Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (review)

This book, based on a 2005 Oxford conference, is a groundbreaking set of essays about the history of veterinary medicine in the context of colonial pastoralism, ca. 1700–2000. Major themes include the following: the ways that animal health has been addressed by European and Asian colonizers (but not so much the colonized); the development of healthcare institutions for animals; veterinary professionalization; the contributions of animal health care to the colonizing project; what happened when Western-origin domesticated animals arrived in new places; and environment and disease as determinants of agricultural production and practices.

Many of the essays describe the professionalization of veterinary medical institutions. The volume begins with the essays of historians who lay a substantial foundation of case studies from the West (The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and the United States)—thus examining the colonizers’ context. Peter Koolmees argues that state control and international trade interests dominated domestic Dutch veterinary health policies; Ann N. Greene places the development of an American veterinary institution within horse culture while Abigail Woods argues for a shift to cattle culture and technological expertise in British veterinary medicine by the mid-twentieth century. Dominick Hünniger’s analysis of German rinderpest control (the emblematic nineteenth-century cattle disease) bridges the gap between veterinary professionalization and the theme of state control of animal health and disease (and also provides a welcome focus on the earlier period covered here, the eighteenth century).

The volume then moves into colonial territory, with historian Martine Barwegen’s analysis of how the Dutch veterinary services tried to control rinderpest in nineteenth-century Indonesia (heavily dependent on “ammunition and carbolic acid” [98] as well as veterinary personnel) Historian Robert John Perrins’ important essay on Manchuria forcefully highlights the role of animal importation, breeding, and production in supporting shifting Japanese colonial goals. Keeping sugar-planter elites in power as well as in good health was the goal of cattle production in Trinidad and Tobago, historian Rita Pemberton argues. Peopled by Trinidadian as well as British state officials, the veterinary services described in her essay make clear the postcolonial implications of colonial structures and practices. This cultural emphasis on settlers’ private property rights, as an important structuring force in British-administered colonies, also anchors John Fisher’s analysis of state veterinary services in nineteenth-century Australia. As essays by Africanists Lotte Hughes, David Anderson, and Saverio Krätli demonstrate, veterinarians educated in the Western context functioned as instruments of colonial state control on the African continent. Additionally, Hughes draws on her ethnographic studies of Maasai people dislocated from traditional lands in Kenya. Her informants pointed to outbreaks of East Coast fever in cattle (which British veterinarians attempted to manage) as contributing to a wave of forced animal and human relocations in 1911–13.

Problematizing state control, several essays also demonstrate that local peoples and environments circumscribed veterinary control, especially in cases of livestock diseases (often imported, and almost always exacerbated, by the colonists). Anderson argues that European settlers in Kenya failed to establish a livestock export market in part due to the stubborn persistence of “scrub” native cattle (in the care of equally determined small-scale African producers who advantageously manipulated market opportunities). In Krätli’s study of cattle-breed selection in Niger, French veterinarians’ small numbers and the vast and rugged territory they were supposed to administer limited their power to control animal breeding. They could not even examine Bororo cattle without “the active cooperation of the herder” (240). The colonists’ imported animals faced new environments, and colonized places faced the consequences of a globalizing trade in invasive species. In historian Robert Peden’s essay on New Zealand sheep production, the disease footrot seemed to become much more virulent in the colonial context; it “assumed a character of its own” once transplanted with Merino sheep to the British colony (217). Geographer Daniel F. Doeppers’ essay discusses the...