Animal disease and narratives of nature: Farmers' reactions to the neoliberal governance of bovine Tuberculosis

This paper examines the relationship between neoliberal styles of animal disease governance and farmers' understandings of disease and nature. In the UK, new styles of animal disease governance has promised to shift the costs and responsibilities of disease management to farmers, creating opportunities for farmers to take responsibility for disease control themselves and opening up new markets for disease control interventions. Focussing on the management of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) and drawing on interviews with 65 cattle farmers, the paper examines how farmer responses to these new styles of animal disease governance are shaped by their own knowledges and understandings of nature and disease. In particular, the paper examines how two key narratives of nature – the idea of ‘natural balance’ and ‘clean and dirty badgers’ – lead farmers to think about the control of bTB in wildlife (such as the choice between badger culling and/or vaccination) in very specific ways. However, whilst discourses of cost and responsibility appear to open up choice opportunities for farmers, that choice is constrained when viewed from the perspective of farmer subjectivities and narratives of nature. Discourses of neoliberalism as control rather than choice are therefore revealed, drawing attention to the complexities and plural strategies of neoliberal governance

The ecological paradox: social and natural consequences of the geographies of animal health promotion

Drawing on the example of bovine tuberculosis (bTb), this paper examines the geographies of animal health promotion. Using theories from the sociology of health, the paper outlines how the spatial practices of animal health promotion have had adverse policy consequences – what the paper refers to as an ‘ecological paradox’. Analysis of ethnographic interviews with 61 farmers in England and Wales provides a range of reasons why farmers do and do not implement biosecurity. Drawing on the concept of lay epidemiology and ideas of ‘the candidate’– that is, the terms by which someone/thing is most likely to suffer from a particular illness – the paper shows how farmers construct farmers, cattle and badgers as likely to be a candidate for bTb; and how aspects of luck and fatalism are significant elements of candidature. These effects are traced to a clash of spatial practice within the different knowledge articulated by official attempts to promote animal health and farmers’ understandings. In failing to consider these cultural understandings of disease, the paper argues that the state's attempts to promote animal health have served to reinforce the explanatory power of candidacy and traditional understandings of bTb, thereby overriding attempts to promote biosecurity. The resulting negative consequences for badgers, cattle and farmers are defined as the ecological paradox

The Spaces of Biosecurity: Prescribing and Negotiating Solutions to Bovine Tuberculosis

Using the example of bovine tuberculosis, this paper explores the emergence, understanding, and rejection of new forms of biosecurity. The paper argues that debates over biosecurity can be conceptualised as arguments over the ability to regulate flows of disease and the constructions of space they adopt. Data from parliamentary inquiries and interviews are used to show how attempts to institutionalise forms of biosecurity emerge from a delicate balance of prescribed and negotiated spaces configured by a host of social, natural, and material agents. The interaction between these spaces provides a way of regulating the flows of disease and purifying agricultural space. This balance is resisted by farmers, whose practical knowledges of the constant struggle of managing the contingencies of agriculture lead them to suggest that only uniform versions of space can effectively regulate flows of disease. The author concludes by discussing the importance of recognising these differences for future biosecurity and animal health polic