Yes and no. Said antibiotics are given because we know that the diet we're feeding them will cause them to develop infections. Cows aren't naturally healthy eating corn/soy.
For so many reasons, we need to end crop subsidies in this country.
It's been known since the 50's that giving penicillin to livestock increases growth rate. Farmers have understood that and used that.
The antibiotics counters and interacts in all sorts of ways we don't really understand (similar to how we don't really, really understand how the human gut works), but one of the ways it surely works is to counter problems caused by unsuitable living conditions.
Ending crop subsidies is probably a good idea in most of the world, but it certainly won't solve the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture.
In a way this is surprising to me. Shouldn't this destroy the gut flora, making it harder to digest/use the food ? Then again their entire gut flora might be anti-biotic resistant ....
Several of the antibiotics in use as feed additives act selectively, changing the mix of microorganisms rather than destroying them all.
I swear I'm not a shill for big ionophore, but this is something they do in ruminants, they shift the mix away from one that tends to lead to "bloat" when the animals are fed a lot of grain.
There's three reasons for using antibiotics in livestock:
1. Growth promotion
2. Prophylactic treatment (what you're suggesting)
3. The treatment of actual disease
Those go from the most to the least problematic - but I was mostly addressing the idea that a decrease in antibiotics would result in more animal products with bacterial contamination. For #1, that's not true, and for #2 it's not linear (infections in animals don't necessarily mean contaminated food products).
When we talk about reducing antibiotic use in livestock, it's usually focused on #1 and putting #2 in the hands of vets (prophylactic treatments when there's actual risk of disease). Rarely do we actually suggest banning #3.
> For so many reasons, we need to end crop subsidies in this country.
We also need to reduce consumption of meat, and work towards raising it more healthily. It should be common sense that an unstressed animal fed the diet that it's evolved to thrive on would yield better meat (e.g. grass fed beef is objectively superior to cows fattened on corn.)
Of course it is more expensive to do this, but so be it. There are plenty of cheap sources of nutritious proteins; people could be directed to adjust their expectations. Of course, there are many deep pocketed industry resources that would be against such an adjustment, and there's a new deep-pockets friendly administration in charge, so there's little hope of this happening in the near future...
For so many reasons, we need to end crop subsidies in this country.