The use of antibiotics in food stock should be banned completely. Saving a few cents per pound on meat isn't worth the damage to our antibiotic stock. Wanna give antibiotics to an animal, fine, but now it can't be used for food.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm not a farmer, but I do manage the IT/automation of my/a family farm.
But below a certain concentration some antibiotics won't have an effect hence, no evolutionary pressure
If at the concentration presented it kills/affects some bacteria, yes, what you mention happens, otherwise it doesn't.
Of course, I may be wrong
They loved the whole situation.
In regards to the announcement, without teeth, this won't cause any changes. External enforcement is absolutely necessary to make this stick.
We had regular cattle too, those amounted to looking at the pasture they're in and moving them around. Way less upkeep.
Edit: here's a reference link http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-...
"Organic certification requires that milk be discarded for 12 months after antibiotic use. This has the unfortunate side effect of making a sick cow such a financial burden to a farm that it must frequently be killed. When this happens, organic farmers generally milk the sick cow (and sell her milk to be bottled as organic) as she gets sicker and sicker and as the quality of her milk deteriorates. She is slaughtered once her milk approaches legal limits."
So that sucks.
I suspect we are looking at a lesser-of-two-evils scenario: would you rather have a small number of cows culled each year because of sickness, or a large number of cows living in feedlots and pre-emptively given antibiotics because of squalid living conditions?
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.