Antimicrobial resistance: preventive approaches to the rescue? Professional expertise and business model of French “industrial” veterinarians

This article focuses on the development of veterinary medicine in the industrial pig and poultry production sector. In the current context of controversies over the public problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the veterinary profession is tending to promote a model of preventive medicine that is supposed to reduce the use of antibiotics in livestock farming. However, veterinarians specializing in pig and poultry production (“industrial vets”) have in fact been adopting such approaches to animal health for several decades. Based on 28 interviews with pig and poultry veterinarians practicing or having practiced in western France between the 1970s and the 2010s, the article aims to understand how such a form of professional expertise has developed, and the business model that underpins it. Contrary to public discourses which promote preventive approaches as a way to diversify professional expertise and to disconnect veterinary incomes from drug sales, it is indeed this economic model that has allowed the development of such approaches within industrial livestock farming. Modern strategies for reducing antibiotic use should therefore seek less to renew the professional expertise of veterinarians than to find new ways to valorize it economically.