In this article, I explore why a number of smallholder pig farmers in central Uganda decided not to implement the biosecurity measures advocated by veterinarians. I focus on the infectious disease, African swine fever, to illustrate how the biosecurity measures intended to limit the risk of disease, inadvertently constrained the future returns on pigs for farmers and their families. I draw on ethnographic research from Mukono, a district in central Uganda, to show how farmers considered pigs to be “quick money”—a type of household wealth that could be rapidly generated and liquidated with ease. I suggest that farmers’ conceptualization of their pigs as a specific type of wealth influenced the ways in which they integrated pigs into their lives and homes. Based on smallholder farmers’ accounts, I conclude this article by calling for a reconsideration of biosecurity measures as a universal solution for controlling diseases on farms. I argue that instead of designing protocols that separate species, disease prevention strategies need to recognize the ways in which different livestock animals become part of farmers’ lives and acknowledge how this influences farmers’ disease management practices.

In this paper, we show how we developed a visualisation tool to challenge perceived notions about biosecurity on poultry farms. Veterinarians and veterinary public health professionals tend to present biosecurity measures as a universal and cost-effective solution for preventing and controlling diseases on farms. However, we illustrate how biosecurity is an ill-defined term, making it difficult to talk about or apply in practice. As a result, we demonstrate how we moved away from using the term biosecurity in our research by designing a visualisation tool. The tool was to allow us to open up dialogue around disease prevention and control, and make tangible the tacit situated practices of stakeholders working along the poultry supply chain. Our findings show that for those working along the poultry supply chain, the term biosecurity was either consistently open to interpretation, or too rigid to reflect or allow for local variations. We conclude by highlighting how our visualisation tool offers insights into why researchers must move beyond using biosecurity as a term, and instead envisage, design, and develop local solutions to prevent and control diseases on poultry farms.

In this book review, I compare three timely ethnographies that critically explore the topics of human–poultry relationships, avian influenza, and global health. I start the review by considering how the three authors, each located in a different context, approach these topics by drawing upon distinct methodological and theoretical frameworks. I then show how these approaches shape the way in which the authors discuss three separate concepts: preparedness, experiments, and viruses. I conclude that, whether read independently or together, these books illustrate the power of ethnographic research in exposing the distinctive ways that people envisage the relationships between human and non-human lives and the implications of such distinctions for disease control.