Even for animal that will become food, I would think that kindness should be applied. If it is sick/infected, but still useful for meat, cure it and eat it. If not, just kill it. Don't let it suffer.
Edit: here's a reference link http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-...
You can't leave a loophole, or else companies will simply take advantage of it, even if it's to the detriment of society as a whole.
Is it worth an extra animal's worth of meat for an extra animal's worth of anti-bacterial resistance, that's the core question here. If we're not using these antibiotics so widely to prevent the infection in the first place how does that scale?
It may be better, in the long run, just to say 'no antibiotics in animals' and kill those that become ill out of hand. Otherwise I can see this becoming an easy out for farmers - they could still keep the animals in atrocious conditions, knowing that they can use AB to cure them after they become ill - and if a large number of them become ill then we'll be in exactly the same pickle we are now.
Expect massive push back from the various farming industries affected by this. Money uber alles.
The sad thing is that we're not starting from a first principle that animal welfare is even something to care about. Ignoring the fact that they're all slaughtered, these animals live a really bleak existence.
You make a good point, but despite all the farming subsidies, the economics of raising animals to eat them are still pretty bad. Fecal management, spacing herds, different feed...none of those things are viable at any scale approaching what is expected to meet the demand. Small farmers aren't paid enough and the larger places are just factories.
Yes, veterinarians may need to treat animal diseases with antibiotics. Antibiotics are in several cases "natural" substances that evolved through natural selection, mycotoxins emitted by fungi, or bacterial toxins emitted by one clade of bacteria, with the effect of killing bacteria in a world full of bacteria. The bacteria susceptible to antibiotics, in turn, have long been under selection pressure to evolve resistance to antiobiotics, as some strains of bacteria did long ago in the wild. The use of antibiotics in human medicine has revolutionized several forms of medical treatment and added millions of years of healthy life to humankind's prospects, but use of antibiotics must go hand-in-hand with other forms of infection control to minimize selective sweeps of antibiotic resistance as a trait among most harmful strains of bacteria. It's a bad trade-off to use antibiotics without veterinary indications in general animal husbandry, so this regulatory step is a step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, the already established multiple-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis are very worrisome,[2] and will have to be a focus of much research and urgent public-health campaigns.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599040
[2] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420...
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...
http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...
"'Our fear ... is that there will be no reduction in antibiotic use as companies will either ignore the plan altogether or simply switch from using antibiotics for routine growth promotion to using the same antibiotics for routine disease prevention,' said Steven Roach, senior analyst with advocacy group Keep Antibiotics Working."
This is why it's a voluntary guideline.
You just can't be too careful, you know.
(Edit: This is not to say that there shouldn't also be strict government regulations as well.)
Not farming, rearing, husbandry, but straight to the point factory industrial production.
Because learning about that has freaked me out for weeks now.
