As Napoleon extended his control across Italy at the start of the 19th century he faced two unexpected foes, the locust and the mosquito.  Although both insects created challenges for Napoleon’s administration, French awareness of these threats differed markedly.  While locust infestations posed an evident danger to grain harvests, scientists had not yet identified the role of the mosquito as a vector for malaria.  These cases thus present an opportunity to examine the ways in which the presence or absence of scientific knowledge can shape human relationships with other species.  In the case of the mosquito, ignorance of the connection between insects and disease caused French officials to vacillate between proposed solutions.  By contrast, French officials engaged in a deliberate campaign to eradicate locust populations.  Yet ironically, while the direct effort against locusts achieved only partial success, French experts examining the problem of malaria advanced strategies of environmental transformation that would prove increasingly successful in eradicating the disease in the years to come.  These contrasting outcomes illuminate the complex ways in which animal agency interacts with science and state power to shape historical events.  Although it is important to recognize the power of insects to “speak” through their influence in human history, it is equally necessary to understand the impact of animal “silence” as constituted through human ignorance.  Likewise, while modern government has often sought to make the environment more “legible,” state projects are often profoundly influenced by a complex array

At the turn of the twentieth-century, South African fauna was under significant threat. Devastating zoonotic diseases, plagues of birds, locusts, and carnivora had convinced veterinarians and farmers that wildlife and ‘civilisation’ could not coexist. Corn, citrus, and cattle had evicted bushveld, buchu, and big game. Wild animals were being shot, gassed, and incinerated in the thousands. In the 1920s, economic ornithology, a US-born discipline which quantified the value of birds to agriculture, posed a powerful counter-argument, and found strong-footing in South Africa. Numerous publications argued the utility of wild animals in consuming anthrax-infested carcasses, plague-bearing rats, trypanosomiasis-spreading tsetse-flies, and crop-devouring locusts. In an intellectual environment of holism, naturalists Frederick FitzSimons and Alwin Haagner argued that nature, contra-veterinary opinion, was hospitable, and humans were responsible for epidemics and crop-failure by upsetting its balance. The diminutive Western historiography of economic ornithology has depicted it as a short-lived science, supplanted by pesticides. In South Africa, on the contrary, it was controversial, but influential in epidemiological, agricultural, and conservationist thought. Farmers began capitalising upon the agency of insectivorous birds by planting trees, building dams, and constructing nesting boxes. The Department of Public Health incorporated the ‘natural enemies’ of rodents, insects, and molluscs into disease-control strategies. The destruction of numerous animals was criminalised. Imbued with economic and medical utility, living fauna could no longer be regarded as ‘reservoirs of disease’ and commercial nuisances. Instead, maintaining the population health of animals once considered ‘vermin’ became critical to maintaining human population health, and economic prosperity.

An outbreak of encephalitis in 1938 Massachusetts sent health officials scrambling to find a way to explain the epidemic. Upon the deaths of eight children, brain matter from an infected child was used to inoculate horses, resulting in the confirmation of a distinct disease that could infect both humans and horses; researchers called it “eastern equine encephalomyelitis,” or EEE. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, veterinarians, biologists, and other experimental scientists worked to uncover the disease’s transmission network, which directly related to the victims’ environment. Pastured animals and humans living close to or visiting wild areas seemed to be at the greatest risk for infection. With the creation of an effective vaccine that could prevent the disease in horses and an emergent understanding of how to prevent human exposure, EEE increasingly became associated with wildlife, only dangerous if it escaped its natural habitat to invade human society.
Using veterinary textbooks, agricultural manuals, and other scholarly publications, this paper investigates how animal vaccines were used in mid-20th century America to form a protective barrier between humans and wildlife diseases. This immunological barrier, I argue, served as a cultural boundary between wild and domestic spaces. In a period of increasing environmental awareness and concentrated efforts to seek interaction with natural spaces, the “wild” was both a place worthy of protection and a lingering threat to human health. Vaccines enabled people to come into more frequent contact with these spaces, manipulating certain animal bodies while drawing margins around human spaces and “wild” ones.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or feedlots, are sites in which animal bodies are produced through the systematic application of scientific knowledge, state regulations, and the logic of capitalism. It is where cattle are “finished” on genetically-modified grains laced with hormones and antibiotics, for a four-to-six month period, before being sent to slaughter. By concentrating and systematizing the large-scale feeding of grains to livestock, feedlots have allowed the cattle population to escape the ecological limitations of a grass-based diet and hence allowed their impact on global warming, as well as ground water pollution and exhaustion, to go unchecked. While shortening the average lifespan of the American cow, feedlots have led to greater efficiencies and concentration in beef production. This is not a by-product of the unfettered free market, but instead results from federal price-supports for corn, extensive water rights, and state-funded research at land-grant colleges. It was in the state universities of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, and their ag-stations that antibiotics and synthetic hormones were first tested and developed for application in feedlots. Land-grant colleges were thus central to mid-twentieth century developments in animal agriculture and their research paved the way for present-day factory farming. By studying the ways in which agricultural experiment stations at land-grant colleges shaped the relationship between creatures, capitalists, and the state, this paper will illustrate the public-private nature of American capitalism and American agriculture.