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Short abstract:

This paper follows the recent negotiation of public health protocols at the Huntsville Prison due to the million bats that live in one of its warehouses. In doing so, it asks how health – of animals, Texans, and the state as a whole – is configured around issues of “exposure.”

Long abstract:

A dilapidated cotton warehouse owned by Huntsville Prison in East Texas became the home to over a million bats in the 1990s. This state-protected urban bat colony, its accumulation of guano, and its reservoir of zoonotic diseases now exposes the town residents and the men imprisoned across the street to a looming public health crisis. Meanwhile, as unlivable heat worsens every summer, the inmates are denied air-conditioning and animal migratory patterns are drastically altered, but only the bats are advocated for by the state of Texas.

This paper follows the recent negotiation of public health protocols at the Huntsville Prison. With the emergence of the “OneHealth” program, a framework for public health proposed by The Lancet, scientists are finding new terms for thinking about health-in-relation between humans-environments-and-animals in Texas. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Huntsville, I explore the way scientists navigate the boundaries of human life and wildlife, species and race, prisoners and pests, and protection and threat, all while rearranging health – of animals, Texans, and the state as a whole –around issues of “exposure.”

OneHealth is a framework for exposure that delineates its relational terms both from the top-down (as a framework advocated for by the international community) and from the bottom-up (as it applies techniques from local public health traditions and counter-traditions). It assumes exposure is a shared—and maybe inevitable— condition. This paper thus uses the prison to reveal the strange, situated logics of exposure and uses the OneHealth framework to consider exposure’s troubling ambivalence.