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Short abstract:

In post-socialist Serbia, the outbreak of African Swine Fever in 2021 could not be contained, largely owing to clashing perspectives over the appropriate modality of veterinarization and the allocation of responsibility between game managers, veterinarians and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Long abstract:

Since 2007, African Swine Fever (ASF), an economically disastrous epidemic affecting domestic and wild pigs, has spread across Eurasia. By 2017 it reached the Czech Republic, where concerted veterinary-state efforts (temporarily) eradicated it. Here double-fenced zoning, with boar shot outside the core zone, led to a “veterinarization of multispecies coexistence” (Broz et al. 2021). Other modalities of veterinarization ranged from merciless and chaotic culling, as in Poland, to patrolling the boundaries of forests where sick animals retreated, as in Lithuania or Hungary. Serbian veterinarians attended EU-financed ASF workshops since 2019. But when an outbreak finally occurred in the National Park Đerdap (NP) in Eastern Serbia in 2021, the professionals were disunited. The experienced NP’s game manager, a veterinary by training who leaned towards Czech or Polish modalities and advocated consulting a respected Serbian wildlife epidemiologist (but not member of the governing parties), was overruled. Fencing the area seemed too expensive to the Ministry; and enrolling private veterinary practitioners in intensive monitoring schemes seemed inopportune to the veterinary inspectors. Instead, the incident was downplayed, and the Lithuanian-Hungarian approach inauspiciously adapted to the much denser forests of the NP. Despite otherwise favorable environmental conditions – given the natural barriers of the Danube to the North and steep mountains to the West – the virus could not be contained. The case study exemplarily shows how veterinary worlds depend on situated epistemological negotiations over which knowledge practices to adopt and how to translate them in multispecies relations and in fields of power across scales.