the book that did not get translated

Roadsides without wildflowers, vanished birds in spring. Signs that were waved away as negligible sacrifices or unfortunate coincidences, but which turned out to be alarm signals of an avalanche of cancer. The latest classic edition in Swedish (Tyst vår 2021) of American biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) about how the chemical industry’s pesticides poisoned nature, animals and finally people, received a lot of attention with talks and essays in Swedish.

So then most have probably been said. Case revived. Case closed. Time to let the work rest for a while and make room for other book titles with similar purpose and content. But isn’t there some unnoticed aspect? I search over the spines of the books on the shelf where I intend to let the copy of the latest edition rest; and yes, on the shelf below, I find it, the book with a foreword by Rachel Carson powerfully advertised on the cover.

After receiving a pamphlet from the activist group Crusade Against All Cruelty to Animals (c. 1960), the author, Ruth Harrison, decided to examine the situation of Sus scrofa (pigs), Bos taurus (cows), Gallus gallus (hen birds) in the British countryside. The result, Animal Machines, the New Factory Farming Industry (1964), caused a stir in the streets and in the country’s media. Faced with the largest demonstrations ever for farm animal rights, the government appointed a review commission (Brambell) and introduced new legislation.1 

Animal machines also managed to inspire action philosophically and ideologically. Brigid Brophy, author of the groundbreaking novel Hackenfeller’s ape (1953), published an article in The Sunday Times (15 Oct. 1965), psychologist Richard D. Ryder coined the term speciesism, and philosophers at Oxford University published a critical anthology on animal oppression with contributions by Ruth Harrison and Brigid Brophy: Animals, Men and Morals (1971).

And in Sweden, how did Animal Machines fare here? Since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was immediately translated into Swedish in 1963, Ruth Harrison’s book ought also to have been translated. I consult the online library catalogues and, yes, Animal Machines is listed in seven languages.

However, not in Swedish.

The matter puzzles me. Both books draw attention to the reality of animals under human dominion; birds and other creatures in nature, in Silent Spring; birds and pigs and cows in production, in Animal Machines. Which nature-interested Silent Spring reader would not have wanted to buy a book in Swedish equipped with a Rachel Carson preface?

When Rachel Carson read the script for Animal Machines, she is said to have exclaimed in horror at the findings about the situation of animals: Can it be true?! The anecdote, accurate or not, is a clue: At the time, not many people knew what had happened to the animals in agriculture.

In the United States, the slaughterhouse industry was industrialized in the 1870s, and in the 1950s and 60s, the breeding was mechanized. Production in Europe followed suit, governed by the same concept: As many creatures in as small a space as possible. And, important here: as invisible as possible. Perhaps the facts in Animal Machines seemed unreal precisely because they were unseen by most people?

It is true that mechanization at this time had not progressed as far in Sweden as it had in the United Kingdom. Elin Wägner’s prophetic analysis of the relationship to animals and nature in Väckarklocka (1941) may have awakened parts of the women’s movement, but the public as a whole, including the literary criticism in media, seem to have pulled up their covers and gone back to sleep.

Still early in the development, it was possible to state that such conditions do not exist here.

It would take time to break through the deeply entrenched perception of the peaceful life in the countryside. Someone needed to do a similar scrutinizing work on Swedish animal production. Just over five years after Animal Machines, journalist Barbro Soller and photographer Stig A Nilsson took on the task with a series of articles in Dagens Nyheter (DN), one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, under the vignette “Djurfabriken”.

Barbro Soller was already familiar with the investigative reporting method. In the series of articles “Nya Lort-Sverige” (DN 1969), thirty years after author Lubbe Nordström’s investigate series on living conditions in the countryside (1938), Barbro Soller showed that overcrowding, damp and smoke had been replaced by lead from petrol emissions, stench from factories, pesticide residues in food – new dimensions of environmental damage that affected nature, animals and people.

The series of articles about the new animal factories, “Djurfabriken”, was quickly followed by the book with the same title (1971). Here, the team Soller and Nilsson showed in detail how animals in the Swedish countryside were kept indoors around the clock, strapped in, squeezed together or separately in tightly sealed factory buildings without ever experiencing natural habitats. Fixed in their own faeces, sick from the slurry and trained with electric shocks, the animals were fed antibiotics so as not to die of grief and illness before slaughter.

The disclosure led to discussion and new rules. The Supreme Administrative Court prohibited what it called “permanent tying of the neck by means of shackles” and “permanent tying in stalls”. The animal rights movement’s magazine Djurens rätt! (DjR), whose editor Ellen Börtz had tried in vain to get articles about Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines published in Swedish newspapers, greatly praised Barbro Soller’s contribution (DjR no. 2 1971).

Yes, the articles, and the book, made a difference, but for some reason it became Barbro Soller’s last muck raking job. Two years later, when other media had begun to cover the issue, an editorial in Dagens Nyheter, in clear prose, took a stand for the existential importance of the matter (“Animals and environment” 20 Aug. 1973). The effort to give more and more people the means to eat according to a so-called high standard, had led to pigs, cows and chickens being treated as “prisoners for life”.

With the choice of words, the editorial highlighted an overlooked complication: the case when individual reforms are not allowed to remedy the larger structural problem, but on the contrary are exploited for conservative, expanding purposes:

The debate and politics that followed Silent Spring led to stricter regulations, but also to extensive animal testing being considered necessary in the production of somewhat less harmful pesticides. The discussion about Animal machines in the UK, and later on Djurfabriken in Sweden, led to a ban on certain types of fixation (around-the-clock tie-up) and somewhat wider cage dimensions – but not to any transition away from the forced rearing of millions of creatures in colossal factory complexes.

Environmental degradation found new forms of emissions – and the breeding systems were exported to other continents.

Facts about how humanity’s planetary relatives under torture-like conditions became cheap meat and dairy products were framed by the industry’s government support, advertising and lobbying; in Sweden portrayed by logo typed animal companies as flagships for the welfare state, backed by the Swedish self-image of blue-and-yellow sincerity and idyllic pastoralism.

A little over ten years ago, in 2013, Animal Machines was published in a new edition. The book was provided with five new prefaces – in addition to Rachel Carson’s – but also this time, no publisher rushed forward to translate the non-fiction classic into Swedish.

In her foreword, Rachel Carson argues that the worship of “speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit” creates “evil” and that by some “devious rationalizing” the producers manage to “blind themselves to the harm they have done society”. “As for the general public”, she writes, “the vast majority rest secure in a childlike faith that ‘someone’ is looking after things.”

Yes, the producers’ interest in one-sided capital accumulation, combined with the naive beliefs of consumers, including politicians and journalists, implies that animal production is largely left unmonitored.

And this even when it has proven to be hyper-relevant from the widest possible perspective. An indication: Only seven percent of the U.S. media’s climate coverage includes environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions from the animal industry – despite the fact that, according to the UN Environment Program (IPCC), the size of these emissions constitutes one of the greatest threats to humanity’s living conditions (“93 Percent of climate news never mentions meat”, Sentient Climate 13 Febr. 2024).

What is the figure for Swedish media’s coverage of animal agriculture’s role in the climate crisis?

So, then, I can’t help but think counter factually: What if Animal Machines had been translated into Swedish immediately, and launched as a warning signal as early as 1964, when the animal industry had not yet become established? What if the book had been allowed to create discussion, room to manoeuvre and knowledge support for the general public, farmers, researchers and legislators – before the investments and subsidies had come into being: Is animal production desirable, or should the investments perhaps be redirected to different, less destructive systems?

Yes, imagine if Animal Machines, together with the for Sweden geographically relevant Djurfabriken, had been given the opportunity to influence the production in the direction that now, in the age of climate change, has begun to be seen as a promising, perhaps even necessary, alternative for the future, see neighboring country Denmark’s action plan for a plant-based food sector.

So that, even then, sixty years ago, one could have imagined a production without “prisoners for life” – as Dagens Nyheter’s editorial put it in 1973, and most recently, fifty years later, Andrev Walden in his editorial column about “the great captivity” (DN 3 Nov. 2023).

But perhaps I am pulling too big a gear on a circumstance.

Perhaps the failure to translate Animal Machines into Swedish was just a manifestation of negligence? Perhaps the rights managers at the publishing house simply happened to forget the book’s documents in the office on their way to a booksellers’ fair?

Some eye-opening books, despite their quality and urgency, are never published, and which ones they are may be a coincidence not worth paying attention to.

Or, we may let their fate teach us something. About the social significance and conditions of non-fiction. About the power to translate, and about the power to highlight, in time.

Originally published in Swedish in Arbetaren 3 May, #35/2024

References

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1962. Translated by Roland Adlerberth, Tyst vår, Stockholm: Trevi, 1963; Tyst vår, Stockholm: Volante, 2021

Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines, London: Vincent Stuart, 1964

Barbro Soller, foto Stig A Nilsson, Djurfabriken, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1971

Animals, Men and Morals, red. Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris, London: Gollancz, 1971. Djur, människor, moral, edited by Morgan Holm, translated by Marianne Sjögren (chapter 1-5), Leena Paaloheino-Eriksson and Morgan Holm, Stockholm: Aldus/Bonniers, 1976

Foot note

1 Helen van de Weerd and Victoria Sandilands, “Bringing the issue of animal welfare to the public, A biography of Ruth Harrison (1920-2006)”, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 113, no 4 (2008), p. 405-407; Claas Kirchelle, Bearing Witness: Ruth Harrison and British Farm Animal Welfare (1920–2000), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, p. 49, footnote 44.

© Arimneste Anima Museum # 28