Animal Health Care is Part of the Bottom Line

We've argued in previous posts that factory farming is simply not conducive to animal welfare. Better conditions for animals hurt the bottom line. Animal welfare is a cost of doing business, not a moral obligation.

Here's an example. I'm not arguing about the methods as I'm not a veterinarian, but it's a good example of the clinical discussion of costs when it comes to managing farm animal health.

The pig industry, says Dr MacDougald, is marked by generally poor production and financial analysis. This means poor assessment of ROI {Return on Investment} for interventions and little focus on opportunity cost. However, research based on finishing pig group opportunity costs calculated on mortality, culls and feed conversion to target reveals startling results, with the best to worst sites varying by $11 per pig, with the widest variance per site at $34 per pig.

These pigs are simply raw materials.