IATP Hog Report - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Section 6
widespread abuses of animal factories in Animal Machines: The New
Factory Farming Industry, little has changed about the basic model of
industrial animal production, especially in the United States. 83,84
Shortly before her death from cancer, Rachel Carson wrote the foreword
to Harrison's Animal Machines. In words that could easily have been
written today, Carson noted: 85
The modern world worships the gods of speed and
quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this
idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.
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....
Although the quantity of production is up, quality is
down.... The menace to human consumers from the drugs,
hormones, and pesticides used to keep this whole fantastic
operation somehow going is a matter never properly
explored.
Sydney Jennings, a past president of the British Veterinary Medical
Association, wrote in the preface to Animal Machines: 86
[Harrison's] whole book is a timely warning to man to halt
in the surge forwards into new methods of farming so that
he may quietly and philosophically consider where it is all
leading.
Four decades later, U.S. agriculture still has failed to change direction and
adopt a more humane, sustainable model of animal production. Why did
the warnings go unheeded; or, if heeded, why were they not acted upon by
the industry and government despite public concerns?
During the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, magazines and newsletters
directed to farmers were filled with articles describing the dangers to
agriculture of extremists who questioned industry practices, such as
intensive confinement and subtherapeutic antibiotic use. In particular,
powerful interests in the U.S. livestock industry and academia squelched
debate by misrepresenting the implications of growing public concern
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