Introduction to the Theme Section: Rural Sociology and Animal Disease

“We didn't actually do much before BSE came along – it was very quiet. Now its just non-stop” (UK Government Vet, 2009 ) Animal health has been something of a silent player in the development of rural sociology. Although much Post-War European rural sociology was concerned with innovation within agriculture, the adoption of new technologies and the role of extension services for agriculture (Hofstee 1960), there has been surprisingly little attention paid either to innovation and technological advances in the treatment of animal disease and animal health or to the place of veterinary science and the veterinary profession within rural expertise and rural society. This lacuna can hardly be explained by the absence of any significant agricultural animal health problems. At the same time as the discipline of rural sociology was emerging, so was the United Kingdom nearing completion of an (apparently) successful eradication of bovine tuberculosis from cattle. Whilst the 2001 outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in the United Kingdom provoked a flurry of academic papers in Sociologia Ruralis (for example see Donaldson et al. 2002; Bennett and Phillipson 2004), a similar response following the 1967 outbreak was never evident. For the most part, animal health has been seen principally as an adjunct to the competitiveness of modern agriculture, whilst contemporary rural sociology has been shaped more by aspects of agricultural sustainability. As a result, other disciplines may have been seen as the traditional home of studies of the socio-economic consequences of animal disease outbreaks. This disciplinary categorisation of animal health may also explain why few studies within veterinary journals have engaged with aspects of rural sociology. Beaudeau et al's (1996) study the influence of styles of farming upon herd management being one notable exception. However, just as the quote at the beginning of this introduction indicates how the veterinary profession has changed to meet the problems of animal disease, so too has rural sociology recently begun to address these issues. Shifts towards interdisciplinarity, and the recognition that farmers' perceptions of agricultural risks are culturally shaped, have encouraged a growing number of rural sociologists to take animal disease more seriously, prompted also by a combination of theoretical developments and recent events that have seen the emergence of a new relationship between rural sociology (and the wider social sciences) and animal disease. The turn to post-structuralism and in particular Actor-Network Theory has been a significant factor. Another, is that outbreaks of animal disease have become dramatic events in themselves. As the quote above suggests, BSE represents the turning point here, but outbreaks of foot and mouth and H5N1 avian influenza have demonstrated not only the impact that animal disease has on rural societies, but also how their representation feeds public concerns over nature, risk and the limits to modernity. At the same time, focussing on resolving disease outbreaks has become a key concern for government. Rural sociology has the potential to make a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the impact of animal disease upon rural societies, advise policy makers how they might prevent future outbreaks, and how the consequences of outbreaks may be alleviated (see Enticott 2008). The purpose of this short collection of four papers is to facilitate this process: recognising the links between animal disease and rural sociology, demonstrating rural sociology's importance for understanding animal disease, and hopefully encouraging further engagement between rural sociology and animal disease. This comes at an appropriate time when new emerging disease threats and their policy responses may have serious consequences. This may include those headline diseases like avian flu, but also those which have become endemic to agricultural regions, such as the bluetongue virus and bovine viral diarrhoea. The following collection of papers were first presented at the European Congress for Rural Sociology at Wageningen in 2007. The first of the papers addresses the relationship between farmers and vets in Western Australia. Surveillance of the incidence of animal disease is important for the management of disease outbreaks but government vets are largely reliant on farmers disclosing when sudden and suspicious livestock illnesses and deaths occur. Palmer et al. show how the development of trusting relationships between farmers and vets assists the reporting of suspicious deaths. However, trust with other government actors is not well developed and farmers are themselves dismissive of information from government sources. Palmer et al. therefore conclude that the development of personal relationships between vets and farmers is crucial to the management of disease outbreaks. Papers by Larsen and by Enticott and Franklin explore the effects of new biosecurity policies upon the countryside. Larsen's story of the imposition of biosecurity standards in Slovenia as part its entry into the European Union shows how an homogeneous view of animal health affects local farming cultures. Larsen argues that the requirement for a range of new biosecurity standards greatly affected semi-subsistence farmers. In order to monitor diseases such as BSE and bovine tuberculosis, on-farm slaughter of cattle was prohibited, despite an absence of the diseases these mechanisms sought to control. Larsen argues that the result was a situation in which farmers became distanced from their role in agricultural production which affected their willingness to participate in other agri-environment schemes. Enticott and Franklin meanwhile show how biosecurity policies contribute to the differentiation of the countryside in the UK. Drawing on the case of bovine tuberculosis, they show how devolution of animal health policy caused confusion to the over-riding spatial logics of animal health policy. This confusion created an opportunity for animal health policy to be reshaped according to local socio-cultural conditions. In particular, their paper shows how forms of veterinary expertise were used to identify the problem of bovine tuberculosis within particular areas and different policy responses to a problem that vets had previously only seen as a resolvable through a unified policy response. Finally, Nerlich et al analyse how the management of an outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza in an industrial poultry farm was linguistically framed in local newspaper reports. They show how discourses of biosecurity revolved around a language of fear and mistrust. In particular, Nerlich et al show how the risks of H5N1 were positioned in dichotomous terms. For example, production birds inside were said to be safe, whilst those outside were described as wild and hazardous. However, as the true nature of the outbreak unfolded, so were the binary linguistic narratives of biosecurity threatened, with the reality appearing much more blurred. The intention of this collection of papers is to stimulate interest amongst rural sociologists to further examine issues around animal disease. More broadly, the papers raise questions about how rural sociology can affect and be affected by animal disease. Indeed, in relation to the problems of animal disease, rural sociology has potential to demonstrate its relevance for policy makers. If the subject of animal disease has been relatively absent from rural sociology, it is also true that animal health and veterinary journals have similarly ignored the value of rural sociology. As governments seek to influence the behaviour of farmers and demand to see the impact from social science research, so do rural sociologists have a chance to demonstrate their worth. The agenda of understanding, resolving and preventing animal disease is therefore one to which rural sociology should increasingly address in future.