Suspicious bats, culled mink, valuable monkeys, vaccinated tigers

Suspicious bats, culled mink, valuable monkeys, and vaccinated tigers: the recent global pandemic has demonstrated the close interconnectedness of animal and human lives in the modern world. The human attribution of epidemic agency to animals has a long historical tradition, as narratives about animal diseases in antiquity already attest. The contributions to this volume focus on animals as victims, hosts, or vectors of dangerous diseases – or, since the late eighteenth century, also as producers of vaccines and test bodies for new medicines. They also show how epistemic breaks such as the bacteriological turn around 1900 led to large-scale extermination campaigns against rats and other “pests”. The changing role of non-human beings in epidemics thus reflects both long continuities and fundamental shifts in relations between humans and other animals.

This interdisciplinary book brings together zoologists, historians of science and medicine, ethnographers and human-animal scholars to explore the potentials of a multispecies approach to assessing cultural, societal, epistemological and bodily vulnerabilities of societies in the past caused by epidemics.

Suspicious bats, culled mink, valuable monkeys, and vaccinated tigers: the recent global pandemic has demonstrated the close interconnectedness of animal and human lives in the modern world. The human attribution of epidemic agency to animals has a long historical tradition, as narratives about animal diseases in antiquity already attest. The contributions to this volume focus on animals as victims, hosts, or vectors of dangerous diseases - or, since the late eighteenth century, also as producers of vaccines and test bodies for new medicines. They also show how epistemic breaks such as the bacteriological turn around 1900 led to large-scale extermination campaigns against rats and other pests. The changing role of non-human beings in epidemics thus reflects both long continuities and fundamental shifts in relations between humans and other animals.