Non-conform Evidence: The Impasse of 1990s Welfare Research

This chapter traces the evolution of welfare science and the marketisation of farm animal welfare between 1980 and 2000. During this time, dedicated welfare publications soared, and welfare scientists obtained prestigious university posts. The field’s growth was aided by assurance schemes for animal welfare, which enabled mutually beneficial cooperation between researchers, industry, and NGOs like the RSPCA, whose Freedom Foods Label enjoyed great popularity from 1994 onwards. Assurance schemes shifted welfare politics to the marketplace and generated funds for research and NGOs. They also deescalated frontstage welfare politics by restricting access to corporate- and expert-led discussions about standards and enforcement. Ruth Harrison was sceptical of label claims and welfare’s transition from a moral into an economic value. Meanwhile, researchers continued to disagree on how to define welfare. While most researchers remained confident in their ability to produce meaningful results, animal welfare science entered a prolonged phase of epistemic navel-gazing.

A “minority of one”: Harrison and the FAWAC

This chapter analyses Harrison’s work on FAWAC and the committee’s wider impact. Agricultural officials had weighted FAWAC membership in favour of producer interests. Within the committee, there were significant tensions over how to define welfare and the status of ethological expertise. Officials, veterinary scientists, and agricultural interests favoured productivity-focused definitions of welfare and prioritised physiological measurements of stress and metabolic conversion. Harrison and other mostly female welfare representatives successfully resisted the passage of weak new welfare codes and called for an inclusion of ethological expertise and wider ethical considerations in FAWAC deliberations. The resulting stalemate between “scientific” and “ethical” factions soon led to a breakdown of FAWAC decision-making, a stagnation of British welfare reforms, and a polarisation of public welfare campaigning.

Between Physiology and Psychology—Ethology and Animal Feelings

This chapter explores scientific thinking about animal behaviour and welfare from the late nineteenth century onwards. After a period of unsystematic investigations of animal cognition and feelings (affective states), many researchers abandoned allegedly anthropomorphic approaches in favour of new mechanistic behaviourist models. Interest in the evolutionary roots and purpose of behaviour was gradually revived by ethologists from the interwar period onwards. While senior continental ethologists shied away from research on animal feelings, a growing number of Anglo-American ethologists questioned supposed divides between animal and human cognition and anthropomorphic taboos associated with studying affective states. In post-war Britain, the University Federation of Animal Welfare and ethologists Julian Huxley and William Homan Thorpe used research on behaviour and stress to call for improved welfare. Their actions were strongly influenced by Edwardian concepts of science as a progressive force for the moral and spiritual improvement of human society.

Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to the animal welfare campaigner Ruth Harrison. It highlights her importance for the development of farm animal welfare and discusses the usefulness of a biographic approach to analyse the wider evolution of twentieth-century welfare activism, politics, and science. It also examines the reasons underlying the relative neglect of Harrison and her long-term campaigning career in existing scholarship.

Meet the Winstens: A ‘Downstart’ Anglo-Jewish family

This chapter reconstructs Ruth Harrison’s family background. It shows that Harrison was born into an avant-garde family of Anglo-Jewish artists and writers. Stephen and Clare Winsten (born Samuel Weinstein and Clara Birnberg) were members of the so-called Whitechapel Boys, had strong pacifist and vegetarian convictions, and cultivated ties to Britain’s cultural establishment. The chapter argues that understanding the synthesist humanitarian values of Edwardian reform that permeated the Winsten household is crucial to explaining Ruth Harrison’s later actions as an author and an activist.

Staging Welfare: Writing Animal Machines

This chapter uses Harrison’s personal archives to reconstruct the writing process leading up to Animal Machines. It argues that Animal Machines was as much an environmentalist and consumer-oriented book as it was about animal welfare. Harrison wrote Animal Machines between 1961 and 1964. During this period, she read scientific publications on animal behaviour, visited British farms, and corresponded with manufacturers, parliamentarians, and other campaigners—the most prominent of whom was the environmentalist Rachel Carson. Hardly any of her findings were novel. Animal Machines’ impact was instead based on Harrison’s ability to effectively stage existing concerns about intensive farming and technological alienation from nature alongside new ethology-informed concepts of animal welfare. Harrison mobilised anecdotal and scientific evidence as well as visual material to create a powerful moral contrast between a threatened romanticised countryside and a desensitised dystopian future characterised by the “factory farm.”

From Protest to ‘Holy Writ’: The Mainstreaming of Welfare Politics

This chapter examines the evolution of British farm animal welfare politics during the last two decades of Harrison’s campaigning. In 1979, the RSPCA boycotted the Thatcher government’s new Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC). The short-lived protest triggered a membership revolt and moderation of RSPCA policies. It also coincided with a weakening of agricultural corporatism in Westminster. FAWC was granted relative independence from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food and explicitly acknowledged an updated version of the five freedoms. Ensuing British welfare reforms were also driven by the increasing involvement of European bodies in animal welfare. Now in her 60s, Ruth Harrison joined FAWC as a welfare member. Her increasing public recognition as a senior welfare campaigner enabled her to proactively push for reforms, expand her fundraising activities, and sponsor additional welfare research. By the late 1990s, most of her welfare positions had become part of mainstream politics.

Conclusion

The conclusion reflects on Harrison’s achievements as a campaigner and analyses the wider changes of animal welfare politics, science, and activism that occurred during her life. Between 1920 and 2000, synthesist Edwardian campaigning gave rise to professionalised activism and new concepts of animal cognition, affective states, and welfare. The “backstage” of British corporatist welfare politics was similarly transformed by polarising “frontstage” public protest and animal rights thinking. Aided by the rise of a new “mandated” animal welfare science and European integration, the turbulent 1970s eventually resulted in a new world of British welfare politics characterised by transnational decision-making and market-driven assurance schemes, which relied on consumer citizens rather than citizen campaigners to drive change. Determined to bear witness to animal welfare, Harrison shaped and witnessed most of these changes even though the economic drivers of welfare were becoming divorced from the universalist moral framework she believed in.

Becoming an Activist: Ruth Harrison’s Turn to Animal Welfare

This chapter focuses on Harrison’s life prior to writing Animal Machines. Together with her siblings, Harrison was brought up in close contact to Britain’s cultural elite. After attending schools in London, Harrison commenced her university studies in 1939. The outbreak of war had a transformative impact on her life. Harrison was evacuated to Cambridge where she likely came into contact with ethologist William Homan Thorpe. She converted to Quakerism and subsequently enrolled in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. The Quaker principles of non-violence, humanitarianism, and bearing witness to injustice would serve as important reference points throughout Harrison’s campaigning. After the war, she completed her studies in the dramatic arts but abandoned a potential career as a theatre producer. In 1954, she married architect Dexter Harrison. Similar to many Quakers, Harrison’s humanitarian concerns motivated her to become involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and protest perceived technological, moral, and environmental threats to society.

Ideals and Intensification: Welfare Campaigns in a Nation of Animal Lovers

This chapter studies the post-war evolution of British animal campaigning. It shows how the 1950s and 1960s saw long-standing concerns about cruelty to animals and wartime tropes of Britain as a Nation of Animal Lovers merge with concerns about the impacts of new intensive animal husbandry systems. So-called factory farms were not ubiquitous. However, in popular discourse, the “factory farm” increasingly functioned as a dystopian sociotechnical imaginary of new and alien technological threats to the English countryside, animal welfare, “British values,” consumer health, and the environment.