From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries both the Middle East and Europe suffered a number of devastating plagues among sheep and cattle. Worst of all were the great rinderpest epidemics of the late 1500s to early 1700s. Often overlooked by historians, these outbreaks were among the worst natural disasters of the age, creating serious economic dislocation and even famine in these regions still so heavily dependent on livestock for food and labor. This paper first considers the causes and consequences of major epizootics (animal epidemics) on both sides of the Ottoman border. In both cases, population pressures and rising demands for urban and military provisioning relocated the pressure of raising livestock to economic and geographical peripheries. Sheep and cattle were forced to make longer treks to more distant markets, leaving them more exposed to infection. At the same time, the recurrence of severe winters during the so-called “Little Ice Age” of the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries weakened the animals and promoted the spread of illness. Next, the paper examines how responses to the outbreaks began to diverge between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While the uneducated majority of both Muslims and Christians still tended to view animal plagues in terms of divine punishment or humoral corruption, veterinary doctors and public health officials in eighteenth-century Europe developed new theories of contagion and new practices of “stamping out” sick animals to control infection — practices not followed in Ottoman lands until the twentieth century. While usually cast in terms of Western scientific progress, I would argue that this difference also stemmed from diverging attitudes towards animals and welfare. In this way, the story of animal disease control mirrors issues in the comparative history of human disease control and public health discussed elsewhere in the panel.