To sanetters
From Marlene Halverson
June 15, 2000
For the group's interest, there follows this message an obituary for Ruth
Harrison, author of the 1964 book Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming
Industry, a prescient look at the impacts of the (then) emerging factory
farming industry.
Anyone who has not read this small book, or who doesn't know about the huge
impact its author had (and continues to have) on policies surrounding animal
agriculture, especially in Europe, should really take the time to pick Animal
Machines up and read it, for it continues to be relevant today.
About Harrison's book, a past president of the British Veterinary Association
wrote: "The present increasing disregard for animal life under intensive
farming is arising in large measure through commercial types who are entering
farming as big business and who are, by example, at the same time turning the
orthodox farmer away from his natural inclinations. Already farming is being
financed increasingly by shareholders who know little of what goes on in
factory farms.... The author goes further than pointing out the approaching
state of cruelty in factory farming. She also draws attention to the
potential dangers to man of hormones, antibiotics and like substances used in
the production of meat. She neither has, nor even professes to have, clear
cut evidence regarding such dangers but then neither have we scientists any
clear cut evidence that there is no danger. The whole book is a timely
warning to man to halt in the surge forwards into new methods of farming so
that he may quietly and philosophically consider where it is all going."
Rachel Carson wrote the foreword to Harrison's book and in it said:
"The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick
and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen. Yet
the evils go long unrecognised. Even those who create them manage by some
devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.
As for the general public, the vast majority rest secure in a childlike
faith that someone is looking after thiings - a faith unbroken until some
public-spirited person, with patient scholarship and steadfast courage,
presents facts that can no longer be ignored. That is what Ruth Harrison has
done.... As a biologist whose special interests lie in the field of ecology,
or the relation between living things and their environment, I find it
inconceivable that healthy animals can be produced under the artificial and
damaging conditions that prevail in these modern factorylike installations,
where animals are grown and turned out like so many inanimate objects....
Whereever [Harrison's book] is read, it will certainly provoke feelings of
dismay, revulsion, and outrage. I hope it will spark a consumers' revolt of
such proportions that this vast new agricultural industry will be forced to
mend its ways."
Ruth Harrison was not only a person of sterling intellect, but a warm and
courageous and caring one. As her obituary notes, she worked for human as
well as farm animal welfare. There is a poignancy in her death because
despite her devotion and hard work for the improvement of the quality of
animal lives in farming, it is clear that the adage holds true that the more
things change, the more they stay the same. It is most clearly seen today in
attempts by the animal industry, especially in the U.S., to coopt the words
"well-being" and "humane" (much like the attempts at cooption of the terms
organic and sustainable) to apply to practices that Harrison and all
individuals concerned about the humaneness and sustainability of animal
agriculture reject.
I felt privileged to have known Ruth Harrison and to have had the opportunity
to spend several days with her at her home in London shortly before her
death. Ruth gave me and my sister her working library, books from which we
will arrange to have placed in a Ruth Harrison memorial collection at the
library of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, so they will be
available to scholars at Carleton and elsewhere, through interlibrary loans,
for further work on farm animal welfare and sustainable agriculture.
The obituary, composed by Dr. Donald Broom, holder of the McLeod chair in
animal welfare at Cambridge University Veterinary College, follows:
Ruth Harrison 1920 - 2000
(died 13th June 2000, London)
Farm animals are not machines.
Ruth Harrison's book "Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry"
burst upon the agricultural world in 1964 pointing out to the public and
governments that farm animals were now being regarded by many in the industry
merely as mechanisms that led to useful production and profit. Ruth said
about the book that she "thought that the public should know both of the
suffering caused to farm animals and the hazards to the consumer in some of
the new systems of keeping livestock." The systems to which she referred,
which were then relatively new to most farmers, included battery cages for
hens, small crates for veal calves and stalls or tethers for pregnant and
farrowing sows. In addition, Ruth Harrison wrote about the efforts being
made in breeding, feeding and housing to obtain ever greater production at
whatever cost to the animals and the use of farm operations such as
castration, tail-docking, beak-trimming and de-horning.
As a result of this book, the U.K. Ministry of Agriculture set up a Technical
Committee chaired by Professor F.W.R. Brambell. The Brambell Committee,
which included Ruth Harrison, reported in 1965 and a new law on farm animal
welfare The Agriculture (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act was passed in 1968.
The Minister of Agriculture appointed an independent committee, the Farm
Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, later to become the Farm Animal Welfare
Council, to provide advice on such matters. Ruth Harrison served on these
until she was 70. At an international level, "Animal Machines" which was
published in seven countries, was an inspiration for the European Convention
for the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes, which was set up by
the Council of Europe in 1976, and for legislation on the welfare of farm
animals in many countries.
Ruth Harrison was born in London in 1920 and read English at London
University, spending part of her university career in Cambridge because her
college moved there during the war. She was a member of the Society of
Friends (Quakers) and worked during the war in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.
At the end of the war she was part of a group that worked with displaced
persons in Schleswig Holstein and in Bochum in Germany. After her return she
attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, obtained a University Diploma,
and directed productions. She worked for a firm of architects and, in 1954,
married Dex Harrison who was to become a distinguished architect. They had
two children, Jonathan and Jane. With this non-scientific background, Ruth's
considerable ability to understand and report lucidly on scientific papers
was most impressive. At the Farm Animal Welfare Council in the U.K. and at
the Standing Committee of the Convention on the Protection of Animals Kept
for Farming Purposes in Strasbourg's Palais de l'Europe, Ruth Harrison would
present the key information from scientific studies of animal welfare that
government officials and other committee members had often not read, or not
understood. She was charming to all and never hostile to the farming
industry in general, only to those practices that she thought unjust.
Ruth Harrison served as a Director or Council Member of the Conservation
Society, Soil Association, Animal Defence Society, R.S.P.C.A., European
Conference Group for the Protection of Farm Animals, Church of England's
Environmental Reference Panel, Quaker Concern for Animal Welfare, and World
Society for the Protection of Animals. She was founder and chairman of the
Farm Animal Care Trust which, since 1967, has been one of the most important
charities funding small conferences and farm animal welfare research
projects, for example on the pig-family pen system, alternatives to veal
crates, gas-stunning of animals, group-farrowing of pigs and the economics of
changing to farm systems with better welfare. Within the limits of its
slender finances, the group also gave practical support to farmers prepared
to try free-range farming. She was awarded the R.S.P.C.A's Richard Martin
Award, the Eurogroup Medal and an OBE in the Queen's Honours list. She gave
many invited lectures including the Hume lecture for the Universities
Federation for Animal Welfare and contributed chapters to books, journals,
house magazines, and newspapers worldwide.
Ruth will be missed by her family and by the many farmers, animal welfare
scientists, government staff, and animal protection society members with whom
she worked.
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