Because the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated in bat populations before crossing over to humans, its epidemiological history offers many opportunities to rethink our relationships with the nonhuman world. This history might remind us that humans and other animals are equally subject to microbial infection, and the diseases that affect nonhuman communities have clear analogs in and often cross over into human communities. But as this chapter argues, in a sharp contrast with the literature of earlier epizootics, the emerging cultural narratives of COVID-19 tend to reinforce the differences between the human and the nonhuman and the importance of keeping those two worlds physically and conceptually separate. With a few notable exceptions, COVID-inspired literature written during the pandemic tends to view the widespread lockdowns as beneficial to the animal world. Setting these narratives of ecosystem renewal alongside rarer literary works that reveal COVID’s devastating effects upon animals, the chapter shows why literary scholars invested in human–animal entanglements should consider COVID as an inter-species event and what difficulties we must overcome in telling that story.