⁸

The solution that some desperate countries found to resolve this immense problem was an early form of necropolitics that instituted, for the first time in human history, the large-scale, state-managed killing of infected animals to safeguard the greater economic and political health of the state – a policy that continues to be employed to manage animal disease outbreaks to this day. Ironically, then, one might argue that the “pressure exerted by the biological upon the historical” was, if anything, intensified during the eighteenth century, albeit largely displaced onto a few key livestock species,Footnote ⁹ which, because of their rapidly increasing population and concentration, would suffer far more devastating plagues during the following two centuries than they had ever experienced before. When read from our own historical moment, in which the consequences of animal diseases and their death-driven containment strategies are playing out more frequently on the world stage, this history might help us to reclassify the birth of a human biopolitics as a redirection rather than relaxation of biological pressure. This redirection fused together the “ancient right to take life or let live” with a new power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” in ways that anticipate both the biopolitical emergencies of the twentieth century and the very different challenges of our present, disease-ridden era.

This book situates literature as the essential sinews connecting the death-driven events and ethical considerations of the early eighteenth century to our contemporary COVID moment. In this sense, my argument contributes to emerging discussions in human–animal and posthumanist studies regarding the value of literature and literary scholarship in understanding the historical relationship between animal biopolitics and human biopolitics. Lucinda Cole has spearheaded these efforts, coining the term “medical posthumanities” to denote a “cross-disciplinary inquiry that combines concerns from both animal studies and the medical humanities” (Reference Cole, Raber and Dugan“Zoonotic Shakespeare” 104). Inspired in part by a set of contemporary zoonotic diseases that cross over between human and animal populations (HIV, avian flu, SARS-CoV-2, etc.), Cole’s recent work laments the absence of sophisticated discussions of animal plagues in literary scholarship of the early modern period, which tends to “ignore references to animal disease or treat them symbolically” (104). Dwelling upon these references, Cole contends, can help us to “reconsider the era in Western Europe when the anatomical, neurocognitive, physiological, moral, and affective distinctions between the human and the animal were actively in the process of being formed” (113).Footnote ¹⁰

Knowledge concerning how an animal (or perhaps human–animal) necropolitics separable from emerging anthropocentric biopolitics was established and then institutionalized constitutes one central but unexamined direction for the coming medical posthumanities. If, as Wolfe proposes, necropolitical discourses surrounding “social others” can be traced back to the “institution of speciesism,” the state-mandated “stamping out” of infected cattle is perhaps the clearest example of this kind of practice, given the practice’s sharp departure from long-codified ways of managing human plagues (or, for that matter, pre-eighteenth-century animal plagues) through quarantines, social distancing, or medical intervention. This cleaving of human public health practices from veterinary health practices during the eighteenth century throws into relief the power of anthropocentric ethical frameworks around the time in which they were established and, at the same time, raises new threats to certain “social others” within human communities based upon how they are characterized by the biopolitical state.

Like Cole, I find that the clearest and most compelling explorations of the ethical consequences of this cleavage can be found in creative literature written during times of widespread epizootic outbreaks. The eclectic set of authors and texts that I have gathered in this book certainly make strange bedfellows – there is little that might otherwise connect the works of eighteenth-century figures such as Thomas Gray, Jonathan Swift, and Tobias Smollett to twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures such as Zadie Smith, Larry McMurtry, and Juan Rulfo. But each of these figures is committed to speculating in their different time periods about the consequences of animal disease management practices and the difficulties of keeping the nonhuman world conceptually and ethically separate from the world of humans. In this respect, they form a genealogy that might help scholars invested in human–animal studies to integrate a “medical posthumanities” perspective into discussions of the present as well as the past.

As the last few years of world history have shown, such discussions are needed now more than ever. It is more than a little surreal to complete a literary history of animal disease in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. At the time I began this introductory chapter (April 3, 2020), roughly four billion people – half of the planet’s population of human beings – were being instructed to shelter at home; over one million people had contracted the disease; and around 60,000 people had died of the illness. As the US economy continued to shut down, over ten million people within my country had already filed for unemployment, and that staggering number would be dwarfed during the next year, with pain and death falling disproportionately upon marginalized communities. In ways too numerous to track, my little world and the larger world around me were rapidly remaking themselves in response to an event the scale of which I could not at the time fully imagine, an event that has infected over 700 million people and killed over seven million human beings. And it was (and is) continuing to do so in all likelihood because of a chance interaction between a person and nonhuman creature carrying a novel coronavirus that took place sometime in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.

When I first began this project, I was interested in a different outbreak in China – one that did not directly impact human health. Sometime in the summer of 2018, the African swine fever virus (ASFV) moved out of its customary environment in sub-Saharan Africa and into Chinese pig populations. Like SARS-CoV-2 in bat populations, ASFV presents little to no risk to the disease’s typical hosts: warthogs and ticks. However, when the virus moves beyond these reservoirs and into domesticated pig populations, it produces a dangerous hemorrhagic fever that can kill affected animals within a week. To contain the virus, the Chinese government was at the time in the process of managing the extermination of 300 million pigs – roughly a third of the total swine population in the world – by reimbursing farmers 1,200 yuan (about US$170) for infected animals, calling upon its strategic pork reserve to offset shortages throughout the country, and instituting surveillance systems to eliminate a black market for unlicensed swine. This incredible slaughter recalled a similar culling beginning in 1997, when millions of birds across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa were euthanized to forestall a highly pathogenic avian bird flu – a pathogen that, like SARS-CoV-2 – was capable of crossing over between animal and human populations.

The immense scale of Chinese efforts to contain ASFV testify to the power of animal disease and its accompanying animal biopolitics during the contemporary period, raising profound questions regarding human–animal relationships in our era of industrialized agriculture, hypermobile human and animal populations, and changing climate. The even more immense scale of SARS-CoV-2 mitigation (and a subsequent outbreak of yet another highly pathogenic avian flu in January 2022 that has killed millions of wild aquatic birds and commercial poultry) has sharpened the significance of these questions: How and how often do diseases endemic to certain species in certain regions of the globe spread out into other areas and other species? How should we monitor and contain such diseases? What are our responsibilities to animals sickened by these diseases, given the fact that human activity creates the conditions for certain animal diseases to become hypermobile? And should these responsibilities change when human populations are threatened?

While these concerns are new to many of us in literary fields, for several decades medical professionals, veterinarians, and public health officials have been grappling with the problems of interspecies epidemiology. On June 24, 2007, members of the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates gathered in Chicago to propose dramatic changes to ways that medical doctors and researchers interacted with their counterparts in the fields of veterinary science and public health. Spearheaded by the AMA’s newly elected president, Ronald Davis, the “One Health” resolution acknowledged that relationships between AMA members and members of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) had been “limited in recent decades” (“American Medical Association House of Delegates Resolution”) and called for a new interspecies vision for managing medical education, clinical care, disease surveillance, and public health decisions.

The (then) recent history of human diseases and disease management played a large part in justifying these proposed changes. As AMA board member Duane M. Cady presciently noted at the time of the resolution’s passage, “New infections continue to emerge and with threats of cross-species disease transmission and pandemics in our global health environment, the time has come for the human and veterinary medical professions to work closer together for the greater protection of the public health in the 21st century” (qtd. in Nolen). These sentiments were amplified by countless veterinary organizations, including the AVMA, whose president at the time, Roger Mahr, had established a close friendship with Ronald Davis. In its 2008 report “One Health: A New Professional Imperative,” the AVMA reminded its audience of the epidemiological threats to both communities’ patients:

The previous three decades had indeed seen their share of frightening new diseases affecting human as well as animal populations. In 1976, a dangerous new hemorrhagic fever emerged near the Ebola River in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), killing 280 people. As virologists quickly determined, the “Ebola” virus responsible for this fever likely originated in primate populations before spilling over into human communities, where it would resurface many times over the next three decades. Likewise, in the late winter of 1994, a decade-long outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in British cattle spread to UK citizens, killing over a hundred people and leading to the slaughter of 4.4 million animals. A third zoonotic crossover event took place in Hong Kong in May 1997, when a three-year-old boy died of pneumonia after being exposed to an H5N1 avian influenza virus in circulation at local poultry farms. After seventeen more confirmed human cases (six fatal) were detected over the last few months of the year, 1.5 million chickens were killed in the region to stave off further spread of the infection. Anticipating the more recent and far more devastating SARS-CoV-2 crossover, in late 2002, a novel coronavirus spilled over from horseshoe bat populations in the Yunnan Province in China to humans, infecting thousands and killing hundreds as it spread quickly beyond the province through the summer of the following year. Because the virus was thought to have been spread to humans by civet cats, the Chinese government managed the culling of 10,000 such animals and called for the complete extermination of other species, including rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes.

In spite of these zoonotic dangers and draconian containment measures, the One Health initiatives faced profound challenges at the time of their institutionalization. In keeping with cultural critics’ observations on contemporary “speciesism,” human and veterinary medical systems were long accustomed to working in isolation from one another and were therefore freighted with the kinds of tribalist prejudices that characterize so many closed professional networks. Physicians and researchers in human medicine often displayed what Robert Cardiff, Jerrold Ward, and Stephen Barthold call a “proprietary attitude” in medical investigations that relegated veterinarians to the status of ersatz doctors (20).Footnote ¹¹ To make matters worse, medical researchers often viewed veterinarians as impediments to biomedical research and would cast a jaundiced eye at any project supported, in part, by the animal welfare groups such as the Wildlife Conservation Society.Footnote ¹²

To overcome these divisions and to legitimize the partnership, One Health advocates began to assemble older narratives of medical history that cast trans-species research in a positive light. These narratives typically began with discussions of a foundational figure, Charles Schwabe, who popularized the term “One Medicine” that would eventually evolve into “One Health” and who helped to revitalize the field of comparative medicine. A professor of epidemiology in the medical and veterinary schools of the University of California at Davis, Schwabe brought together these two fields in his highly influential 1964 textbook Veterinary Medicine and Human Health, which argued that the principles underlying the decision to bring animal medicine into dialogue with human medicine had their origins in the very foundation of modern medicine. As Schwabe insisted,Footnote ¹³ the birth of modern pathology depended upon the joint work of veterinary and human medical practitioners. Over a hundred years earlier, he noted, the esteemed German physician and scientist Rudolf Virchow had suggested that his fellow scientists should not see the human body through the anthropocentric lens of human exceptionalism. “Between animal and human medicine,” Virchow argued, “there are no dividing lines – nor should there be. The object is different but the experience obtained constitutes the basis of all medicine” (qtd. in Reference KlauderKlauder 170). These sentiments were echoed by the father of veterinary pathology, William Osler, who trained with Virchow before serving as chief physician for the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

As Angela Cassidy argues in her exhaustive study of the origins of One Health, the initiative’s repeated references to Schwabe and to earlier forebears such as Virchow and Osler (often based upon Schwabe’s own genealogy) demonstrate “processes of retroactive citation and celebration of historical individuals and publications” that are “an important aspect of discipline-building” (203). This progressivist (what historians might called “whiggish”)Footnote ¹⁴ genealogy has the advantage in justifying the movement of the present but obscures, for Cassidy, the much messier and more fragile reality of One Health. Indeed, as she notes, the AMA dropped the resolution only one year after advancing it, and it is by no means certain that the movement has inspired lasting change for the field of human medicine.

In spite of these uncertainties, the capaciousness of the One Health concept has begun to attract figures outside of the medical fields. Because its narrative (if not, as Cassidy shows, the actual practice of One Health itself) situates humans within a larger network of biological and ecological actors, some scholars have suggested that One Health thinking aligns with Indigenous communities’ attitudes toward human and nonhuman health.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, One Health practitioners actively encourage this association, inviting members of the Wurundjeri people of Australia to the First International One Health Conference in Melbourne in 2011, to share “dances, stories and song … [that] told of the need of harmony between the earth, animals and man for physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing” (“1st International One Health Congress Summary”).

Other cultural critics have begun to use One Health policies to help to justify the aforementioned posthumanist and human–animal approaches to humanities research. The important continental philosopher Rosi Braidotti, for example, sees One Health as “the perfect post-anthropocentric concept” that illuminates “the advantages of a posthuman scientific position” (14, 13). Within the field of literary studies, Cole echoes this sentiment in her article “Aliens, Plagues, One Health, and the Medical Posthumanities,” written for the 2021 “Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics” special issue of the journal Configurations. Lamenting the absence of engagement with “the nonhuman animal world” in other COVID-inspired essays within the issue, she suggests that recent discussions of posthumanism “shar[e] with One Health a non-anthropocentric focus, a desire to develop models and methods more appropriate to the global histories and problems that overwhelm traditional disciplinary paradigms” (455). Working, as she writes, “in the spirit of One Health,” she goes on to deliver a reading of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938) that shows how the story’s representation of a trans-species alien plague operates as “an important prequel to our contemporary epidemiological, environmental, and ultimately posthumanist pandemic concerns” (457).

Cassidy might take issue with Cole’s characterization of Campbell’s work as a “prequel” in the same way that she takes issue with the grand historical narratives of One Health. After all, she argues,

But like Cole and Braidotti, Cassidy is committed to projects that clarify how paying attention to animal diseases – zoonotic or otherwise – can enable us to tell new stories about the modern relationships between our species and the many other species around us.

This book contributes to this particular contemporary discussion as well. I do so in part to compensate for what Cole, following One Health historians, finds as a depressing tendency in our literary as well as medical histories: “when most people think of medicine and disease, they think of human medicine and disease” (454).Footnote ¹⁶ This anthropocentric bias even affects One Health research; as Abigail Woods observes, the movement is still “struggling to achieve its interdisciplinary aspirations … [I]n spite of its intention to advance health across all species, it is primarily humans that are benefiting” (28). For this reason, until the final chapter, I do not focus on zoonotic pathogens, which, because of their immediate dangers to public health, are charismatic microorganisms, forcing their way into public consciousness in ways that, like the alien virus in Cole’s example or the SARS-CoV-2 virus of the present, compel our attention.Footnote ¹⁷

Instead, for the first three chapters, I dwell upon a set of viruses that have garnered far less attention from modern scholars outside the fields of agriculture and veterinary history, including rinderpest, equine flus, and foot-and-mouth disease. At various moments over the last four centuries, these pathogens became epizootic, infecting animals across wide geographical areas in a manner similar to the way that human pathogens become epidemic. Because the animals affected by these epizootic diseases played important roles in human health, transportation, agriculture, and commerce, their illnesses encouraged literary figures far removed from the immediate vicinity of sickened animals to think and write about animal disease and new forms of animal disease management.

Most prominently, these literary figures can change of our sense of how animal disease became a political problem for Western governments to manage. As I argue in Chapter 1, the stirrings of what might be called an animal biopolitics date from the start of the eighteenth century, when two men – the Italian doctor Giovanni Maria Lancisi and the British surgeon Thomas Bates – instituted a new method for controlling rinderpest outbreaks in Europe: the state-sponsored killing of infected animals. This stamping out method transferred powers traditionally invested in farmers and cattle traders to government officials, forcing those same officials to justify their actions in ways that redefined the relationships between citizen and state. This redefinition troubled literary figures from a variety of political orientations, raising fears that this new power over animal populations might be brought to bear upon the growing human populations in Europe. Such fears are vividly expressed in major and minor works of eighteenth-century literature, from the Houyhnhnms’ proposal to exterminate the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the exasperations of the disease-ridden eponymous narrator of Tobias Smollett’s “The Beef of Old England” to the curious manner by which the anxieties of agricultural laborers are juxtaposed with images of human slaughter in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Until the start of the twentieth century, North America was largely spared these troubles, and its literature and culture therefore developed a different set of stories about the relationship between animals and humans based upon a different kind of epizootic. In Chapter 2, I investigate the American “Great Epizootic”: a now largely forgotten horse influenza that spread quickly across the United States in 1872. Unlike rinderpest, this equine flu was not highly pathogenic, and most horses that were allowed to rest recovered after a period of convalescence. As such, Lancisi’s and Bates’ stamping out method was not employed, and the fraught biopolitics of animal disease was left for a later time period. But the flu did shut down urban infrastructure and commerce throughout the continent for a period of weeks, as omnibuses, carriages, and drays were unable to transport people and freight from place to place without horses to propel them. Americans responded to suspension of everyday activities by recasting it in humorous ways, writing poems about horses behaving like sickened people and writing marvelous accounts of teams of humans taking the place of these animals in front of carts and wagons. The strangeness of the event and the largely benign nature of efforts to control it encouraged that same public to use the word “epizootic” (and its many variants) in songs and stories to describe moments of inexplicable breakdowns – either within humans themselves or within the automobiles that they created to replace horsepower at the start of the twentieth century. Through figures as varied as Zora Neale Hurston, Kurt Vonnegut, and Flannery O’Connor; in media forms ranging from musicals like Whoopee! (1930) to more recent rap songs like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “My Hooptie” (1989); and even, perhaps, in the origin of the word “oops,” these direct and indirect literary revisionings of the Great Epizootic left a rich but underappreciated legacy within the United States. This legacy, I argue, augments efforts within human–animal studies for renewed interspecies intimacies brought about by a recognition of our shared vulnerability to disease.

Considerations of this shared vulnerability find their clearest expression in twentieth-century responses to a series of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) epizootics affecting North American cattle. Like the equine flu of 1872, FMD was less lethal than the rinderpest outbreaks in Europe during the previous two centuries. However, its debilitating effects upon cattle size and milk production led Mexican and US governments to implement stamping out methods of disease containment similar to those imposed in the earlier rinderpest epizootics. As in that earlier epizootic, federal and state governments met fierce resistance to the displacement of the pastoral power of farmers and cattle drovers. To complicate matters further, FMD was known to be spread by fomites – objects that carried infection including the boots and clothing of humans – as well as direct contact between sickened animals. This new vector of transmission meant that controlling the FMD epizootic meant controlling the movement of human beings within and between state and national borders, leading to a series of lockdowns in California in the 1920s and at the US–Mexico border during the mid-century. These restrictions on human travel, in turn, were taken up by Mexican and US authors such as Juan Rulfo, Rafael Bernal, Ramón Rubín, William Burroughs, and Larry McMurtry, whose references to the epizootic were often juxtaposed with a much darker human biopolitics associated with the Holocaust, the US war on drugs, and the Mexican government’s fraught relationship with its rural and Indigenous communities. By exploring how the image of sickened cattle came to be associated with human victims of state-sponsored violence, the chapter provides new insight into how literary narratives played a prominent role in structuring North American conceptions of biopolitics in general and public health mandates in particular.

The final and by necessity most inconclusive chapter returns us to the question posed by Cole concerning the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Given the fact that this contemporary pandemic likely originated in horseshoe bat populations before ripping across global human populations, the epidemiological history of this world-changing virus offers many opportunities to rethink our relationships with the nonhuman world around us. This history might remind us that, because of our shared genetic heritage, humans and other animals are equally subject to microbial infection, and the diseases that affect nonhuman communities have clear analogs in and often cross over into human communities. But as I argue, in a sharp contrast with the literature of earlier epizootics, the emerging cultural narratives of COVID tend, if anything, to reinforce the differences between the human and the nonhuman and the importance of keeping those two worlds physically and conceptually separate from one another. With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of COVID-inspired literature to date views the pandemic as an incredible boon to the animal world. Setting these narratives of ecosystem renewal alongside rarer literary works that cast COVID as an opportunity to reengage with the (human–)animal world, I show why literary scholars invested in human–animal entanglements and Cole’s “medical posthumanities” speculations should consider COVID as an interspecies event and what difficulties we must overcome to tell ourselves that story.