**3.1 Reasons to focus on antibiotics' use in livestock vis-à-vis antibiotic overuse and resistance**

For decades, meat industry has fed antibiotics to chickens, pigs, and cattle for their weight gain and disease prevention in the stressful and unhygienic conditions that is prevalent in industrialized animal agriculture production facilities. A strong scientific consensus asserts that this practice fosters antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which is detrimental to human health (HSUS Report). Food animals are quite susceptible to benign or commensal opportunistic microbes, so they are often exposed to antimicrobials, such as the antibiotic, for disease treatment and prevention, subtherapeutic purpose and prophylactic purpose to promote growth and improve feed efficiency. Many of these antimicrobials used to treat diseases common to both livestock species and humans closely resemble drugs used in this species [25]. On the one hand, these miraculous antimicrobial drugs are pillars of modern medicine to prevent and diagnose dangerous bacterial infections and save lives. On the other hand, the overuse, injudicious use, and misuse of these antimicrobial drugs have spawned the evolution of life-threatening bacteria that is making the current antibiotics reserve useless [26]. Thus, antimicrobial resistance can be defined as the ability of microbes, such as bacteria and fungi, to grow and continue to multiply even in the presence of administered antimicrobial with purpose to kill or limit their growth (NIAID).
