Bearing Witness

Front matter

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Bearing Witness

Ruth Harrison and British Farm Animal Welfare (1920-2000)

Part II Synthesis: The Post-war Landscape of Welfare Science and Activism (1945-1964) 4 Between Physiology and Psychology—Ethology and Animal Feelings

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

Part III Impact (1964-1968) 7 From Author to Adviser: Ruth Harrison and the Animal Machines Moment Part IV Defining Welfare (1967-1979) 8 A “minority of one”: Harrison and the FAWAC

Part V From Eclat to Consensus (1979-2000)

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

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

ALF Animal Liberation Front

BF British Farmer

BESS British Field Sports Society

BVA British Veterinary Association

CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament DB Donald Broom Ruth Harrison Papers EEC European Economic Community

FACT Farm Animal Care Trust

FAWAC Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee

FAWC Farm Animal Welfare Council

FW Farmers Weekly

HSTA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv | Bavarian Main State Archive] LACS League Against Cruel Sports

LSF Library of the Society of Friends (London) MAFF Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Farms MD Marian Dawkins Ruth Harrison Papers

NFU National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales

OBE Order of the British Empire

RADA Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

RCVS Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons

RSPCA Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

RVC Royal Veterinary College

SVS State Veterinary Service

T-AP Standing Committee of the European Convention for the Protection of Animals Kept for Farming Purposes

TNA The British National Archives xxiii

Xxiv ABBREVIATIONS

UFAW Universities Federation for Animal Welfare WFPA ~ World Federation for the Protection of Animals WSPA World Society for the Protection of Animals

YBL Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Image 3.1 Image 3.2

List OF IMAGES

Clare Winsten, Portrait by Isaac Rosenberg, oil on canvas 1916 (image courtesy of UCL Art Gallery and Bridgeman Images)

Winsten Family Portrait of Clare, Theodora, Ruth, and Stephen, Photograph ca. 1922 (image courtesy of Jonathan Harrison)

George Bernard Shaw by Clare Winsten, pencil on paper laid on board, 1949, NPG 6891 (image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)

Picture in Friends’ Ambulance Unit Card Register (image courtesy of Friends’ Library, London)

Ruth Winsten Personnel File (image courtesy of Friends’ Library, London)

Theodora and Stephen Winsten, George Bernard Shaw, Ruth Winsten, Devdas Gandhi (son of Mohandas Gandhi) and Clare Winsten at Ayot St. Lawrence (ca. 1949) (image courtesy of Jonathan Harrison)

Dex Harrison’s pleasure gardens at the 1951 Festival of Britain (image courtesy of Jonathan Harrison)

Leaflet by the Crusade Against All Cruelty To Animals pushed through Harrison’s letterbox around 1960 (image courtesy of Marlene Halverson)

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

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

Xxvi_ LIST OF IMAGES

Image 11.1 Ruth Harrison and Klaus Vestergaard observe a sow at the

Swedish Pig Park in 1988 (image courtesy of Bo Algers) 216 Image 11.2 Ruth Harrison at a Danish mink farm in 1997 (image

courtesy of Marlene Halverson) 221

Introduction

It is a rare event for a 40-year-old member of the public to pick up the mail and decide to write a book on farm animal welfare. Yet, supposedly, this is what Ruth Harrison (née Winsten) did in 1960. The result was an international bestseller and a turning point in the history of farm animal welfare. Often compared to American biologist Rachel Carson’s environmentalist mile stone Silent Spring (1962), Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) has been cited as a major inspiration by animal welfare scientists around the world, and the regulatory impact of its publication has become part of the post-war activist lore.! The same cannot be said about the book’s author. Now mostly remembered for her bestseller, Ruth Harrison often features as a one-hit-wonder, who suddenly emerged out of and then vanished back into the general ferment of British civic activism.’

1 Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (London: Vincent Stuart Ltd, 1964).

?Donald M. Broom, “A History of Animal Welfare Science,” Acta Biotheor 59 (2011), 121-137; Donald M. Broom and Andrew F. Fraser. Domestic animal behaviour and welfare (Wallingford and Oxford: CABI, 2015); Linda J. Keeling, Jeff Rushen, and Ian JH Duncan. “Understanding animal welfare,” in Michael C. Appleby, Anna Olsson, and Francisco Galindo (eds.), Animal welfare (Wallingford and Oxford: CABI, 2018), 13-26; Mieke Roscher, Ein Königreich Für Tiere. Die Geschichte Der Britischen Tierrrechtsbewegung (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2009), 260-261. Abigail Woods, “From Cruelty to Welfare: The Emergence of Farm Animal Welfare in Britain, 1964-71,” Endeavour 36/1 (2012), 14-22; Karen Sayer, “Animal Machines: The Public Response to Intensification in Great Britain, C. 1960-C. 1973,” Agricultural History 87/4 (2013), 473-501.

© The Author(s) 2021 1 C. Kirchhelle, Bearing Witness, Palgrave Studies in the History of

This narrative is too simple. Neither did the author Ruth Harrison appear by chance, nor did the campaigner Ruth Harrison vanish after 1964. A fuller analysis of Harrison’s life instead reveals a remarkable campaigning career spanning much of the twentieth century and influencing the trajectory of British animal welfare politics, science, and activism until her death in 2000. It also reveals a complex world of different actor groups trying to come to terms with the changing contours of post-war Britain. This world comprised a who-is-who of leading intellectuals, campaigners, and decision-makers. It was also a place in which animal welfare was rarely just about animals. Although actors’ concerns for animal welfare were genuine and deeply felt, they often symbolically stood in for broader concerns about the environmental and moral trajectories of British society.

Both concerns and proposed solutions changed considerably in the course of Ruth Harrison’s life. While the influence of her vegetarian parents and Quaker beliefs loomed large over Harrison’s own campaigning, the decades after 1945 saw many older forms of civic activism and thinking about animals’ place in society change. Economically and intellectually, pre-war welfare arrangements were strained by a growing number of confined intensive animal husbandry operations—so-called factory farms—and by new concepts of humans’ duties towards animals and animals’ own rights. At the societal level, a younger generation of grassroots activists experimented with new forms of direct protest and challenged traditional animal politics and leadership structures. Scientifically, ethologists and veterinary researchers opened the door for new ways of conceptualising animal welfare in physical, behavioural, and cognitive terms. Politically, once powerful bastions of agricultural decision-making were complemented by a new set of non-governmental actors including professionalising welfare organisations, large retailers, and influential assurance schemes. By the end of the century, new animal welfare concepts had transformed the production, conceptualisation, and treatment of most British farm animals.

Bearing Witness is a biography both of Ruth Harrison and of the remarkable world of activism, scientific thinking, and politics she inhabited. The book follows core conventions of the literary genre of biography as defined by Hermione Lee: it starts with Harrison’s birth in 1920 and ends with her death in 2000, tries to be as impartial as possible, investigates Harrison’s identity, but also engages with biography as a form of history.* This latter point is particularly important. Inspired by the renaissance of life stories’ approaches in the history of science and environmental, postcolonial, and legal studies,* the aim is not to provide a comprehensive inventory of events and actors. Nor is it to write a hagiography of Harrison. Instead, Bearing Witness follows recent research by Sally Sheldon, Gayle Davis, Jane O’ Neill, and Clare Parker and uses Harrison’s biography as an “important window onto the world around it.”

This approach has three advantages: (1) the chronology of Harrison’s life parallels a significant period of agricultural change, which was associated with new forms of intensive food production and an increasing divorce of urban ideals of the rural from agricultural realities. By tracing and contextualising Harrison’s life, Bearing Witness is able to chart both long-term continuities and transition points in British thinking about farm animal welfare. (2) Harrison’s hybrid status as a political insider and activist outsider also means that a biographic approach is uniquely suited to simultaneously examine what Angela Cassidy calls the public “frontstage” and compromise-oriented “backstage”’ of welfare politics. Doing so over a longer period is all the more important given what Jon Agar calls the ŝ` Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6-18.

*See, for example, Christoph Gradmann, Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology, Elborg Forster (trans.), (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Sally Sheldon, Gayle Davis, Jane O’Neill, and Clare Parker, “The Abortion Act (1967): a biography,” Legal Studies 39/1 (2019), 18-35; Mark Hamilton Lytle, The gentle subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the rise of the environmental movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Nasaw, “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” American Historical Review 114 (2009), 573; Judith M. Brown, “‘Life Histories’ and the History of Modern South Asia,” American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), 587-595; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Sudipta Sen, Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

5 Sheldon, Davis, O’Neill, and Parker, “The Abortion Act,” 32.

© Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory. The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); John Martin, The Development of British Agriculture since 1931 (London et al.: Macmillan & St Martin’s Press, 2000); Karen Sayer, Farm Animals in Britain, 1850-2001 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018).

7 Angela Cassidy, Vermin, Victims and Disease. British Debates over Bovine Tuberculosis and Badgers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 205.

post-1950s’ “sea change”® of public attitudes towards expert authority and the rise of non-governmental research and assurance schemes. (3) Pursuing a biographic approach allows Bearing Witness to merge a macroscale analysis of twentieth-century politics and science with an actorcentred human-level perspective of how a leading campaigner experienced the transforming world around her.

The book achieves this merging of biography and macroscale analysis by drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished materials. These include oral history interviews and correspondence with leading animal welfare scientists and activists, archival documents from the British government and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the previously unseen personal papers of Ruth Harrison and her research charity, the personal papers of former RSPCA Chairman Richard Ryder, the papers of Rachel Carson, the unpublished autobiography of Harrison’s mother, as well as contemporary scientific and media publications.

Readers will notice that the animals featured in this book are mostly talked about and do not ‘talk’ themselves. Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing field of animal studies has cast light on the “entangled”? relationships between humans and non-humans. The resulting body of research has flattened perceived differences between humans and animals and highlighted dynamic multi-species ecologies in the case of disease vectors, laboratory research practices, animal breeding, conservation practices, food production, and popular culture. It has also drawn attention to the role of built environments like farms, laboratories, cages, and housing systems in reflecting evolving moral economies of care and violence.'®

8Jon Agar, Science in the 20th Century and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 403-432.

°’ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3-38.

For a far from complete selection of work by historians and other disciplines, see Keith Thomas, Man and the natural world: Changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 (London: Penguin UK, 1991), Hilda Kean, Animal rights: Political and social change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Angela NH Creager and William C. Jordan, eds. The animal-human boundary: historical perspectives. Vol. 2 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert G.W. Kirk, Reliable animals, responsible scientists: constructing standard laboratory animals in Britain c. 1919-1976 (London: PhD Thesis University of London, 2005); Neil Pemberton and Mike Worboys, Rabies in Britain. Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Donna J. Harraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Henry Buller and Emma Roe. “Modifying and commodifying farm animal welfare: The economisation of layer chickens,”

Bearing Witness draws on the rich body of work resulting from the “animal turn”! but remains in the human realm. Focusing on Ruth Harrison and the socio-scientific development of farm animal welfare— which often happened away from farms—the book fills important scholarship gaps by (1) revealing the importance of farm animal welfare within the broad church of post-war activism, (2) providing a first comprehensive biography of Britain’s most influential farm animal welfare activist, and (3) highlighting the synthesist ideological drivers of post-war animal welfare as well as the increasing power of European and non-governmental actors in British welfare politics.

At first glance, it seems remarkable that Harrison’s life and campaigning have so far been neglected by historians. Two reasons emerge: the first has to do with disciplinary priorities. Mirroring the strength of environmental history in US academia, many accounts of post-war activism tend to neglect European campaigners like Harrison in favour of American figures like Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring (US 1962; UK 1963)

Journal of Rural Studies 33 (2014), 141-149; Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: conservation after nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Michael Bressalier, Angela Cassidy, and Abigail Woods, “One Health in history,” in J. Zinsstag et al. (eds.) One Health: The Theory and Practice of Integrated Health Approaches (Oxfordshire: CABI, 2015), 1-15; Kristian Bjorkdahl and Tone Druglitro, eds. Animal housing and human-animal relations: Politics, practices and infrastructures (London: Routledge, 2016); Gail F. Davies, Beth J. Greenhough, Pru Hobson-West, Robert GW Kirk, Ken Applebee, Laura C. Bellingan, Manuel Berdoy et al. “Developing a collaborative agenda for humanities and social scientific research on laboratory animal science and welfare,” PLoS One 11/7 (2016), e0158791. Henry Buller and Emma Roe. Food and animal welfare (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); Nicole C. Nelson, Model behavior: Animal experiments, complexity, and the genetics of psychiatric disorders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Rachel Mason Dentinger and Abigail Woods, “Introduction to Working Across Species,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40/30 (2018), 1-11; Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History (London: Routledge, 2018); Robert GW Kirk, Neil Pemberton, and Tom Quick, “Being well together? promoting health and well-being through more than human collaboration and companionship,” Medical Humanities 45/1 (2019), 75-81; Angela Cassidy, Vermin, victims and disease: British debates over bovine tuberculosis and badgers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Gail Davies, Richard Gorman, Beth Greenhough, Pru Hobson-West, Robert G.W. Kirk, Dmitriy Myelnikov, Alexandra Palmer et al., “Animal research nexus: a new approach to the connections between science, health and animal welfare,” Medical Humanities 46/4 (2020), 499-511.

1 Erika Andersson Cederholm, Amelie Björck, Kristina Jennbert and Ann-Sofie Lénngren (eds.), Exploring the Animal Turn. Human-Animal Relations in Science, Society and Culture (Lund: Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, 2014), 5.

is often credited with sparking modern environmentalism.” Even in Britain, farm animal welfare campaigning often fails to feature in accounts of other forms of contemporary civic activism like the peace movement or environmentalism. Over the last three decades, Meredith Veldman, Adam Lent, and Jodi Burkett have discussed the CND and Silent Spring’s impact on British activism but have ignored Harrison and Animal Machines.’ Such a focus not only neglects an important British campaigner but also contributes to an artificial separation of post-war protest movements into thematic blocks even though many participants marched for environmentalism, peace, and animal welfare alike.

In animal studies and the history of science, a prominent focus on laboratory and ‘wild’ animals or on famous ethologists and philosophers has similarly facilitated a comparative neglect of farm animals—and by extension Ruth Harrison.'* Recent accounts like Angela Cassidy’s excellent history of badgers and bovine tuberculosis or Michael Tichelar’s account of English opposition to blood sports do much to link the worlds of animal, conservation, and environmentalist politics. However, they either do not or only briefly mention farm animal welfare activism and Harrison.

2 David Kinkela, Ddt and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011); Garry Kroll, “The ‘Silent Springs’ of Rachel Carson: Mass Media and the Origins of Modern Environmentalism,” Public Understanding of Science 10/4 (2001), 403-405; Joachim Radkau, Die Ara Der Okologie. Eine Weltgeschichte (C.H. Beck: Miinchen, 2011), 118-123; Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to “Silent Spring” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Carson’s views on animals have been explored by Marc Bekoff and Jan Nystrom, “The Other Side of Silence: Rachel Carson’s Views of Animals,” Human Ecology Review 11/2 (2004), 186-200.

13 Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain. Romantic Protest, 1945- 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Adam Lent, British Social Movements since 1945. Sex, Colour, Peace and Power (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001); Jodi Burkett, “The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Changing Attitudes Towards the Earth in the Nuclear Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 45/4 (2012), 625-39.

Larry Carbone, What animals want: expertise and advocacy in laboratory animal welfare policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard W. Burkhardt Jr, Patterns of behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the founding of ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Robert GW Kirk, “A brave new animal for a brave new world: The British Laboratory Animals Bureau and the constitution of international standards of laboratory animal production and use, circa 1947-1968,” Isis 101/1 (2010), 62-94; Dmitriy Myelnikov, “Tinkering with genes and embryos: the multiple invention of transgenic mice c. 1980,” History and technology 35/4 (2019), 425-452; Robert Garner and Yewande Okuleye, The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

15 Angela Cassidy, Vermin, Victims and Disease, 129; Michael Tichelar, The History of Opposition to Blood Sports in Twentieth Century England (New York: Routledge, 2017), 11 & 28.

Intellectual histories of the period also tend to neglect Harrison and other adherents of traditional contractualist welfare models in favour of more radical utilitarian or animal rights thinkers like Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, and Tom Regan.'° Although some accounts are beginning to challenge the described farm-field-laboratory divide in animal history,” a full survey of international (farm) animal welfare activism, politics, economics, and science remains an important desideratum.

The second reason for the relative neglect of Harrison is that the few accounts explicitly addressing her tend to focus on Animal Machines and its immediate impact rather than the book’s author. This chronological flattening of Harrison’s life can in part be explained by her self-proclaimed status as an uncompromising “loner,” !8 who often struggled to find allies in larger organisations and whose story fits uneasily into existing historiographies of activism and ethology.

In ethology, textbooks and articles covering the discipline’s history usually stress the importance of Animal Machines for increasing the discipline’s public recognition. However, most accounts quickly move on to the subsequent development of animal welfare science and do not dwell on Harrison’s important family background or on her subsequent career as a campaigner and research sponsor.” In 2013, the University of Oxford

16 Gary Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, [1996] 2007); Rod Preece, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb: A Chronicle of Sensibility to Animals (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A Personal View. Writings on an Ethical Life (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), 293-302; Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton, “Animal rights,” Linda Kalof (ed.), The Oxford handbook of animal studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 25-40; Garner, Robert and Yewande Okuleye, The Oxford Group and The Emergence of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

1 Frank Uekotter and Amir Zelinger, “Die Feinen Unterschiede. Die Tierschutzbewegung und die Gegenwart der Geschichte,” in Herwig Grimm and Carola Otterstedt (eds.), Das Tier an sich. Disziplineniibergreifende Perspektiven fiir neue Wege im wissenschaftsbasierten Tierschutz (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 119-134; Robert Kirk, “The Invention of the ‘Stressed Animal’ and the Development of a Science of Animal Welfare, 1947-86,” in David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden (eds.), Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century (Woodbridge and Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 241-263; Robert GW Kirk and Edmund Ramsden. “Working across species down on the farm: Howard S. Liddell and the development of comparative psychopathology, c. 1923-1962,” History and philosophy of the life sciences 40/1 (2018), 1-29.

18 Ena Kendall, “Ruth and the Ruthless,” The Vegetarian/New Series No. 43 (April) (1975), 2.

1 Broom, “A History of Animal Welfare Science”; Broom and Fraser, Domestic animal behaviour and welfare; Keeling, Rushen, and Duncan, “Understanding animal welfare”.

organised a conference to commemorate Rachel Carson and Ruth Harrison and launch a reprint of Animal Machines. The reprint’s preface contains comments by leading contemporary welfare researchers. However, most have little to say about Harrison’s non-literary roles as a government advisor, campaigner, and research funder.” Two notable exceptions to most ethological accounts’ focus on 1964 are a 2008 essay by Heleen van de Weerd and Victoria Sandilands, which provides a cursory overview of important events in Harrison’s life and career, and Edward Eadie’s focus on Harrison’s campaigning within the so-called Eurogroup for Animal Welfare from the 1980s onwards.”

Even specialist histories of British animal welfare and rights have tended to flatten Harrison’s role. While Hilda Kean’s magisterial Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 discusses Silent Spring, it does not mention Animal Machines.” In their work on protests against live animal exports and the rise of British green politics, Alun Howkins and Linda Merricks reference Animal Machines as a key text for a younger generation of 1970s’ and 1980s’ activists but do not focus on the book’s genesis or author.” Similarly, former RSPCA chairman Richard Ryder’s often-autobiographical history of British animal protection—Animal Revolution—devotes only a brief paragraph to Harrison despite his repeated clashes with her.” Both Robert Garner’s and Mieke Roscher’s important histories of British animal protection discuss Animal Machines’ role in opening the way for the 1965 Brambell inquiry into animal welfare,

% Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines—New Edition (Wallingford and Boston: CABI, 2013).

21 Heleen Van De Weerd and Victoria Sandilands, “Bringing the Issue of Animal Welfare to the Public: A Biography of Ruth Harrison (1920-2000),” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 113 (2008), 404-410; Edward N. Eadie, Understanding Animal Welfare. An Integrated Approach (Heidelberg et al.: Springer, 2012), 19-30; see also R.C. Newberry and Victoria Sandilands, “Pioneers of applied ethology,” in Animals and us: 50 years and more of applied ethology (Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2016), 175-192.

2 Hilda Kean, Animal Rights. Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).

23 Alun Howkins and Linda Merricks, “‘Dewy-Eyed Veal Calves’. Live Animal Exports and Middle-Class Opinion, 1980-1995,” The Agricultural History Review 48/1 (2000), 85-103; Linda Merricks, “Green Politics: Animal Rights, Vegetarianism and Naturism,” in David Morley & Kevin Robins (eds.), British Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 435-436.

**Richard D. Ryder, Animal Revolution. Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000).

but limit their subsequent analysis of Harrison to her role on the margins of the so-called Oxford Group of animal rights thinkers.?°

Focusing in more detail on the changing nature of (farm) animal welfare during the 1960s, historians Abigail Woods and Robert Kirk highlight Harrison’s importance in challenging agricultural equations of animal productivity (‘thrift’) with welfare and in creating popular pressure for a reformulation of official welfare definitions. However, events leading up to Harrison’s attack on ‘factory farming,’ links to the nascent environmentalist movement, and Harrison’s subsequent campaigning remain undiscussed.’ In 2013, an important essay by Karen Sayer studied Animal Machines’ impact in more detail. Sayer argues that Animal Machines’ success was based on a pastoral romantisation of Britain’s rural past. She also points to the fact that many husbandry systems did not resemble the ‘factory farms’ described by Harrison in 1964. However, Sayer does not provide further details on the genesis of Animal Machines or on Harrison’s later work within government and animal campaigning organisations.”

By limiting our focus to the 1960s, we run danger of reducing Harrison’s career to an individual act of romanticised protest. We also too readily accept the contemporary media’s—and to a certain extent, Harrison’s own—heroic narrative of a humble outsider, who within three years researched, wrote, and published a transformative international bestseller. This is a missed opportunity. Even a cursory glance at Harrison’s life reveals a rich web of contacts with other leading campaigners and influential scientists. Their shared interest in animal cognition, emotions, and welfare and concerns about the moral status of post-war Britain would exert a powerful influence on the subsequent trajectory of animal science.” Similarly, ending an analysis of Harrison’s campaigning in the 1960s is to ignore her role in the 1970s’ polarisation of protest, the fraying of official decision-making, and the rise of a new era of European farm animal welfare politics and commercial assurance schemes.

Roscher, Ein Königreich Für Tiere 260-261; Robert Garner, Animals, Politics and Morality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 108-110.

26 Robert G.W. Kirk, “The Invention of the ‘Stressed Animal’,” 241-63; Woods, “From Cruelty to Welfare”.

?7 Karen Sayer, “Animal Machines”.

8 Robert G.W. Kirk, “Science and humanity: national culture, scientific freedom and the limits of animal experiment in Britain and America, 1949-1966”—presented at the 2019 LSE/ Animal Research Nexus “National Cultures of Care, Animals and Science” workshop, in preparation.

The five parts of Bearing Witness are designed to both overcome the chronological flattening of Harrison and reinsert farm animal welfare into the wider history of post-war British activism, science, and politics. Part I reveals that Harrison was by no means a nobody but a well-connected and educated individual with a strong family tradition of civic activism. Harrison’s parents were the painter Clara Birnberg and the author Samuel Weinstein (later Clare and Stephen Winsten). Both Samuel and Clara grew up in Eastern European Jewish families and were founding members of the so-called Whitechapel Boys, an important avant-garde group of artists from London’s East End. The couple were committed socialists, pacifists, and vegetarians, who acted on their beliefs. After moving to rural Ayot St Lawrence around 1939, the Winstens became close friends of their neighbour and fellow vegetarian George Bernard Shaw. For the Winstens and the many Edwardian intellectuals, artists, and activists with whom they engaged, refusing to harm animals was part of a wider synthesist moral agenda of societal reform, which ultimately centred on improving human welfare and ethics.

Understanding this synthesist concept of welfare and socio-moral improvement is key to explaining the post-1945 turn towards animal welfare by activists and leading scientists like William Homan Thorpe and Julian Huxley. Having experienced the barbarity of the Second World War and steeped in synthesist Edwardian thinking about science, society, and morality, British campaigners and researchers saw animal welfare as part of a broader quest for moral reform. This was also true for Ruth Harrison. Born in 1920, the proximity to leading vegetarian, social, and peace activists during her youth left a profound mark on her. In 1939, she enrolled as an English major in Bedford College and made the significant decision to join the theist Society of Friends (Quakers). During the Second World War, she was first evacuated to Cambridge and then joined the Quaker-led Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU). As the daughter of ethnic Jews, she then made the remarkable decision to aid displaced refugees in post-war Germany. After her return to the UK in 1946, Harrison enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Act and was coached by Shaw. However, despite winning awards, she did not pursue an artistic career after graduating in 1948 but instead joined an architectural firm. Following her 1954 marriage to the firm’s partner, Dexter Harrison, Harrison settled into the seemingly quiet life of a Kensington housewife.

This quietude did not last long. Living in London, Harrison soon gained first-hand experience with the new non-violent protest of the

1 INTRODUCTION ll

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She was not the only Quaker to do so. As historian Frank Zelko has shown, Quakers’ tradition of peacefully ‘bearing witness’ against unethical activities made them particularly active in the peace movement and nascent environmentalist groups after 1945.” Harrison provides a perfect example of Zelko’s profile of midcentury Quaker environmentalists like Greenpeace founders Irving and Harriet Beecher Stowe: born into a highly educated Jewish family with influential cultural contacts, Harrison had already shown a remarkable commitment to the Quaker principle of living faith through action and ‘bearing witness’ during the war. Generationally, she stood between two key cohorts of British animal activism. Old enough to meet leading Edwardian figures like George Bernard Shaw, Harrison was also young enough to participate in and appreciate the power of new post-war protest movements like the CND. At the same time, her parents’ political background and her economically constrained upbringing among Britain’s elite enabled her to fluently converse with radical and establishment circles alike.

As Part II shows, Harrison’s ability to move between older and younger as well as between establishment and anti-establishment circles made her perfectly poised to shape a watershed moment in animal welfare history. Beginning work on Animal Machines in 1961, Harrison was writing during a time of heightened wariness about the social, moral, and environmental side-effects of technological ‘progress’ as well as intensifying scientific engagement with animal cognition and emotions.

In the case of the animal sciences, the 1950s saw previously dominant behaviourist concepts of machine-like mental conditioning come under fire. Since around 1930, researchers belonging to the young discipline of ethology had begun to redirect attention to animals’ evolutionarily acquired behaviours, ability to learn via insight, and complex social lives. Trying to avoid accusations of anthropomorphism, leading continental ethologists had, however, shied away from publicly engaging with charged debates about animal cognition in the context of animal welfare. Their British colleagues felt less compunction. Inspired by what Robert Kirk has called “scientific humanism,”*° members of the Universities Federation for