Advocates for animal rights often position the killing of animals for food or clothing alongside discussions of state-sponsored killings of humans. This chapter argues that stories of widespread animal disease outbreaks – what veterinary scientists call “epizootics” – and the policies we adopt to contain them offer fruitful ways to strengthen these ethical and political discussions in human–animal studies. Because animal diseases can threaten economic systems, governments often implement “stamping out” policies to contain them that require the killing of large numbers of sickened animals. Because some diseases can cross over between nonhuman and human populations, epizootic outbreaks have also catalyzed “One Health” initiatives within the medical and veterinary sciences that view human and nonhuman sciences through a shared sense of pathogen vulnerability. By examining literary accounts of these developments, we gain a clearer sense of the limits of ethical, political, and medical models that frame the animal world as fundamentally separate from our human world.