Animal Machines had been crafted to produce maximum impact. Ruth Harrison began to systematically collect material for her book in 1961. Over the next three years, she read scientific publications on animal behaviour, visited British farms, and corresponded with manufacturers, parliamentarians, and other campaigners—the most prominent of whom was Rachel Carson.Footnote 1 Hardly any of her findings were novel. As the past two chapters have shown, numerous activists, scientists, and media outlets had already criticised issues ranging from behavioural constraints on farms to chemical residues in animal products. Rather than providing shocking revelations, Animal Machines’ impact was instead based on its RADA-trained author’s ability to stage and fuse existing concerns. The result was an easy-to-read, compelling moral narrative that focused readers’ attention on highly effective examples of alleged cruelty, introduced scientific concepts about animal welfare, and contrasted a dystopian ‘factory farm’ with a romanticised countryside.

Accessing the latest ethological literature and contacting relevant experts was not straightforward for someone without access to agricultural, policy, or academic networks. On farms, Harrison noted that “farmers were astonishingly unaware that their methods were questionable.”Footnote 2 Meanwhile, government officials either assured her that everything was fine or claimed that the 1911 Protection of Animals Act permitted no further regulatory action to enhance animal welfare, beyond preventing immediate physical harm.Footnote 3

Other responses to Ruth Harrison’s information requests were more productive and provided her with promising leads for crafting her narrative. One of these early leads was the humane stunning and killing of animals. Harrison had been shocked to learn that the slaughtering of animals in large abattoirs was not necessarily painless. Following correspondence with the Council of Justice to Animals and Humane Slaughter Association, she received information on electric stunners. Although stunning was by no means universal in secular abattoirs, Harrison followed contemporary campaigns by the Council of Justice and the RSPCA by targeting the unstunned “Jewish and Mohammedan Slaughter of Food Animals” in early drafts of her book.Footnote 4

White veal production (see Chap. 5) quickly became a second pillar of her book’s attack on ‘factory farms.’ Harrison’s moral outrage at the intensive production of anaemic calves in what would become Chapter Five of Animal Machines is palpable.Footnote 5 Production practices had already featured prominently in the Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals’ letterbox leaflet to Harrison. In his testimony for the Crusade, “Suffolk farmer” and Daily Mail contributor Laurence Easterbrook highlighted the “wretched trade[’s]” unBritish characteristics—modern systems of veal and broiler husbandry “might well have been devised by Hitler.”Footnote 6Harrison decided to conduct further research and requested information from Gwendolen ‘Gwen’ Barter, who had come to national fame after disrupting the RSPCA’s 1961 annual general meeting to protest against ‘field sports.’ Barter had actively lobbied both the RSPCA and MAFF to stamp out veal production and passed on relevant correspondence to Harrison,Footnote 7 who supplemented MAFF statements with published industry, veterinary, and personal descriptions of production practices, as well as with images taken during farm visits.Footnote 8

This combination of written and visual depictions of intensive production proved extremely effective. Similar to Greenpeace ‘mindbombs,’ which eschewed complex content in favour of simple visual messaging like the clubbing of a baby seal,Footnote 9Harrison made extensive use of images for her attack on ‘factory farms.’ The cover image of the 1964 edition was a linocut depicting a spinning cogwheel whose centre consisted of a cow’s head and whose individual cogs consisted of alarmed chickens’ heads (Image 6.1). Upon opening the book, readers were greeted by a cartoon of three farmers trying to convince a herd of dairy cows, who had clearly never ventured outside, to eat grass: “It’s GRASS y’fools—you’re supposed to EAT it—Remember?”Footnote 10

Image 6.1
A photo of a book. It is on the table, the cover reads, Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines, a cartoon at the center, and the bottom left of the cover is torn.

Cover of Animal Machines (Ruth Harrison’s personal copy) (image courtesy of Ruth Layton)

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The book’s core message of unnatural, unhealthy, and cruel intensive farming was condensed in a “Pictorial Summary.”Footnote 11 The summary was strategically placed in the middle of Animal Machines where it functioned as a narrative hinge. The hinge connected descriptions of intensive production systems for poultry, calves, and other species in the first half of the book with the second half’s analysis of food quality and animal legislation and resulting call for welfare reform. Opening with Animal Machines’ most striking image—a picture of a wide-eyed calf staring out of a small, dark crateFootnote 12—the pictorial summary’s 24 high-quality photographs contrasted intensive and alternative methods. Staged contrasts were not subtle: an image of a dog overlooking a bucolic countryside farm with meadows full of sheep was contrasted with a concentration camp-like image of utilitarian broiler barracks; a farmer feeding an outdoor flock was contrasted with a white-coated worker in a battery house; a cow nursing her calf in a field was contrasted with shackled calves standing on concrete slats with swollen knee joints. The photographs had either been shot by Dex Harrison or been purchased from farming magazines and other campaigning organisations. Each picture was accompanied by a brief take-home message. Some of these were pithy one-liners as with a photograph of the interior of a pig sweathouse, which was simply titled “Phew-w…w!”Footnote 13 Others contained more detailed reflections on the design of production and slaughter facilities as well as on their welfare and environmental impacts (Image 6.2). The pictorial summary drove its message home with three questions: “in degrading these animals are we not in fact degrading ourselves? (…) At what point do we acknowledge cruelty? (…) Can these unhealthy animals possibly make healthy human food?”Footnote 14

Image 6.2
A greyscale photo of a wide-eyed veal calf. It is stared out, through a small opening from the crate.

Animal Machines’ image of a veal calf looking out of its crate with the neighbouring crate shut (image courtesy of Jonathan Harrison)

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In addition to its effective use of visual imagery to summarise its core messages, what also set Harrison’s book apart from other attacks on ‘factory farming’ was its popularisation of ethological research on animal instincts and the frustration of instincts on intensive operations. For her chapter on “Cruelty and Legislation,” Harrison relied heavily on Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) publications. Although she did not reference newer work on stress or the humane treatment of laboratory animals (see Chap. 4), Harrison was very interested in a 1948 publication by Oxford zoologist John R. Baker. Addressing the “scientific basis of kindness to animals,” Baker claimed that “it is probable that there is some degree of correlation between intelligence and capacity to suffer.”Footnote 15

For Harrison, the question of outwardly healthy animals’ capacity to suffer in intensive production systems was of central importance to refuting the equation of animal productivity—thrift—with welfare.Footnote 16 It was also key to her argument for legislative reform by showing that the cruelty definitions set out in the 1911 Protection of Animals Act were inadequate. However, her resulting interest in issues like boredom, ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and animal ‘vices’ like feather pecking or tail biting was not shared by leading continental ethologists (Chap. 4). Replying to a 1961 letter from Harrison, Konrad Lorenz noted: “we need not torment our conscience too much about unavoidable cruelty though of course we are in honour bound to avoid all avoidable cruelty.”Footnote 17Lorenz did not think that “the heavy domesticated breed of chicken suffer seriously either under the measures taken to produce quick growth or under the conditions of hens kept in batteries.”Footnote 18 Chickens did “not ‘understand’ the situation when their fellows are being slaughtered or lying dead.”Footnote 19 Willing to “incur the danger of your thinking me callous and cruel,” Lorenz asserted that maltreated animals would not thrive: “The claim that birds which are distinctly unhappy would not lay many eggs is, in my opinion, perfectly justified.”Footnote 20

Rather than deter her, Lorenz’s reply intensified Harrison’s efforts to find sympathetic research. For her book, Harrison drew on UFAW work on instincts, Cambridge veterinary researcher David Sainsbury’s research on animal vice, and US naturalist Roy Bedichek’s descriptions of nervous and bored battery hens.Footnote 21 She also began contacting other British ethologists like fellow Quaker William Homan Thorpe, whose acknowledgement of animal cognition and welfare views mirrored her own (Chap. 4). While it is unclear whether resulting contacts were established in time to influence the writing of Animal Machines,Footnote 22 they would later help Harrison secure positions on government committees, scientific backing for her campaigning, and high-profile members for her charity (see Parts III and IV).

Now often forgotten, a third major theme of Animal Machines centred on intensive agriculture’s environmental and health impacts. The publication of Silent Spring (1962) in the US one year into her research had a significant effect on Harrison’s own writing process. Carefully studying public reactions to Silent SpringFootnote 23 and citing the book in her chapter on “Quantity versus Quality,”Footnote 24Harrison was keenly aware of Silent Spring’s impact on British attitudes towards agricultural chemicals. The similarities between Silent Spring and her own book project must have been obvious, and Harrison established contact with Carson via the editorial office of the New Yorker on November 9, 1962.Footnote 25 In her letter to Carson, Harrison wrote that she was working on a book on “factory farming” and asked for “assistance … on the nutritional side.”Footnote 26 Indicating the breadth of her interests, Harrison felt “whereas the cruelty angle causes only momentary interest, the questionable food value of foods so produced might raise a more lasting doubt in people’s minds.”Footnote 27 Describing the rearing of vealcalves, Harrison asked Carson “whether animals reared in an unhealthy way can possibly produce healthy food”Footnote 28 and whether eating animals that had come into contact with antibiotics or hormones was safe.

Responding on November 23, Rachel Carson admitted being “quite appalled by your letters describing matters that I had known very little about.”Footnote 29 Although Carson was unsure whether unhealthy animals produced unhealthy meat, she knew “that many Doctors [sic] feel that the fact that we all get small doses of antibiotics from eggs, meat, and so on has something to do with the fact that so many bacteria have become resistant to these drugs.”Footnote 30 In the case of insecticides, Carson also noted that a “tolerance has been set for the occurrence of insecticide residues in meat.”Footnote 31 It was her belief that “this situation should be changed,”Footnote 32 and she referred Harrison to British physician Franklin Bicknell’s 1960 publication Chemicals in Your Food.Footnote 33

Ruth Harrison must have found this rapid response encouraging because she sent six draft chapters to Carson in May 1963 and asked whether Carson would like to contribute a preface or foreword to Animal Machines. Well aware that intensive production systems were only beginning to establish themselves in the UK, Harrison hoped that Carson would help her prevent their further spread:

I realise that you have not personally studied this subject, but I hope that these chapters will show you that as each set of conditions becomes established it becomes more and more difficult to change them. I feel that it is most important to explain to the individual what is happening, and to try to make him aware of his responsibility in allowing it. Both physically and morally that is indeed a poor heritage to pass on to our children.Footnote 34

According to Harrison, Sydney Jennings, former President of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), was “backing [her] most staunchly” and had “been kind enough to ‘vet’ all my husbandry facts.”Footnote 35

However, Carson stalled. Referencing her increased workload in the wake of President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee’s report on pesticides, she asked Harrison to send a complete manuscript so that Carson’s friend, Christine Gesell Stevens, could check it. Stevens was an important contact. The daughter of University of Michigan physiologist and laboratory animal campaigner Robert Gesell, Stevens was in close contact with both US and British animal protection organisations. Drawing on the resources of her husband, real estate baron Roger Lacy Stevens, she had founded the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) in 1951. The AWI was based in the Stevens-owned Empire State Building and had just helped push the 1958 US Humane Slaughter Act through Congress.Footnote 36 During the 1960s, the AWI lobbied for what became the 1966 US Laboratory Animal Welfare Act, farm animal welfare, and a ban of whale hunting.Footnote 37

Only after Stevens’ check was complete did Carson agree to write the foreword in July 1963: “Both Mrs. Stevens and I are much impressed with what you have done, and are delighted that you have undertaken to describe and document this situation for the public.”Footnote 38 Responding to Carson’s suggestion of a further preface from a British expert, Ruth Harrison confirmed that Sydney Jennings had agreed to provide such a preface. Animal Machines had also received approval from Chemicals in Your Food author Franklin Bicknell. Significantly, Harrison also agreed to make certain revisions in response to Christine Stevens’ comments and cut passages dealing with Jewishslaughter practices, a topic which would have alienated some readers and could have detracted from the book’s wider arguments:

My only hostility is to the broiler industry in the United States I will prune to make this clear. I agree with her comment on the possible detraction from the main theme by the mention of Kosher slaughter. I will omit this. I would disagree with her acceptance of Kosher slaughter as being in any way humane, but that is beside the point.Footnote 39

Indirectly, Harrison also asked for Carson’s help in publishing Animal Machines in the US. In July 1963, Harrison informed Carson that her British publishers were considering collaborating with US publishers Devin-Adair on an American version of Animal Machines.Footnote 40 After Devin-Adair rejected the proposal, Houghton Mifflin, the publishers of Silent Spring, indicated that they were interested but insisted that Harrison rewrite Animal Machines with the help of an American writer. The project of an American Animal Machines was later quietly abandoned.Footnote 41 Potential hopes that Carson might help with such a project were precluded by her death in April 1964.Footnote 42

Carson’s foreword reached Harrison on August 15, 1963, and resulted in profuse thanks from Harrison, who “couldn’t have wished for a better Foreword.”Footnote 43Carson strategically reinforced Animal Machines’ dystopian call to action. Drawing on ethical, environmental, and health arguments, she painted a hyperbolic opposition between a romanticised, pre-modern pastoral and modern intensive farming:

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 unrecognized. Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalizing 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 things—a faith unbroken until some public-spirited person with patient scholarship and steadfast courage, presents fact that can no longer be ignored.Footnote 44

According to Carson, the “pastoral scenes in which animals wandered green fields or flocks of chickens scratched contentedly for their food” had been replaced by “factorylike buildings in which animals live out their wretched existence.”Footnote 45 As a biologist, Carson found it inconceivable that such animals could produce healthy food. Intensive establishments were regularly swept through with diseases and were “kept going only by the continuous administration of antibiotics.”Footnote 46 However, health concerns were only one element of the argument against factory farming:

The final argument against the intensivism now practiced in this branch of agriculture is a humanitarian one. … It is my belief that man will never be at peace with his own kind until he has recognized the Schweitzerian ethic that embraces decent consideration for all living creatures—a true reverence for life.Footnote 47

Ultimately, Carson hoped that Animal Machines would “spark a consumers’ revolt of such proportions that this vast new agricultural industry will be forced to mend its ways.”Footnote 48

Securing a foreword by Rachel Carson—whose name appeared more prominently on the cover of Animal Machines than Harrison’sFootnote 49—and a preface by ex-BVA president Sydney Jennings was a major publicity coup for Ruth Harrison. Authored by an unknown layperson, her book was bound to profit from endorsement by well-known experts. Harrison’s second major public relations coup came in late 1963, when she agreed to publish two feature articles on ‘factory farming’ in the Observer.Footnote 50 Having failed to interest a “top television documentary film make[r]”Footnote 51 in her work, the Observer articles were an ideal way to promote Animal Machines and sensitise the British public to animal welfare issues.

Harrison’sObserver articles appeared right ahead of the publication of Animal Machines in March 1964. Summarising Animal Machines’ main arguments and titled “Inside the animal factories”Footnote 52 and “Fed to Death,”Footnote 53 they were widely advertised as “a disturbing survey” of “animals as food machines.”Footnote 54 The articles themselves included pictures and vivid descriptions of conditions in ‘factory farms’Footnote 55 and modern abattoirs. Addressing pig, poultry, and veal husbandry, Harrison asked whether the price society was paying for cheap animal products was “not too high.”Footnote 56 According to Harrison, “the factory farmer and the agri-industrial world behind him [sic]” only acknowledged “cruelty … where profitability ceases.”Footnote 57 However, such an equation of animal productivity and welfare was fundamentally flawed in an age of antibiotics, which could keep animals on their feet despite inadequate welfare. Harrison then attacked animals’ cramped living conditions on intensive farms, the perpetual twilight in many buildings, the debeaking of poultry, inadequate stunning prior to animals’ scalding and slaughter, and official complacency.

In addition to welfare concerns, the articles addressed potential health hazards resulting from ‘factory farming.’ According to Harrison, it was common for young birds suffering from respiratory diseases or cancer to end up on consumers’ tables, with the birds’ ill health masked by antibiotics. Unsurprisingly, the fattening of tethered calves in darkened sties with slatted concrete floors provoked Harrison’s particular ire. According to Harrison, calves’ diets consisted almost “exclusively of barley, with added minerals and vitamins, antibiotics, tranquilisers and hormones.”Footnote 58 Living in these conditions, some calves became blind, and many suffered from liver damage and pneumonia: “their muscles become flabby and they put on weight rapidly, but they are not healthy.”Footnote 59 Using more and more antibiotics to keep animals alive, farmers and veterinarians were actively contributing to a race “between disease and new drugs.”Footnote 60 The results of this race were antibiotic resistance and residue-laden “tasteless meat”Footnote 61—an admittedly odd comment from someone who had probably never eaten meat.Footnote 62

Harrison’s joint staging of environmental, welfare, health, and moral concerns was extremely successful. By addressing the alleged dangers of ‘factory–farmed’ meat in combination with its welfare implications, she was able to turn ‘factory farms’ into a focal point of contemporary concerns about technological alienation from nature and resulting effects on the nation’s physical and moral health. Whereas Animal Machines is now mostly remembered for its welfare message, a closer reading of the book and its origins shows the many intellectual roots connecting it to the wider ferment of post-war environmentalist, conservation, and peace activism. Understanding these roots is important in terms of both Animal Machines’ wider reform message and its ability to galvanise public protest. Harrison and Carson saw animal welfare and environmental reform as two sides of the same coin. Although Silent Spring and Animal Machines focused on different core messages, it would be wrong to limit either book to a single message. While DDT overuse was one of several concerns voiced by Carson, Harrison criticised ‘factory farms’ for both their effects on animal welfare and their wider impact on human health, the environment, and societal morals. By challenging prevalent notions of thrift, Harrison was also able to popularise emerging strands of applied ethology, which acknowledged animals’ affective states. Breaking with continental ethologists’ refusal to engage in ‘anthropomorphic speculation,’ British ethologists and younger campaigners would use the political momentum created by Animal Machines to call for a new form of animal welfare that encompassed physical and affective states.