Abstract

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, millions of quail chicks crossed the US-Mexico border inside vegetable boxes. Trapped on private estates across Northern Mexico, the chicks were imported as part of a broader practice of “game farming,” in which private landowners and game commissioners from Midwestern states sought to “plant” birds to restock depleted native populations. In 1915, however, an outbreak of quail disease disrupted the cross-border trade, prompting the Bureau of Animal Industry to introduce sanitary crates and inspection regimes—some of the first such federal regulations to govern the movement of non-human animals in the US. This paper explores how the quail trade materialized the US-Mexico border—for both humans and birds—at a moment of intensifying surveillance and governance in the borderlands, while also demonstrating the limits of attempts to manage wildlife through agricultural means. Drawing on US Fish and Wildlife Service import permits, and correspondence between game commissioners, animal brokers, and Biological Survey personnel, the paper locates the history of quail importation within a longer history of animal confinement and bio-management.