Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century

Cassidy, Angela

The first half identifies Schwabe as a key source of ideas and inspiration, as well as the latest in a series of historical progenitors for OH today. It documents how the idea of OH was developed by different academics, clinicians and policy-makers working in specific institutional contexts to produce not one but many OHs, which awarded different roles to animals, offered different portrayals of their health relationships with humans, presented multiple interpretations of the term 'zoonosis' and held different visions of how disciplinary relationships needed to change in order to achieve the desired integration of human and animal health. 14 It argues that, like the earlier intersections of human and animal health and medicine explored in the other chapters, OH is a response mounted by specific researchers (and policymakers) to problems manifesting at particular times and in particular places. In contrast to advocates' claims, it is not a self-evidently beneficial phenomenon, nor the result of inevitable progress, but a contingent and context-bound activity that is actively and continually created through persuasive rhetoric and alliance-building. 15 The second half of the chapter focuses on the animal subjects of OH. It asks what sorts of animal feature in the images and scientific literatures associated with OH, and in what types of roles and relationships with humans. Where in the world do they come from? How are they perceived in relation to each other and to humans, and what can this tell us about the relative prioritization of human and animal health within the OH agenda? 16 As in earlier chapters, this analysis involves the scrutiny of traces left by animals on the medical historical record. 17 The photographs, infographics and logos used by advocates as they make their case for OH offer a particularly distinctive type of animal trace thatlike other cultural material, such as films, photographs, artistic portrayals, fictions, illustrations, advertising and even clipart-provide a rich source of information about the roles that animals play in medicine and society. 18 Such sources have been used previously to investigate human-animal relationships, and to illuminate how human recipients of care are represented and understood, particularly in health and international development contexts. 19 While the symbolic representations of animals that they contain constitute less direct animal traces than those in the scientific and other sources analysed elsewhere in this volume, they are traces nonetheless that are left on and remade by the human imagination. They might differ wildly from animals themselves, up to and including completely imaginary animals, but it is unlikely that humans could create these images without encountering animals in the first place. Therefore their analysis can offer meaningful insights into human-animal relationships. In the case of OH, they are all the more important because they are created and used with the intention of shaping how humans interact with animals in the future.