The world is in the midst of big changes with respect to global animal diseases. We are heading for more diseases, more deadly types of disease, and more capacity for these diseases to spread. There is also a greater probability of the emergence of zoonotic diseases and global pandemics.Yet the international response to this situation has so far failed by a large measure to reflect the seriousness of the crisis. The fault lies in governments’ unwillingness to confront the dominant powers of industrial livestock farming – whether it be the pharmaceutical corporations and their patents or the industrial meat corporations and their factory farms.