Caring for the Collective(s)? Dairy Cow Health and Antibiotic Stewardship

• In Event: Antimicrobials in Livestock: Practices, Technologies, Markets, and Regulations

Abstract

International policy concern about antimicrobial resistance and the threat it poses for the treatment of infectious disease has resulted in a range of proposals to intervene in antibiotic use and prescription behaviours. In agriculture, the concept of antibiotic stewardship has begun to feature prominently in efforts to address antibiotic use. Although enforced through targets for maximum permitted antibiotic use per kilogram of food-producing animals, these narrow measures are expected to necessitate improved disease prevention, biosecurity and herd health planning in livestock.

Therefore, antibiotic stewardship potentially has broader implications for human-animal relationships within agricultural systems. However, how these relationships are changing in practice, i.e. within the context of daily activities of animal management and their underlying logics, as well as what it means for the quality of animal lives is less clear and requires investigation. Drawing on the post-human concept of heterogenous biosocial collectivities, we examine how relations between humans, animals, and technologies are being modified as a result of new obligations to reduce antibiotic use in livestock, specifically in the context of UK dairy farming.

Our analysis highlights the multiple and segregated collectives that constitute a single dairy farm and underlines how antibiotic stewardship is co-produced between animals, humans and materials within different relational contexts, with uneven implications for the management of animal health, antibiotic use and the quality of animal lives. This analysis thus emphasises the need to attend to the multiplicity of on farm human-animal collectives in assessing the diverse implications of policy initiatives to reduce antibiotic use.

Authors

• Richard Helliwell, University of Nottingham

• Carol Morris, University of Nottingham