Paper Short Abstract:

Examining the Third Plague Pandemic as a global panzootic I propose that the “panzootic” is a notion useful for anthropological and historical discussions of the anthropogenic entanglements of the multispecies complexities of animal pandemics and of human responses to these on global scales.

Paper Abstract:

The third plague pandemic (1894-1959) was the first pandemic of Yersinia pestis to be understood through framings of rodents as the principal hosts of the disease, and rats as the global spreaders of the pathogen. This paper urges us see the pandemic as an anthropogenic panzootic: a global outbreak of plague that affected and interlinked different rodent species and populations across the globe. I will argue that this rodent panzootic took two forms: first, it involved the mass death of rodents as a result of plague infection, as fostered by the unprecedented global circulation of the pathogen through maritime trade; second, it involved the mass killing of rodents carried out by humans across the globe in an effort to stem the human pandemic. In this sense, the paper proposes that the “panzootic” is a notion useful for anthropological and historical discussions of the anthropogenic entanglements of the multispecies and global scales of epizootics and human responses to animal diseases on a global scale.