Farmers massively administer antibiotics so they can keep animals in crowded/unsanitary conditions. If antibiotics were administered properly that would severely affect their revenue.
- Constantly feeding livestock antibiotics makes them grow bigger. The mechanism for why this happens is not understood (but who cares because bigger livestock means more money).
- It is costly to deal with an animal after it gets an infection rather than just being preventative.
- Farmers are scared about diseases sweeping through their herds and causing issues where they are forced to kill the whole herd (e.g. mad cow disease -- though antibiotics don't prevent prion diseases).
It's a harmful practice and should be outlawed. Even if it means paying more for your food.
I am sure that farmer's would rather risk their livestock than risk their children or grandchildren.
I think the only way this practice can exist is when people do not understand or are coerced into doing it. Many of the largest farms just have people following rote instructions and not actually understanding what is happening.
Let's compare to an easier to understand industry, think about fast food. The people in the kitchen at a McDonald's don't need to know how to cook, they follow the instructions and put uncooked meat in a machine and food comes out of the machine. If that process killed kittens somehow the McDonalds worker would never know.
I suspect the near minimum wage workers manning livestock farms and farmers that might not have the benefit of a full education, simply don't or don't accept that antibiotic abuse creates a breeding ground for something will kill some of their children.
you're kidding right? sure economical impact today vs. theoretical risk to grand/children tomorrow - Nov 8 will show how many people and of what demographics what choice would make, and I'm somehow sure what choice the farmers would make :)
When the discussion is calm enough, they do largely agree that they wouldn't do anything harmful to their children or their farm's legacy. The just don't think global warming is real so their low mpg cars don't contribute to harming their farm.
Combine this with the fact that people defending a stance often become emotionally entrenched and likely they will continue to believe global warming is not real until they can no longer plant corn. Then once that emotionally devastates them, or some similarly life shattering cognitive dissonance destroying event occurs, they can take a look with fresh eyes.
EDIT - I know this is mostly about glbobal warming and the original discussion related to antibiotic resistance, but largely the resistance is from uneducated super-conservative people with a fundamental religion and a fundamental distrust of science. I really see these two problems as two sides of the same coin.
Farmers are few, people who get diseases are many. Shouldn't be too hard.
- Sir Alexander Fleming
The nightmare scenario is medical science gets rolled back by a century as non-trivial infections return to being a death sentence.
I know it's not, we reap the benefits in lower food prices, but does beef really need to be cheap enough we can eat it 7 days a week?
No it is. The total cost to society has to include healthcare costs as well. Saying, 'This lowers our cost at the dinner table' is only looking at part of the equation.
Never mind that people don't eat dinner together which is a by product of having super cheap convenient packaged calories available. Eating as a family increases child development significantly, it's like the cheapest thing you can do to give kids a good start.
Never mind that we don't really need nearly as much corn as we produce. When the farm bill came out and started picking agricultural winners, we turned garbage farm land into prime producers of a crop that we don't need. Then we added tariffs to sugar imports, then we put corn into everything, providing a cheap source of calories and diabetes, heart disease, perhaps cancer (most of the links here are still from correlation and haven't been proven as causation). Corn moved from a side dish to being in everything you eat unless you are cooking all (most) of your own food.
We have the (possible) super bug issue from our meat sources.
It takes like 50 gallons of water to grow an avocado but we do that anyways because irrigation water is subsidized in many states even as we start to drain our reservoirs.
It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of food. We do this because it's still cost effective because of subsidies.
The whole picture makes it look not quite as cheap, we've just pushed the cost into other categories to hide it.
I think "we do this because we can't eat fossil fuels no matter how many calories they provide, so trading total energy content for ability to serve as food is valuable, independent of subsidy" would be more accurate.
"Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs." Farmers are highly organized and vigilant in defense of their subsidies and regulations, whereas sick people are not similarly organized and the policy connection to their condition isn't obvious. Concentrated benefits are what create special interests, which by their nature put their own interest ahead of the national interest.