Wildlife management

One entry here will be misread by an English speaker with complete confidence: die Afrikanische Schweinepest. The Pest in it is not a pest. In German that word is der Schädling, the aphid or the rat. Die Pest is the plague, and in the names of animal diseases it stands for a severe epidemic of whatever cause: die Geflügelpest is the dangerous form of avian influenza, die Rinderpest is rinderpest, and the disease found in wild boar in parts of Germany is caused by a virus, not by the plague bacterium. The English name, African swine fever, says nothing about plague at all. The two words do share a source, the Latin pestis, and « pest » once meant plague in English too; English narrowed it to a nuisance, German kept the disease. So in a report on wild boar, Pest names an outbreak, and the pest control an English reader expects is die Schädlingsbekämpfung.