Exploring the animal treatment-sustainability nexus: integrating animal welfare and antibiotic stewardship into the sustainability agenda

Animals have played a crucial role in human history and development for millennia, utilised for food, fibre, livelihoods, leisure, companionship, and sociocultural functions. Humans derive various benefits from animals, but increasing global populations of kept animals (e.g., in agriculture) are generating harmful external costs related to animal welfare problems and antimicrobial resistance. For example, many farmed animal production systems configured to maximise production and resource-use efficiency prevent animals’ expression of normal behaviours and positive affective states. Furthermore, antibiotic use in farmed animals is well managed to the extent that it aligns with the public health agenda; however, some antibiotics considered of lower risk to public health are used in relatively high quantities in farmed animals and are discharged into the environment with high persistence and potential toxicity to non-target organisms. The ineffective delivery of animal welfare and environmental public goods by the private sector denotes market failure. This thesis explores the levers for incorporating the neglected considerations of animal welfare and antimicrobial stewardship into the veterinary and agriculture sustainability discourse and metrics in the UK context. Four sector-specific studies are presented, exploring this nexus in the veterinary profession, agriculture sector, commercial food supply chains, and public sector institutions. The studies afford different perspectives on these externalities, including both production and consumption as potential drivers of welfare harm and antibiotic use. They contribute to a nascent discourse within the UK’s veterinary and commercial agricultural communities that is reflecting more deeply on how, as critical and influential stakeholders, these actors can support and forge a new relationship with non-human animals and other components of nature through a One Health approach. It concludes by proposing a series of recommendations, including regulations, incentives and voluntary initiatives, which align with an ecological sustainability paradigm that respects and strives for intergenerational and interspecies wellbeing.