How animal diseases become endemic: case studies of avian influenza in France and African swine fever in Italy

This article compares the management of highly pathogenic avian influenza in France and African swine fever in Italy, asking how experts have qualified these epizootics as endemics. While farmers perceive wild animals as threatening their domestic animals, hunters and wildlife managers understand the behaviour of wild animals as a potentiality for regulation. This distinction between wild and domestic is ignored by small-scale farmers who are often hunters, but it is reinforced by trade unions supporting industrial farming and by health authorities at provincial, national and European Union levels. Animal activists, on the other side, trouble this distinction because they take the perspective of animals as sentient beings, endowing them with rights or souls by their feeling of compassion. Epizootics thus produce a wide range of perspectives across and beyond wild/domesticated dichotomies as viruses reveal different aspects of relations between humans and animals.