Intensive Animal Agriculture and Human Health

This chapter provides an overview of some ethical issues that arise when people use intensive agricultural techniques—often called “factory farming” 1 —to raise livestock for food. I will ignore important issues such as animal suffering and environmental concerns that other authors in this book discuss. Instead, I focus on problems factory farming raises for human health, with special emphasis on antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can arise in animals and infect people. I conclude that there are legitimate disagreements about what we should do about factory farming, but I argue that everyone should agree on two things: fi rst, we should defer to the best available science rather than viewing these issues through the prism of political ideology; second, we should think carefully about the moral trade-offs of different policy proposals rather than pontifi cating from an armchair.