{
  "id": "hamsters-pet-trade-biosecurity-hong-kong",
  "type": "article-journal",
  "title": "Hamsters, Pet Trade and Biosecurity During the 2022 COVID-19 Outbreaks in Hong Kong",
  "author": [
    {
      "literal": "Rachel Yang"
    }
  ],
  "container-title": "Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science",
  "volume": "13",
  "issue": "1",
  "issued": {
    "date-parts": [
      [
        2026
      ]
    ]
  },
  "URL": "https://spontaneousgenerations.com/articles/hamsters-pet-trade-biosecurity-hong-kong/",
  "page": "31-47",
  "abstract": "This paper uses the 2022 mass culling of pet hamsters in Hong Kong during COVID-19 to explore the biosecurity logics that guide responses to zoonotic outbreaks. Drawing on post-humanist perspectives and infrastructure studies, this paper demonstrates how disease transmission emerges through entanglements of animals, human practices, and global flows. In this case, hamsters acted as active participants in the co-production of medical knowledge, particularly epidemiological knowledge around COVID-19 and functioned as biological vectors, experimental subjects, and triggers for policy. However, they were quickly deemed expendable once cast as threats. The case reveals how crisis-driven infrastructures, such as testing regimes, favour rapid containment and human-centred risk elimination, masking the ecological, political, economic, and infrastructural forces of industrial breeding, global trade networks, and urban design that create vulnerability. It also exposes the shortcomings of health governance frameworks such as One Health, which too often defaults to eradication rather than addressing the uneven distribution of risk and care across species. Arguing for a shift toward a disease ecology paradigm that attends to global flows in shaping multispecies relations, this article calls for biosecurity strategies rooted in relational coexistence, structural change, and long-term ecological resilience rather than eradication and exclusion."
}