According to wikipedia there are about 96,669,000 cattle in the US, and 1,970,000,000 chickens. Compared to about 300,000,000 humans.

Food animals aren't kept alive long, but they do live at least around a year, so lets ignore births/deaths within the year.

Lets see, a chicken is about 5lb, cattle about 1600, and humans say 150.

So about 45,000,000,000 lb of humans, and 164,520,400,000 lb of food animals.

Based on that I would expect 27% of antibiotics for humans, and 73% for animals - and that matches pretty well with reality, especially considering the crude estimates I used, and completely ignoring pets.

Upvoted, because from the article you cannot possibly ascertain whether this trivial counterargument would make the article disappear in a puff of smoke.

However, let me assure you that this is absolutely not the case. Food animals have been given large amounts of preventive antibiotics for decades and the resistant results of that have started biting us some time ago.

Why would an animal sacrificed at an extremely young age in a farm need to receive more or less the same amount of antibiotics (normalized to its weight) in its life than a normal human being that lives many decades?