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Comment by waffle_ss | Hacker News Reader

Antibiotics are used to make animals grow faster and bigger not to make them well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16142667/

The antibiotics are needed because they're so poorly treated. The chickens wouldn't get sick if they weren't packed into battery farms. The antibiotics aren't always necessary either, it's just more profitable to have the animal spend less energy fighting illness that it would otherwise have survived.

Aside from the growth hormones which can be avoided, chickens suffer ftom contagious transmissible diseases even in exurban settings (few chickens, lots of space), so they must ne administered antibiotics to fend of diseases and collapse of the brood.

In the dairy industry, for example, organic milk would mean you have to either let the cow die if they get sick, or give it antibiotics, cure it, and then send it to the slaughterhouse as you can't milk that cow anymore, worse still you give the cow antibiotics and continue to milk it thereby making the milk worse than "normal milk", because you don't want to lose money.

That's why organic isn't always the most ideal.

Where did you get the idea that the regulation of "organic" labeling prevents treating sick animals? To my knowledge it is not true.

It does not prevent treatment, but if treated with antibiotics, that animals milk will never there after be organic. Thems the rules.

That is insane that that is the case here in the US. ( and I just checked as I could not believe it).

In Europe it’s different - https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-...

“When the animals are ill, chemically synthesised allopathic veterinary medicinal products including antibiotics may be used where necessary and under strict conditions. This is only allowed when the use of phytotherapeutic, homeopathic and other products is inappropriate.”

The slaughterhouse is hardly the only option.

https://www.fooddialogues.com/happens-farm-animals-raised-no...

> On an organic farm, once that animal receives antibiotics, she is no longer considered an organic animal. Rather than rejoining her organic herd, she will join a traditional herd of cows that may have received antibiotics during their lives.

Traditional herds exist because there remains a large non-organic market.

The more popular the organic religious dietary code becomes, the least viable traditional herds are.

The issue with antibiotics in farming is that they may be used to contrast unhealthy conditions.

If your chicken don't get sick because they have free roaming space and don't peck each other and so on you don't need antibiotics.

> they have free roaming space and don't peck each other and so on

Chickens are assholes no matter the square footage.

I think that's a bit unfair, just because we haven't bred all of their instinctual behaviour out of them.

chicken contact lenses (to reduce aggression) was one of my favorite business case studies: https://gohighbrow.com/optical-distortion-aka-the-chicken-co...

i won't spoil the punchline (it's not obvious from first blush).

Someone made a website for it too: https://www.opticaldistortion.com/

awesome but how do I learn more about this? Both links from that page are dead -_-

if you want the punchline, this quora answer has it (SPOILER ALERT): https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-useful-Harvard-Busine...

otherwise you can search for “ODI optical distortion business case” to find sites that have the setup and various attempts at analyzing/answering the case.

Tyson doesn’t use any antibiotics, Purdue says they used less than 5%, and most of the rest don’t use them.

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