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It's dead in the end either way. If you assume we're going to eat it.

Is it worth an extra animal's worth of meat for an extra animal's worth of anti-bacterial resistance, that's the core question here. If we're not using these antibiotics so widely to prevent the infection in the first place how does that scale?

It may be better, in the long run, just to say 'no antibiotics in animals' and kill those that become ill out of hand. Otherwise I can see this becoming an easy out for farmers - they could still keep the animals in atrocious conditions, knowing that they can use AB to cure them after they become ill - and if a large number of them become ill then we'll be in exactly the same pickle we are now.