Epidemic Illness, Animal Agriculture, and the History of Quarantines in the United States: A Thread

One frustrating bit in GOP opposition to increasing unemployment insurance was the idea that if workers earned more on UI than working, they wouldn't go to work. But that’s the point! Public policy should incentive voluntary cooperation with quarantines.

Indeed, although most quarantines have various punitive components, public health authorities recognize--and have for a long time--that they also need to structure them to encourage cooperation. Oddly, this is a lesson learned drawn from history of animal agriculture in the US.

The earliest effective institutional responses to epidemic illnesses in the United States were not about humans but about livestock. What can we learn from the USDA's responses to veterinary illness through the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in the late 19th century? A lot!

The BAI created a robust and extremely effective set of responses to epidemic infectious disease, so much so that early twentieth century public health officials studied their approach and based human smallpox eradication campaigns on it.

First, some scene setting: The integration of Western US lands into Atlantic commodity circuits proceeded primarily through agricultural expansion. The rapid expansion of settler colonial ecologies could easily be told as the story of livestock.

Converting biomass into animal flesh--through grazing and grain feeding --was the most efficient way to extract value from Western prairie and grasslands. Animals could be fattened on vegetation, transported to Chicago by rail, slaughtered, and then sold to the nation and world.

By 1900, animal agriculture was a huge portion of the American economy. Livestock were the second largest asset class in the nation after land and about 4% of the nation’s wealth was held directly in livestock, more than the value of the nation’s railroads, for example.

Animal products were also a major export in the late 19th century, with cheap barreled (pickled) American pork a ubiquitous product in Atlantic world markets. By 1870, animal products composed about 20% of the total value of US exports.

Epidemic veterinary illness could devastate the economy. It could kill livestock worth millions, and it could close markets to US products. From 1879-1881, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary all imposed bans on U.S. pork products due to endemic trichinosis.

Epidemics of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia and Texas fever among U.S. cattle spurred Congress to create a federal agency to supervise livestock and meat production in 1884, the BAI housed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

President Chester A. Arthur appointed veterinary scientist Daniel Salomon to head the new agency, a fact that reflected the BAI's primary responsibility for addressing diseases endemic to livestock production.

As Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode argue in *Arresting Contagion,* the BAI was among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, federal agencies prior to WWI. The BAI used its unparalleled power to pioneer an approach to veterinary illness called “Area Eradication.”

(By the way, Olmstead and Rhode, economists both, are extremely controversial for their sparring with historians of capitalism about the brutality of slavery in cotton production. Nevertheless, *Arresting Contagion* is an empirically very sound work.)

BAI powers were expansive but related to establishing conventional quarantines: BAI agents had the power to declare quarantines, enter private property, seize and kill infected and exposed animals, and even destroy buildings and equipment, all without warrants.

The BAI maintained these powers through federal-state agreements. Essentially, state governments agreed to automatically deputize federal BAI agents and empowered them to take a variety of actions usually reserved for state and municipal law enforcement.

BAI protocol called for agents to establish a quarantine zone (or area) where a disease was endemic and then, within that area, they would systematically kill all infected and exposed livestock and destroy any facilities that could facilitate exposure.

But these expansive powers alone were not sufficient. Salomon and other BAI administrators quickly recognized that the robust and punitive enforcement of quarantine protocols created obvious problems.

Namely, if farmers knew that infected and exposed livestock would be seized and killed, they would do everything in their power to conceal evidence of disease and avoiding contact with precisely the public health officials who needed to know about its presence.

In particular, BAI experts reasoned that farmers worried about catastrophic loses from seizures would breach the quarantined area and sell livestock in other areas, thus creating a set of incentives that would actually circulate and spread the disease rather than contain it.

Evading a quarantine could, of course, be criminally prosecuted, but it was often difficult to prove in court and, regardless, the total bankruptcy that could come from complete seizure and killing of a herd was hard to counterbalance without draconian punishments.

The BAI came up with a straightforward solution: They offered to pay farmers close to market value for sick and exposed animals. As a result, farmers would have an incentive to voluntarily cooperate with quarantines rather than trying to evade and flee from them.

This approach was enormously successful and the US quickly became a global leader in containing livestock illnesses. In 1892, a BAI campaign successfully eradicated contagious bovine pleuropneumonia in the United States.

Successful campaigns to eradicate Texas fever, hog cholera, and bovine tuberculosis all came in the following decades. It was this public and notable record of success that attracted public health officials and inspired efforts to adopt area eradication to human illnesses.

To zoom back out and conclude: Quarantines are rarely effective if they do not encourage voluntary cooperation from potentially exposed populations. If quarantines establish an oppositional relationship between public health authorities and exposed populations, they often fail.

We need to stop thinking about debates about UI, sick leave, and cash assistance as only questions of economic support or stimulus. We also need to consider what sorts of material incentives they create for people to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

From that perspective, $1200, expanded UI, and full sick leave is just the start and does not go nearly far enough. Do I want the government to pay people well to stay home and quarantined to flatten that curve? Hell yes. And I’d pay them to wear masks too if it would help.

Okay all done. Thanks for reading!