Rachel Carson and Factory Farming

By Bernard Unti

It was Christine Stevens of the Animal Welfare Institute who encouraged Rachel Carson to pen the foreword for Ruth Harrison's "Animal Machines" (1964), a landmark critique of the intensive confinement methods that developed within post-World War II animal agriculture. It was apt that Carson be the one to provide the foreword, for Harrison's book, like Carson's own, drew strong connections between practices that hurt animals and their negative consequences for people.

The two authors had more in common than this conceptual framework, however. Harrison, who lacked Carson's professional background, would experience the same kinds of gender-based attacks that characterized reactions to "Silent Spring." And like "Silent Spring," "Animal Machines" provoked more than just public outrage.

Harrison's book was serialized in The Observer, and the ensuing outcry led to the British government commissioning the 1965 Brambell Committee Report, which set out basic principles for the rearing of farm animals and led to the establishment of the U.K. government's Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, now known as the Farm Animal Welfare Council, that would develop the Five Freedoms for farm animals:

• freedom from hunger and thirst
• freedom from discomfort
• freedom from pain, injury, or disease
• freedom to express normal behavior
• freedom from fear and distress

The American edition of "Animal Machines" did not appear until 1966, and the animal protection movement in the United States, still largely focused on humane and ritual slaughter concerns, did not shift its attention to the problems of intensive confinement agriculture until the mid-1970s. This makes Carson's censure of intensivism all the more striking. One of the first critical assessments by an American, it anticipated many of the arguments now commonly advanced against factory farming.

"The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit," Carson wrote, "and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen. … Modern animal husbandry has been swept by a passion for 'intensivism;' on this tide everything that resembles the methods of an earlier day has been carried away. Gone are the pastoral scenes in which animals wandered through green fields or flocks of chickens scratched contentedly for their food. In their place are factorylike buildings in which animals live out their wretched existences without ever feeling the earth beneath their feet, without knowing sunlight, or experiencing the simple pleasures of grazing for natural food—indeed, so confined or so intolerably crowded that movement of any kind is scarcely possible."

"As a biologist whose special interests lie in the field of ecology, or the relation between living things and their environment, I find it inconceivable that healthy animals can be produced under the artificial and damaging conditions that prevail in these modern factorylike installations, where animals are grown and turned out like so many inanimate objects. … "The question then arises: how can animals produced under such conditions be safe or acceptable human food?" 

"The final argument against the intensivism now practiced in this branch of agriculture is a humanitarian one. I am glad to see Ruth Harrison raises the question of how far man has a moral right to go in his domination of other life. Has he the right, as in these examples, to reduce life to a bare existence that is scarcely life at all? Has he the further right to terminate these wretched lives by means that are wantonly cruel? My own answer is an unqualified no. It is my belief that man will never be a 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."

Bernard Unti, senior policy adviser and special assistant to the president, received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, "Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States," is available from Humane Society Press.

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