From Animal To Meat

Eating antibiotics April 30, 2012

With all the hullabaloo recently over the FDA’s attempts to regulate the administration of antibiotics to livestock (which resulted in the agency encouraging producers to voluntarily reduce their antibiotic use) I thought I’d give my take on it.

First, an all-or-nothing approach to antibiotic use isn’t good for animals, so I don’t support it. One of the problems with organic regulations is that they ban antibiotic use entirely, which means that if a farmer wants to sell an animal’s meat as organic, he can’t give that animal antibiotics even if the animal is sick and needs them. That creates a perverse incentive for organic farmers to let their animals suffer.

But in general, yes, antibiotics are used when they’re not needed – specifically, to speed up growth so that animals reach market weight faster. (Scientists are still researching why this works, but it does.) And they’re used to ward off diseases that wouldn’t pose such a risk to animals if they weren’t crowded into the CAFOs that characterize modern conventional agriculture. For example, antibiotics are prescribed for pigs to prevent Swine Respiratory Disease (SRD). But pigs wouldn’t be so susceptible to SRD, various forms of which make them literally cough until they die (SRD is the leading cause of pig mortality in the US), if they weren’t packed like sardines into barns reeking of ammonia.

So I’m most emphatically for limiting the administration of antibiotics to livestock, if it would compel farmers to improve their living conditions. However, removing the crutch of antibiotics without changing the rest of the system would be a disaster – for farmers and animals alike.