By the mid-eighteenth century, cattle plague had become endemic in the Netherlands, and threatened to again infect herds in England. Robert Dossie’s influential Memoirs of Agriculture, and Other Oeconomical Arts published in 1768 treats cattle plague as a “very momentous national evil” against which the government must provide “a means of security”. This chapter returns to the issue of ecological vulnerability raised by De Mortibus Boum; it analyzes hymns, sermons, topical poetry, newspapers, natural histories, and eighteenth-century versions of the “bovine elegy,” all of which reveal confusion, distress, and what we might now call bioinsecurity for the government and rural economies. Dossie was one of many agricultural writers who, partly out of desperation, partly driven by a desire to cut economic losses, began to question the efficacy of cull and bury policies, a long-standing tool of government plague containment and control. He argues that cattle plague is seasonal and therefore partly subject to the ministrations of good husbandry. While his turn away from cull to cure might be perceived as a sign of increased concern about animal welfare, I treat it as the paradoxical capture of cattle within an instrumental medico-economic regime. Separated from “Nature” in the public imagination, while still serving as disease vectors and victims, dying cattle provoked complex responses, from satire to affective, elegiac compassion. The chapter ends by considering the possibility that eighteenth-century eco-anxiety includes not only climate-related disaster but the trauma of mass animal die-offs.