On this day in vegan history · June 24, 1920
Ruth Harrison Is Born
A Quaker conscientious objector grew up to write the book that made factory farming impossible to ignore, and forced a government to answer for it.
The facts
- Born
- 24 June 1920, London, England
- Book
- Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry (Vincent Stuart Publishers, 1964)
- Government response
- Prompted the 1965 Brambell Report, which outlined the Five Freedoms for farm animals
- Recognition
- Served on the UK Farm Animal Welfare Committee; awarded an OBE in 1986
Ruth Harrison was born in London on 24 June 1920, the daughter of the writer Stephen Winsten and the artist Clara Birnberg. She served as a conscientious objector with the Friends Ambulance Unit during the Second World War, then turned her attention to the new postwar farming methods reshaping how animals were raised. In 1964 she published Animal Machines, a plain-eyed account of intensive poultry and livestock farming that named the suffering built into the new system. The British government could not simply wave it away: it appointed a committee under Francis Brambell, and within a year that committee's report had set out principles for farm animal welfare still cited today.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The book exposed the suffering inflicted on farm animals by industrialised agriculture.
Wikipedia's entry on Ruth Harrison, describing the impact of Animal Machines (1964)
Source: Wikipedia -
reading Animal Machines was important in his becoming a vegetarian and adopting the views that he sets out in Animal Liberation
Wikipedia's account of Peter Singer's reaction to the book, citing Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life (2001)
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Animal Machines is the reason factory farming stopped being invisible: it pushed a government to write down, for the first time, what animals were owed, and it is the book Peter Singer and Ingrid Newkirk both point to as the one that changed them.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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