Chapter 1 surveys relations between domestic animals and state formation in Mexico from the colonial to the postrevolutionary era, and discusses how the aftosa disease arrived in Mexico. While the aftosa campaign represented an unprecedented effort by the state to intervene in the lives of livestock animals and their owners, it emerged from a longer history. Conquest, war, commodity booms, depressions, and revolution remade people's relations with domestic animals. Through these shifts, Mexico’s government had never been indifferent to animals, whether as sources of food, energy, disease, or symbolic power.