Action for Animals Austin

Nice article in the Washington Post on this issue. If you know your animal rights stuff then you know that animals in factory farms (chickens and pigs and veal calves, mostly) are pumped with antibiotics to keep them alive. The stress of confinement is so severe that an animal's immune system will crash making them susceptible to life threatening illnesses and death. To keep an animal alive long enough to slaughter, he/she is pumped with antibiotics to fight infections. Those antibiotics do not "wash out" of the animal's body entirely. They remain there and are consumed by meat eaters who's immune system, according to some studies, then does not easily respond to some antibiotics needed to fight off human infections. Super bugs are created with doctors increasingly finding it difficult to treat once easily treatable infections with the usual dose of antibiotics.

So, this is good news for "consumers" of animal flesh but what does it mean for factory farm animals? Ultimately it may mean that if factory farms can't use antibiotics to keep their animals alive then they will need to provide less stressful environments for them to live in. That may mean bigger and less crowded cages - and higher meat prices due to the higher cost in production.

Read the story here.

• Factory Farms
• antibiotics