Animals On Drugs: The Role Of Pharmaceutical Companies In The Animal-Industrial Complex
In this paper, Richard Twine outlines the intersections between multinational pharmaceutical companies and animal agriculture, and calls for a more intensive study of these crossovers by bioethicists and critical animal studies scholars. Noting the mutually reinforcing dynamic between “animal health” drugs and factory farming, Twine looks specifically at the importance of antibiotics, and how the mutual use of antibiotics for humans and animals can potentially serve to break down or problematize human/animal dualism. Giving concrete examples of news stories from the U.K. and U.S., he shows that the antibiotic issue is not only important for theoretical scholarship, but can lead to new avenues for advocacy as well.
Though many animal advocates are likely to be aware that the use of antibiotics on farmed animals is a widespread and troubling practice, scholar Richard Twine would like us to be more informed of the enormous scale of the “animal health” industry and its impact. “The animal health industries are the clearest point of overlap and coproduction between the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and the animal-industrial complex,” he says, and notes in stark statistics that animal health sales can be measured in the billions of dollars. Many of the companies that make animal health products are subdivisions of large transnational companies such as Pfizer and Eli Lily, and this output on average accounts for 6-7 percent of their massive annual revenues. Overall, the animal health sector is growing by about 8.3%. Set against this context, Twine explains that, “even with medication and vaccination, disease is a constant problem on the farm. […] It is significant that the incidence of disease may be exacerbated by methods of farming and often drugs are administered to animals to treat what are in effect “production-related diseases” such as mastitis. The relationship between animal health companies and intensive farming can be seen as mutually sustaining.” This intertwined, entangled relationship should be of particular significance to advocates who “should be wary of making a rigid distinction between campaigning for change in ‘agriculture’ or ‘animal research.'” Pharmaceutical companies have not only blurred the line between human and animal medicine, but in doing so have overlapped different animal advocacy issues as well.
Of particular interest for Twine is the use of antibiotics in agriculture. He notes that, “in the early part of 2012, antibiotics explicitly emerged in the U.K. and U.S. media as a serious human public health issue.” Citing four key examples (a journal publication on antibiotic resistance, a speech by World Health Organization general director Dr. Margaret Chan, moves by the FDA to regulate some antibiotic use, and the increasing economic and social impact of antibiotic use), Twine clearly shows that the antibiotic issue is an increasingly pressing one. “The crux of the concern is that some common human diseases could simply become untreatable due to the reduced efficacy of antibiotics,” he says. It is not simply medical efficacy that is under attack, but rather “one of the great progress narratives of 20th-century medicine.” So, as we rely more and more on antibiotics to bolster intensive farming, it unravels the medical progress narrative we have built over a century. This is further complicated by the fact that “there is ambiguity between preventing and treating disease and the use of antibiotics as growth promoters. Their routinized use for disease prevention and growth promotion has come under the most criticism.” In that criticism, however, Twine notes that it often “assumes the normativity of animal farming generally and ignores how all uses of antibiotics are productivist and essential to the successful commodification of farmed animals. The moral dualism works to open a space for less intensive modes of farming animals, rather than a more systemic critique of the practice.” In other words, the intersection between the pharmaceutical industry and the animal-industrial complex is often only questioned insofar as it is compared to more “traditional” farming practices.
Ultimately, Twine’s paper is a call for a more clear-eyed and comprehensive critique of animal agriculture, the pharmaceutical industry, the animal research industry, and numerous overlaps between the three. Though Twine specifically calls on bioethicists and critical animal studies scholars to deepen their analysis, it is plain to see that these intersections could also be useful in advocacy campaigns. “Is it enough for the field to be content to outline ontological entanglement without also attending to the various contexts of power at play in human–animal relations?”, he asks, and it is a question that could be posed as much to advocates as well as academics. Is it enough to simply advocate for the reduced or eliminated use of antibiotics in agriculture, without also questioning the economic power behind the companies involved?
Original Abstract:
In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a consideration of how political economy shapes the conditions for bioethical discourse. Part of my argument around bioethical dualist ontology is to critique the assumption of a division between the “medical” (human) and “agricultural” (nonhuman) and to show various ways in which they are interrelated. I deepen this analysis with a focus on transnational pharmaceutical companies, with specific attention to their role in enhancing agricultural production through animal drug administration. I employ the topical case of antibiotics in order to speak to current debates in not only the interdisciplinary field of bioethics but also that of animal studies. More generally, the animal-industrial complex is underlined as a highly relevant bioethical object that deserves more conceptual and empirical attention.