Living the Animal Life

There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even be.

It won't pass. Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start.

The bill is Rep. Louise Slaughter's (D-NY) offering to ban non-medicinal, preemptive use of antibiotics in livestock.

In large part, as the article notes, these are used to promote growth. However, it's the barely mentioned "prevent illnesses" part that's of most concern. Eddie Gehman Kohn talks here about the way this practice is turning antibiotics into worthless candy by spurring the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, but that's still a side effect - though a powerful and frightening one. The main point of these drugs is to prevent animals that are raised in utterly vile conditions from simply keeling over dead before they can be slaughtered.

If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity.

As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious.

They're fed a grain diet, now that it's no longer allowed to feed these obligate herbivores ground up bones and scrap from other cattle, which is like feeding a human an all-Twinkie diet. They get permanent acidosis, roughly equivalent to a terrible case of chronic ulcers, and the bacteria from their guts are able to escape to infect the rest of their bodies. This commonly leaves their livers abcessed and scarred, not entirely unlike what would happen in a human with advanced cirrhosis of the liver.

Imagine humans kept wading in sh*t all day, force-fed to the point of severe obesity, suffering all the while from ulcers and cirrhosis. Those people's immune systems would be extremely compromised. They would need constant doses of antibiotics just to stay alive.

I don't make this comparison to say that animals should be treated like humans, but that they should be treated like animals.

They should be let out on real grass, on well-managed pasture where their numbers are just right to stimulate and fertilize the growth of a healthy prairie. They should be able to move around in the open air, where their immune systems will be supported by a proper diet and exercise, be part of an ecosystem that's very close to a naturally evolved grassland, have a quick death-by-predator (if we insist on being their only predators, we should do it right and be merciful) and the remains returned to the ground for the plants to eat.

This is what they're for. If we are to be sensible managers of the Earth's resources, getting this right is crucial to preserving what's going to be left over when the planet's freshwater and topsoil reserves can no longer handle the levels of grain production asked of them now. Getting this right is crucial to having livestock be a source of health instead of disease.