The Nightmare We Created: Exploitation of Animals and AMR
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often presented as a medical problem. A matter of germs outsmarting drugs. But the truth is uglier: AMR is a direct consequence of how humans exploit animals and the food systems built on their backs.
Researchers have shown what activists have been saying for years: AMR doesn’t “just happen.” It emerges from cycles of exploitation where animals are packed into filthy, overcrowded sheds, pumped full of drugs to keep them alive, and then their waste is spread across fields, leaking resistant bacteria into soil, rivers, crops, wildlife, and eventually us.
A Feedback Loop of Exploitation
A recent umbrella review examined 80 high-quality studies and mapped over 40 feedback loops that keep AMR cycling through the system. The picture is clear:
▫️Farmed animals given antimicrobials pass resistant bacteria into their manure.
▫️That manure fertilises crops, contaminates soil and water.
▫️Crops and feed spread those resistant bacteria to more animals and to humans.
▫️Wild animals, farm workers, and local communities are pulled into the cycle.
This isn’t a linear chain. It’s a self-reinforcing system of contamination. Resistance doesn’t stop at the farm gate, it flows outward, binding animal, human, and ecosystem health into one tangled crisis.
The “Nightmare Bacteria” Warning
The United States is already seeing the consequences. Infections from carbapenem-resistant bacteria, germs immune even to last-resort antibiotics, jumped nearly 70% between 2019 and 2023. One particularly difficult gene, NDM, surged by 460%. Once considered rare, it’s now spreading within communities.
Doctors warn that infections once trivial, like urinary tract infections, are becoming harder to treat. Many carriers don’t even know they’re infected, raising the prospect of silent, widespread transmission. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re happening now.
Economics Over Health
The system keeps spinning because of profit. Farmers are caught between the reality of animals constantly falling sick in intensive conditions and the financial necessity of keeping them alive long enough to sell. The “solution” is more drugs. More antimicrobials, more resistance.
Consumer demand for cheap flesh and milk fuels this cycle. So long as animals are treated as commodities, property to be fattened, milked, and slaughtered for profit, prevention will always come second to economic survival.
The Injustice at the Core
Advocates often talk about AMR as one health problem: human, animal, and environmental health are inseparable. That’s true, but let’s not sanitise it. The real driver is the enslavement of animals. Without animal agriculture, there is no systemic overuse of antimicrobials to prop up unnatural, disease-ridden populations. Without commodifying animals, there is no feedback loop turning their bodies and waste into reservoirs of resistance.
The fight against AMR is not only about protecting human health, it’s about dismantling a food system built on exploitation.
The Choice Ahead
Governments, corporations, and media will continue to push “solutions” that leave the underlying injustice intact: marginally fewer drugs, slightly different management, new vaccines for animals bred into misery. But isolated reforms won’t break the cycle.
What will?
▫️Ending the use of animals as resources.
▫️Shifting away from farming systems that depend on forced breeding, confinement, and routine medication.
▫️Recognising that prevention isn’t about better drugs, it’s about freedom for the beings we exploit.
Antimicrobial resistance is a slow-burning pandemic. Every steak, every glass of cow’s milk, every chicken breast is part of a system accelerating it.
This isn’t just about saving ourselves. It’s about freeing animals from us. Only then do we stand a chance of ending the nightmare we created.