in recent history there were disease outbreaks that led to authorities killing off animals in big areas, e.g. the various Mad Cow outbreaks. Now, back in the good old days, did they ever have similar disease outbreaks and how did they deal with it? Were there periodic big outbreaks of human mortality in the West due to eating meat from diseased animals? Are there historical records of big cattle slaughter campaigns similar to what was done in late 20th century?
Or are these epidemics in farm animals really an artefact of the modern farming techniques so that the cattle farms of 19th century and before that would not have been susceptible to them?
One is whether food-based illness epidemics occurred. The answer is certainly. There were several hundred cholera outbreaks from milk alone in the U.S. before widespread pasteurization. Diseased meat also caused numerous deaths and illnesses on an all-too-regular basis.
That’s from bad processing and handling, though, rather than a mad cow style inherent disease.
Anthrax epidemics were commonplace among sheep and cattle herds from antiquity until reliable vaccines were developed. It still shows up from time to time in improperly- (or non-) vaccinated herds.
the tidbit about the horses epidemic is intereting, but I am primarily interested in the implications for the food supply.
So suppose a premodern but sophisticated society (e.g. 19th century Europe or Japan) were to get hit by mad cow disease or one of the other diseases that merits holocaust of the animals today. What would have happened? Would millions of people fall gravely ill and/or die “for reasons unknown to modern medicine”? Or would it look like an uptick of a few thousands of unexplained scattered food poisoning deaths which everybody else would just shrug off?
Another way at looking at this might be, suppose hypothetically our modern authorities would respond to a Mad Cow outbreak in a way reminiscent of how people in the past might have treated it, i.e. kill off the obviously diseased animals and dispose of their meat but otherwise let the farms keep on operating with the other animals. What would then happen? Would resulting human casualties number in the hundreds or in the hundreds of thousands?
Most of the food-borne epidemics from meat require that the meat be shipped. In a premodern society, nearly all the meat would be for the farmer’s consumption; it wasn’t until there were railroads that it could be widespread.
So if a farmer’s food was tainted with mad cow, he and his family would contract the disease, as well as friends who might have eaten it, but it wouldn’t be widespread.
Once there were railroads, diseased meat could spread, and it did.
In addition to anthrax, brucellosis (aka undulant fever) was spread from farm animals to man. In addition, other mammals can also contract brucellosis, and there are still outbreaks from time to time.
So yes, there were epidemics unrelated to modern farming techniques. Howeveer, Reality Chuck is also correct that with mass shipping and meat processing plants, a single infected animal could have a much greater impact than in previous eras.
Scrapie has been observed in sheep since the 18th c. (or maybe earlier but went unnoticed). Nobody was all that worried about it apart from the flock owner.
Brucellosis went by the name of ‘Malta Fever’ as it affected sailors who called at Malta (and drank contaminated milk or milk products, although this was not identified as the carrier until the 20th c.)
so are we dealing with much scarier diseases now? Or are we just less willing to tolerate illnesses and deaths involved and so we have these large scale killings of animals during outbreaks?
What large-scale killings are you referring to? There have been government-ordered herd killings in response to BSE (“Mad Cow”), but I’m not aware of it being a common solution for other problems.
For what it’s worth, Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By mentions a herd of Mexican cattle being slaughtered to stop an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, so the practice goes back at least that far.
ok, the Wikipedia foot-and-mouth disease article talks about large slaughter of animals. E.g. Foot-and-mouth disease - Wikipedia says that in England slaughter ran into millions at some point.
Interestingly this section of that article Foot-and-mouth disease - Wikipedia notes that critics believe that for the case of foot-and-mouth disease slaughter on such scale is inappropriate and wasteful. I guess if they are right, that would to some extent answer my question about implications of such epidemics without the current policies.
Meat would not have been just for the farmer’s consumption: animals would have been taken to the nearest town, and sold there for slaughter and consumption. However, you could only take live animals so far. One thing that did change things was not railways, but refrigeration: with that, you could (for example) slaughter in Chicago, and transport the meat to New York.