The Nonlinear Library EA - Lessons from two pioneering advocates for farmed animals by LewisBollard
Apr 26, 2024
09:26
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lessons from two pioneering advocates for farmed animals, published by LewisBollard on April 26, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
What would Ruth and Henry do?
How much can one person achieve for animals? Ruth Harrison (1920-2000) and Henry Spira (1927-1998) started out pessimistic. They inherited an animal welfare movement that had generated more noise than results, especially for farmed animals.
As factory farming arose in the mid 20th Century, the movement paid little attention. Moderate groups, like the ASPCA and RSPCA, were too busy sheltering lost cats and dogs - a role that had largely supplanted their original missions to win legal reforms for all animals.
Radical activists, meanwhile, were waging an endless war on animal testing. "Self-righteous antivivisection societies had been hollering, 'Abolition! All or Nothing!,'" Spira
recalled, noting that during that time animal testing had skyrocketed. "That was a pitiful track record, and it seemed a good idea to rethink strategies which have a century-long record of failure."
Harrison and Spira shook up this impasse. Harrison's 1964 book Animal Machines exposed factory farming to a mass audience and led to the world's first on-farm animal welfare laws. Spira's campaigns won the world's first corporate animal welfare policies, first for lab animals and then farmed animals.
Today's movement, which has won dozens of laws and thousands of corporate policies to protect factory farmed animals, owes much to Harrison and Spira. So how did they do it? And what can we learn from them?
Ruth-lessly effective advocacy
In 1960, an obscure grassroots group, the Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals, pushed a leaflet against "factory farming" through Ruth Harrison's door. They got lucky. The leaflet prompted Harrison, a Quaker peace activist and life-long vegetarian, to
reflect that "in doing nothing I was allowing it to happen." She set out to study the issue.
The result was
Animal Machines, the first book to document the cruelty of factory farms. With graphic images and vivid prose, she described a system "where the animal is not allowed to live before it dies." She called for a slate of political reforms.
Harrison then expertly promoted her book. She got Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, to write a foreword. Harrison leveraged Carson's endorsement to get a top publisher and to serialize the book in a London newspaper.
The book's publication sparked an outcry loud enough to force a reluctant UK Ministry of Agriculture to order a commission of inquiry. The resulting Brambell Commission called for farms to provide animals with
Five Freedoms, which guide many animal welfare policies to this day.
A few years later, the UK government passed a farm animal welfare law and established the Farm Animal Welfare Committee, on which Harrison served. These reforms partly inspired the European Convention on the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes, which led to all modern EU farm animal welfare laws.
Harrison's work also motivated the animal welfare movement, including the RSPCA, to re-engage with farmed animals. And her work helped inspire a young Australian philosopher to write an
article in the New York Review of Books entitled "Animal Liberation."
Henry for the hens
Henry Spira read that article. A former union organizer and civil rights activist, Spira would later
recall that "I decided that animal liberation was the logical extension of what my life was all about - identifying with the powerless and vulnerable."
His first campaign took on cruel experiments on cats at the American Museum of Natural Histor...
Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
What would Ruth and Henry do?
How much can one person achieve for animals? Ruth Harrison (1920-2000) and Henry Spira (1927-1998) started out pessimistic. They inherited an animal welfare movement that had generated more noise than results, especially for farmed animals.
As factory farming arose in the mid 20th Century, the movement paid little attention. Moderate groups, like the ASPCA and RSPCA, were too busy sheltering lost cats and dogs - a role that had largely supplanted their original missions to win legal reforms for all animals.
Radical activists, meanwhile, were waging an endless war on animal testing. "Self-righteous antivivisection societies had been hollering, 'Abolition! All or Nothing!,'" Spira
recalled, noting that during that time animal testing had skyrocketed. "That was a pitiful track record, and it seemed a good idea to rethink strategies which have a century-long record of failure."
Harrison and Spira shook up this impasse. Harrison's 1964 book Animal Machines exposed factory farming to a mass audience and led to the world's first on-farm animal welfare laws. Spira's campaigns won the world's first corporate animal welfare policies, first for lab animals and then farmed animals.
Today's movement, which has won dozens of laws and thousands of corporate policies to protect factory farmed animals, owes much to Harrison and Spira. So how did they do it? And what can we learn from them?
Ruth-lessly effective advocacy
In 1960, an obscure grassroots group, the Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals, pushed a leaflet against "factory farming" through Ruth Harrison's door. They got lucky. The leaflet prompted Harrison, a Quaker peace activist and life-long vegetarian, to
reflect that "in doing nothing I was allowing it to happen." She set out to study the issue.
The result was
Animal Machines, the first book to document the cruelty of factory farms. With graphic images and vivid prose, she described a system "where the animal is not allowed to live before it dies." She called for a slate of political reforms.
Harrison then expertly promoted her book. She got Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, to write a foreword. Harrison leveraged Carson's endorsement to get a top publisher and to serialize the book in a London newspaper.
The book's publication sparked an outcry loud enough to force a reluctant UK Ministry of Agriculture to order a commission of inquiry. The resulting Brambell Commission called for farms to provide animals with
Five Freedoms, which guide many animal welfare policies to this day.
A few years later, the UK government passed a farm animal welfare law and established the Farm Animal Welfare Committee, on which Harrison served. These reforms partly inspired the European Convention on the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes, which led to all modern EU farm animal welfare laws.
Harrison's work also motivated the animal welfare movement, including the RSPCA, to re-engage with farmed animals. And her work helped inspire a young Australian philosopher to write an
article in the New York Review of Books entitled "Animal Liberation."
Henry for the hens
Henry Spira read that article. A former union organizer and civil rights activist, Spira would later
recall that "I decided that animal liberation was the logical extension of what my life was all about - identifying with the powerless and vulnerable."
His first campaign took on cruel experiments on cats at the American Museum of Natural Histor...