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Surveying domestic animal populations has always encompassed more than the simple fact of controlling the way they perform. Indeed, multiple aspects are at stake, evolving in relation to the social, political and economic context. In the case of South Rhodesia (to become Zimbabwe), complex animal surveillance and monitoring systems contributed to the structuring and territorial security of the colonial state as well as its economic development. With the independence of the country, these systems provided the basis for the control of foot and mouth disease according to international regulation, and provided an opportunity to develop a production system dedicated to exportation. These systems relied mainly on a partitioning and a “geographic sequestration” of the living (colonialists/indigenous people ; human/animal ; domestic/wild ; healthy/unhealthy). The organization of these surveillance systems has been deeply shaken by the land reform of the 2000s’ and its recovery called into question by the rise of powerful concepts such as biodiversity and “One Health” associated to the will to associate poor human populations to economic development. New monitoring systems emerge (in the form of Transfrontier Conservation Areas and sanitary guidelines such as commodity-based trade) aiming at better associating the control of flux with the control of boundaries, and testify of continuities and discontinuities with categories inherited from the colonial era.