Paper short abstract:

Building on current multi-species ethnographic work with zoo keepers and rangers, this paper explores how panzootic threats are reshaping conservation care and multi-species relationships in a zoo in the northern UK; and their implications and challenges for a public Planetary Health.

Paper long abstract:

The panzootics of SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1 simultaneously reinforce and trouble both the biosecurity logics underlying care in conservation, and the human-animal care relationships that sit at the heart of zoo keepers' conservation practice. Drawing from recent multi-species ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a British zoo between 2021-2023, this paper seeks to bring into focus what it means to physically care for animals in a panzootic world, and how this kind of care challenges the projects of OneHealth and Planetary Health. The urgency of panzootic infection management and biosecurity presents site managers and staff with a fundamentally different timescale than the multi-generational visions conservation care is most comfortable with; and the potential ubiquitousness of infectious risk within and across species intensifies the spatial and material demands of care in the zoo's ex-situ conservation. Through both space and time, SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1 have changed, and are continuing to change, the daily rhythms of multi-species care and multi-species relationships within ex-situ conservation. Panzootic outbreaks highlight how animal care professionals become health care professionals trained to encounter chronic and acute disease across a variety of plant and animal species within the contagious worlds of the Anthropocene. The phenomenon of the panzootic is reshaping modes of care in zoo conservation through its intensity; and its combination of animal husbandry and interest in the conservation of and care for the non-human offers a different perspective into the balance of medical and veterinary focal points within OneHealth and Planetary Health.