Introduction: Veterinization: Extending Care and Control in More-Than-Human Health

This introduction develops veterinization as a framework for analyzing how veterinary knowledges extend across social and political life. Situating the concept in relation to medicalization and tracing the entangled histories of human and animal health sciences, it examines how veterinary authority and governance, data and standards, infrastructures, actors, and animal ontologies are reconfigured across diverse contexts. Veterinization unfolds as a relational and contingent process spanning domains including infectious disease management, animal welfare and care, and food safety. Veterinary expertise, while oriented to nonhuman life, are inherently biosocial, enacting forms of care and control with consequences well beyond animal health.