COMMENTARY | Ever since the 1950s, many farmers and ranchers have been giving penicillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics to their perfectly healthy livestock to prevent the livestock from becoming sick. The medicines also help the animals grow bigger, according to a report by Jill U. Adams of the Los Angeles Times. This practice might be good for the livestock, but it is not good for us. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that when we become ill and need antibiotics after we eat the meat of injected animals, the antibiotics are no longer working for us.
Opposition and Support
To help curtail the phenomenon of people getting infections that resist treatment, the FDA announced that ranchers and farmers cannot give a certain class of antibiotics to cattle, pigs, turkeys and chicken at will. This is good news for the folks at the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association. Not so for the American Veterinary Medical Association and for the National Pork Producers Council. The Veterinary Association believes that the practice of giving antibiotics to healthy animals does prevent disease outbreaks, which are common to animals that live in close quarters. Once an outbreak occurs, an entire herd could be wiped out.
Factory Farming
The issue goes far deeper than what meets the eye. The question we need to ask is why farmers and ranchers need to inject their animals with antibiotics in the first place. The reason is the unsanitary and inhumane living conditions of the animals that live on factory farms. Around the time that Americans fell in love with fast food came industrial farming. These are not the kind of farms we typically visualize; they are not full of green pastures with rolling hills and a quaint barn painted red. They are facilities where animals are confined in areas with no grass, areas so small that animals are sometimes mutilated to fit in the pens. Chickens and turkeys often have their beaks removed, and cows and pigs often have their tails cut. Factory farms allow mass production of food, but we pay the price because our food is not as safe as it could be. To ward off disease caused by factory conditions, antibiotics are given to the animals.
Take Action
What I do to avoid eating tainted meat is to buy it from organic farms that raise grass-fed beef. It’s easy to do; I just read the labels. The more people who refuse to buy unnatural meat injected with antibiotics or growth hormones, the less demand there will be. The FDA has not stopped the practice of farmers and ranchers injecting antibiotics into their livestock; it has merely restricted it.