How Veterinary Worlds Meet Politics: The Case of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Serbia

We are happy to announce that on 17 July 2024, our postdoctoral researcher André Thiemann will give a presentation on “How Veterinary Worlds Meet Politics: The Case of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Serbia” at the panel “Veterinary Worlds & the challenge of Multispecies coexistence”, organised by Amy Clare & Else Vogel at the 4S–Society of the Social Study of Science Conference “Making and Doing Transformations” at Vrije University Amsterdam. Based on his multi-sited research in Serbia, André’s talk describes how in post-socialist Serbia the containment of the outbreak of African Swine Fever in 2021 was complicated by clashing perspectives over the appropriate modality of veterinarization and the allocation of responsibility between game managers, veterinarians and the Ministry of Agriculture.

When one of the first outbreaks of ASF in Serbia occurred in the National Park Đerdap (NP) in 2021, the professionals were disunited. The experienced NP’s game manager, a veterinary by training who leaned towards a Czech modality of veterinarization 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 even enrolling private veterinary practitioners in intensive monitoring schemes seemed inopportune to the veterinary inspectors (as the veterinarians had been relatively recently privatized) and it was unclear how to effectively enroll them in state activities afterwards. Instead, the incident was downplayed, and it was decided to task local hunting associations (of mainly leisure hunters) to shoot wild boar and thereby slow down the spread of the virus was. However, 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 that way. On the contrary, panicked by the hunt, the wild boar fled and those who escaped the bullets in the dense forests and steep mountains of the NP ran much further than they would have roamed if undisturbed, spreading the virus much faster as a result. 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.