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

Cassidy, Angela

Eight photographs in the sample show animals as patients, with human clinicians working directly with them in one way or another. They are split evenly between images of dogs being cared for in clinical settings (by implication in the global North), and wild or agricultural species being cared for in the field (by implication in the global South). Finally, 18 images of humans without animals feature. About half of these are pictures taken at conferences and other scientific or policy meetings, while most of the rest depict people working in laboratories. With the exception of a still from the 2011 film Contagion, no images of human patients were found. Indeed, the plot of Contagion, which plays out the imagined scenario of an emerging infectious disease pandemic, can be seen as part of a broader cultural case for OH. The film 96 For a fuller analysis of this kind of human-paw imagery, see Haraway (1999) pp. 134-9. 97 Examples include the first edition cover of David Quammen's popular science book Spillover (2013), depicting a baboon baring its fangs; and the process of creation of a 'scarier looking' computer-generated imagery (CGI) bat for the 2011 film Contagion (Failes 2011). starts with an American businesswoman who becomes sick after a trip to Hong Kong, passing on the disease to several others before dying and setting off a civilization-threatening pandemic. While much of the film focuses on victims, survivors and scientists' efforts to understand, trace the source of and treat the outbreak, the end of the film provides a critical 'reveal'. A series of brief shots shows the destruction of rainforest, disrupted bats taking refuge in a pig house, a pig sold at a wet market being prepared in a restaurant, an Asian chef with unwashed hands, and an American businesswoman, who then becomes ill, taking the viewer back to the start of the story. This narrative brings together many of the themes found across OH advocacy images. Indeed, Professor Ian Lipkin of Columbia University (an expert in emerging infectious diseases and OH ally) was a key scientific adviser for the film. 98 Taken together, what can these images tell us about the sorts of animal bodies and disease that have shaped OH, and which are, in turn, shaped by it? Generic animals, humans and plants play a central role-with outlined images of human figures, common animals such as cows, hand-foot-paw prints, and leaves often appearing in OH logos. Reinforcing the verbal messages of OH advocates, they convey an idea of OH as a generic, universal approach that addresses all types of health problem arising at the intersections of humans, animals and environment-even though, as shown above, the work performed by researchers adopts a more selective approach to those problems. Once we move beyond the generic animal, more differences begin to open up between their portrayal in OH images, advocacy arguments and OH research. For example, while cows feature in a small number of OH research papers which are largely devoted to bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis, they are extremely common in the visual sample. While dogs appear in both, in visual images they feature as family members and veterinary patients, not-as in scientific articles-as carriers of rabies. Images of charismatic wildlife such as great apes and giraffes are prominent in OH advocacy but extremely rare in OH research. By contrast, animals as experimental models are rarely depicted despite their presence in the research liter