We have a duty of care to the 'dumb animals' we manipulate for our own ends. To withhold treatment and allow an animal to suffer is not acceptable.
As to wishing a human were given antibiotics the same as a ewe - hopefully it's a little cleaner in the hospital than in the lambing shed!
(Yes, I know that hasn't always been as true as we'd hope...
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I am all for making sure we are diligent in our use of antibiotics - not unnecessarily, better education perhaps on which one to use when, and attention to giving the right dosage and an appropriate length of course - and am comfortable with not
every antibiotic in the world being used on the farm, and with some being licensed only for administration by veterinary practitioner.
We already have LA (long-acting) versions of some antibiotics, so that where a daily dose should be given but a recovered animal is unlikely to be caught and jagged, there is still sufficient antibiotic to properly deal with the infective agent.
Back in the 1970s, when this was all starting to be realised (I was taught about it at University, it was pretty new research at the time), the main culprit was so-called 'growth promoters', antibiotics incorporated into animal feedstuffs to improve growth rates. That was clearly unjustifiable and was eventually outlawed.
However, antibiotics for a ewe who's had your hand inside her - absolutely yes. However clean you try to be, we don't have a clinical environment and therefore it would be negligent of care to withhold such treatment.
And as I've said on a different thread, prophylactic a/bs for vulnerable neonate lambs, properly administered, will reduce the risk of a real disease outbreak - and more antibiotics being used in that case, in some cases unsuccessfully.
But no question, it is a fine line. If we had no antibiotics available, are there ways in which we could reduce the risk of infection and disease? Probably yes, and therefore yes we should be doing those things anyway.
Some practises lead to increased use of a/bs - indoor lambing, surrogacy and caesarean deliveries, AI in sheep, even the quest for ever larger and meatier offspring through natural breeding and non-invasive AI. Without a/bs, some of these practises might become unprofitable, and we'd have to change our ways.
But we'd still have years when the weather was inclement in April and we'd need to have some of the flock lambing indoors. And some cattle and ewes would still need caesarians. For them, I'd still want to be able to use a/bs.
I can see where this may lead... a/bs banned on farms in the UK, all UK farmers have to get more extensive (which isn't in itself a bad thing), cost of production rises...
import of meat goes up, the public blithely eat meat produced overseas in intensive systems with goodness knows what use of a/bs, the UK farmers go bust and there's very little impact on the resistance to a/bs of the bacteria found in humans.