Agricultural Farmers versus Factory Farmers: Whether to Treat Animals with Antibiotics
The continuous debate of the use of antibiotics in farming has separated farming into two groups: agricultural farming and factory farming. Agricultural farmers are primarily concerned about the welfare and health of their animals and the quality of lifestyle that these animals experience. They focus on how treatments of farm animals affect their produce. On the other hand, factory farmers are entrepreneurs that are primarily concerned about profits and the survival of their oligopoly. Their interest is to have a monopoly over other modern meat corporations. They are business leaders that forgo animal welfare in order to maximize efficiency in slaughter and minimize losses. Animals fated with such dismal lives must endure overcrowded, cramped cages filled with overdue feces.
Farmers are encouraged to feed and inject their animals with antibiotics in order to prevent the common outbreaks of diseases due to pathogens such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruignosa, etc. Since agricultural farmers do as much as they could to keep their animals healthy, they have less of an incentive to treat their animals with antibiotics. On the contrary, the high number of diseased factory animals is due to the poor living parameters that factory animals must cope with. Therefore factory farmers have a greater incentive to treat their animals with antibiotics. Their corporations would induce incredible losses if the use of antibiotic were rejected. Their animals would be dying off exponentially due to illnesses.
Assuming that factory farmers and agricultural farmers know what strategies their opponent will use, and taking into consideration the primary motives of these two groups of farmers, I have provided an example of a payoff matrix (Table 1) representing how much payoff each group of farmers will receive if they choose to treat their animals with antibiotics and if they choose not to treat their animals with antibiotics. Regardless of which strategy factory farmers will use, agricultural farmers will choose not to use antibiotics. Therefore, the strict dominant strategy of agricultural farmers would be not to use antibiotics. On the other hand, regardless of which strategy agricultural farmers will use, factory farmers will be better off using antibiotics; therefore, using antibiotics would be factory farmers’ strict dominant strategy. The pure Nash equilibrium will then be the pair of strategies would be for agricultural farmers not to treat their animals with antibiotics and factory farmers to give high dosages of antibiotics to their animals.
| Table 1: Payoff matrix for agricultural farmers and factory farmers | |||
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Factory Farmers |
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Use antibiotics |
Don’t use antibiotics |
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Agricultural Farmers |
Use antibiotics |
1, 5 |
-1, 1 |
|
Don’t use antibiotics |
9, 9 |
9, -1 |
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