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If you're curious why antibiotics are seen as necessary by farmers - I found an insightful Quora answer about US practices: "The antibiotic, not antibiotics, i
by drak0n1c 7y ago
If you're curious why antibiotics are seen as necessary by farmers - I found an insightful Quora answer about US practices:
"The antibiotic, not antibiotics, in question is monesin sodium, also known originally by the trade-name Rumensin. It is an anti-biotic in the truest sense- it changes the living conditions for gut flora of a ruminant animal in such a way as to promote the growth of bacteria that produce proprionic acid, and making it less favorable for other microorganisms such as those that cause coccidiosis or inefficient digestion that results in methane gas.
So yes, it's an ionophoric activity. It kills off some stomach bugs by changing the environment inside the cow, promotes others, and makes the animal healthier and more efficient as a result.
Yes, there are other antibiotics fed at times, as prophylactics against respiratory disease disease during severe weather or shipment, but it is illegal to sell animals containing residues, and those additives are expensive.
It's not a surreal concentration-camp factory-farm shoving pills into cows so they roid-rage and turn into bloated meat-sacks, it's a finely tuned process of optimizing cow health and efficiency to get the most out of inputs and the best results. Which in turn means more profit for the farmer. Strange as it may seem, when your livelihood comes from livestock, you put a lot of attention, science, and technology into making sure they are as healthy and happy as possible, so they make you the most money when sale time comes."
https://www.quora.com/How-do-antibiotics-cause-farm-animals-to-gain-weight https://www.quora.com/How-do-antibiotics-cause-farm-animals-...
- hnarn 7y ago>Strange as it may seem, when your livelihood comes from livestock, you put a lot of attention, science, and technology into making sure they are as healthy and happy as possible, so they make you the most money when sale time comes. This seems like such a huge conflation of terms -- of course there's a lot of attention, science and technology put into animal farming, because it's a huge industry. Making sure animals are healthy makes sense, because you can't sell animals that die before slaughter: but happy? Where did that come from? Since when does the happiness of animals factor in anywhere in the equation of industrial slaughter for meat? I'm by no means a vegan, and neither am I overly skeptical of markets and their value, but please let's not fall for the siren song of pretending that the market has already made animals as happy as they can be, because "of course they are, because nothing else would make economical sense". Abhorrent conditions for animals make economic sense: that's why they exist. And this doesn't even address the glaring point of the "game theory" aspect of antibiotics in animal farming.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoHow happy are these animals in the documentary, Dominion? https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=984 https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=984 Your post presents a nice rainbows and sunshine guess at how the animal ag industry works, and I really wish it worked like that, too.
- drak0n1c 7y agoDominion... of Australia? I quoted Harman Meyerhoff, an independent American dairy farmer. If the goal is to solve a problem, when hearing different opinions and life experiences a better instinct to have is empathy -- calling people shills won't get you anywhere.