Responsible antibiotic use in livestock is essential for both preserving antibiotic efficacy in human medicine and ensuring animals receive appropriate care.
Antibiotic stewardship in livestock creates a welfare tension: restricting antibiotic use is essential for public health and reducing resistance, but sick animals have a welfare right to effective treatment. The resolution is stewardship, not prohibition — eliminating prophylactic use that harms no individual animal while ensuring sick animals receive appropriate therapeutic care. The welfare trap of antibiotic overuse is that it enables management systems with such poor welfare conditions that disease is endemic and antibiotics become necessary for basic survival. Improving housing and management conditions that drive disease eliminates the welfare imperative for prophylactic use while improving animal welfare simultaneously.