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This chapter discusses diseases affecting livestock and their consequences. Topics covered include rinderpest, a deadly form of plague that can occur among domesticated cows, sheep, and goats; measles virus, and “mad cow disease” (bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE)).

This chapter outlines the historical events that have shaped the nature of the Serengeti ecosystem and the surrounding human populations. Currently, the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is an area of some 25,000 km² on the border of Tanzania and Kenya, East Africa, and it is defined by the movements of the migratory wildebeest. Outside it boundaries are agricultural and pastoralist tribes. Historically, the Serengeti ecosystem was affected by the ivory trade and rinderpest (a viral disease of cattle) in the 19^th century. After the 1920s era of uncontrolled hunting, the area started to be protected, gradually, leading to the formation of the modern Serengeti National Park boundaries. These events all had repercussions on the human and natural ecosystems of today.

This chapter describes research on specific pathogens that illustrates the multiple roles of infectious diseases in the Serengeti, including (a) impacts on individual hosts (canine distemper virus); (b) threats to endangered populations (rabies) and to the ecosystem (rinderpest); (c) impacts of disease on community structure and vegetation dynamics (rinderpest and anthrax); (d) wildlife as reservoirs of diseases that threaten livestock economies (malignant catarrhal fever) and human health (trypanosomiasis); (e) the consequences of animal diseases on rural poverty and land use decisions around the Serengeti; (f) the dynamics of multiple-host pathogens; and (g) the impact of major human diseases (Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).

This chapter explores the emergence of several unpredictable food crises which appeared after 1800. These particular crises centred on adulteration (particularly of milk), imported epizootics (particularly rinderpest), milkborne epidemics (particularly tuberculosis), diseased meat and emergent foodborne pathogens. Each of these risks posed problems for a model of minimal regulation of economic systems, and catalyzed a complex mixture of strategies designed to alleviate or minimize them without fundamentally damaging freedom of trade. These responses included food analysis, mass slaughter, inspection, notification, bacteriological expertise, pasteurization, port regulation, and food hygiene.

This chapter argues that the colonial state largely adopted a hands-off or non-interventionist policy when it came to the question of health of ‘public cattle’ in India. This was largely because the colonial state was completely preoccupied with areas of military interest such as horse breeding. While studying these themes, the chapter will attempt to partially answer the rhetorical question ‘what is colonial about colonial medicine’, which has been often posed in recent times. The chapter will look at various aspects of veterinary medicine, including areas such as bacteriology, veterinary training, horse breeding, and the work of the Civil Veterinary Department. The overall aim will be to study colonial veterinary policies in detail, and to point out the various ways in which these policies differed from those implemented in case of human health.

This chapter will look at bacteriological developments that took place in India in the context of animal diseases such as rinderpest, surra, and glanders. It is a striking fact that the bacteriological research in India in its early decades (from the 1890s onwards) was focused mostly on animal diseases, and little attention was paid at institutes such as the Imperial Bacteriological Institute (Muktesar) to human diseases such as cholera or plague. This chapter will examine the reasons behind this, but more importantly it will examine the larger issue of colonial science and its relationship with metropolitan scientific trends. In other words, we will address the question of whether bacteriological research in India was independent/autonomous, or if it slavishly followed metropolitan trends. This chapter will also allow us to further clarify the colonial position on the subject of veterinary health and cattle diseases, which had been highlighted in chapter II.

This chapter builds up the first case study of the book by examining the trajectory of diseased animals. It investigates how rinderpest or the Calcutta Epizootic of 1864 came to be constructed as a visible threat to the empire. Additionally, by focusing on major crosscurrents concerning cattle health, it demonstrates how a renewed protectionist stance manifested itself in the form of colonial legislations along with a surge of anti-animal cruelty literature among Bengalis. What sets this chapter apart from other works on animal disease in colonial India is that it demonstrates how attempts to control animal disease eventually merged with humanitarian initiatives. While the sentiment of compassion towards nonhuman animals was not a novelty in India, its contact with the Raj lent a different hue to it. Compassion was no longer a commitment to the virtue of “ahimsa” (non-injury to a living being)- but implied a loyalty to bigyan or “science.” The best example of the mingling of ahimsa and bigyan is the foundation of the Belgachia Veterinary infirmary in 1901.

While there had always remained a close relationship between animals and human disease, until the mid-20th century however, medical knowledge on the boundary between animal and human health remained blurred. Against this backdrop, this chapter investigates the relationship between cattle plague and slaughterhouse inspection. Diseased animals increasingly flooded markets because Bengali farmers often rejected the “English method” of slaughter and culling as it was economically damaging. It was often cheaper for farmers to sell diseased animals than seek veterinary attention. This chapter thus focuses on how rinderpest subsequently revived the interest in Bengali diet – the debate over safety of meat from diseased animals became fiercer over time and quickly kindled bhadralok paranoia on animal disease, public health, and sanitation, as they now abruptly turned to vegetarianism. Additionally, it examines the interplay between veterinarians and the Calcutta Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA) to study the impact it had on the spatial reconfiguration of Calcutta with slaughterhouses being increasingly ousted from the heart of the “sanitary city.”

This chapter explores the politics of scientific knowledge and visual representation of savanna environments in Bernhard and Michael Grzimek’s bestselling book and Academy Award–winning documentary film, Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959). It shows how the Grzimeks used their iconic airplane, nicknamed the “Flying Zebra,” to conduct ecological reconnaissance and employ aerial filmography. They depicted the Serengeti as an untouched ecosystem and a global heritage of mankind, despite its history of pastoralist land use and as a battleground between contending German and British imperial forces. Following international conventions established in London in 1933, the Grzimeks insisted that the Serengeti should encompass the entire habitat of migrating wildebeest—and not, as some officials in the Tanganyika Territory insisted, be divided to accommodate the local Maasai people’s customary cattle grazing. The Grzimeks failed to stop the redrawing of the park’s boundaries, partly because the airborne camera never expunged the Serengeti’s “ghosts of land use past.”

This chapter examines the ground-level debates over pastoral land rights that lay outside the aerial camera’s frame in Serengeti Shall Not Die. When the British gazetted Serengeti National Park in 1951, Tanganyika’s colonial government had guaranteed the Maasai rights of occupancy because they did not traditionally hunt and were deemed part of the natural landscape. Yet a prolonged drought brought increasing numbers of Maasai into the parklands in search of better-watered highland grazing, causing conflict with park officials. Such movements, coupled with scientific and administrative misunderstanding of transhumance and savanna resilience, led the British to propose excising the Ngorongoro region from the park to accommodate local land use. The Grzimeks and a “green network” of international allies asserted that cattle herding and wildlife conservation were incompatible due to livestock’s overgrazing. They buttressed this ecological claim with fears of racial degeneration, claiming that there were no more “true-blooded” Maasai left in the Serengeti. The Grzimeks’ advocacy helped to transform a colonial debate about “native” rights into an international scandal. The green network had discredited British imperialism yet inherited many of its paternalist assumptions about traditional African land use and modernist development.