Today, we’re bringing you a special highlights episode! It’s a roundup of some of the most interesting conversations we had in 2025. They include:

• Vicky Bond (Madre Brava) on what it's really like to lead in animal advocacy
• Lewis Bollard (Coefficient Giving) on the strategies that win and traps to avoid
• Dawn Neo (Global Food Partners) on the 4+ billion hens in cages in Asia and how we can help them
• David Cole (author of Engines of Liberty) on what we can learn from the marriage equality and gun rights movements
• Carley Betts (Open Wing Alliance), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• David Coman-Hidy (The Navigation Fund), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• Karolina Sarek (EA Animal Welfare Fund), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• Haven King-Nobles (Fish Welfare Initiative) on why high agency is critical for entrepreneurship
• Penny Tehlilah (Animal Activism Collective) on uniting "welfarists" and "abolitionists" through pressure campaigns
• David Kay (now at Kraft Heinz) on the emerging cultivated meat industry

Chapters:

• (00:00:00) Cold Open
• (00:01:55) Lewis Bollard on what advocates commonly get wrong.
• (00:05:34) Vicky Bond on overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome
• (00:09:07) Haven King Nobles on how to help new projects succeed and supporting new founders
• (00:15:48) Penimah Tehilah on how pressure campaigns can unite the movement.
• (00:29:37) David Kay on the importance of centering animals in our advocacy.
• (00:33:34) Dawn Neo on changing informal markets and production in low income countries
• (00:36:00) David Cole on the importance of incrementalism in past social movements
• (00:52:25) Carley Betts on moving past good cop and bad cop binaries in campaigning
• (00:57:17) David Coman-Hidy on the importance of political advocacy
• (01:01:19) Karolina Sarek on progress for shrimps

For those who miss Amy as a co-host, you’ll be very happy to know that a bunch of these snippets include her too.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Dawn was one of the first people in Asia working on cage-free reforms – she started working on Asian farm animal welfare 10 years ago, often as one of the few individuals talking to major food companies about improving the welfare of animals in their supply chain.

Dawn Neo is the director of corporate engagement at Global Food Partners. She works with food and hospitality businesses as well as various stakeholders in the industry to improve farm animal welfare. Prior to joining Global Food Partners, she was the lead for Humane Society International’s farm animal welfare program in Asia.

Today, we cover lots of important things: Major trends in Asian farming, the 2025 cage-free deadline, how to deal with countries with large informal markets, cultural differences in campaigning and negotiation and much more.

Chapters:

(00:00:00) - Cold Intro

(00:00:50) - James' intro and Dawn's background

(00:08:12) - Why Asia is critical for farm animals

(00:12:15) - How countries differ in production systems and why this matters

(00:17:55) - Who is on track for their 2025 cage-free commitments?

(00:23:17) - What if companies can't meet their commitments? & how do cage-free credits work?

(00:31:13) - Which Asian countries are doing well?

(00:36:48) - Rising egg consumption in Asia

(00:41:09) - How to tackle informal markets? Should we get new commitments or hold companies accountable?

(00:43:30) - Cultural differences in campaigning

(00:57:09) - The need for patience & self-care in advocacy

Resources:

• Global Food Partners LinkedIn
• Global Food Partners podcast
• Global Food Partners contact page
• Jason Hickel – Less is more

For sending recommendations of future guests:

• hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com
• James’ LinkedIn: James Özden

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Vicky Bond has done lots of impressive stuff in her career – she started working as a vet and later ended up running a 100+ person organisation, The Humane League (THL), which many of you might be familiar with as one of the key organisations campaigning to get chickens out of cages. She is now the CEO of Madre Brava, an international climate campaigning group focused on food.

Given Vicky’s extensive leadership and management experience, managing teams ranging from 5 to over 110, I wanted to pick her brains about leadership and management in the animal advocacy movement. I would highly recommend it for people who are leading teams of any size or want to learn more about how to do it well!

Podcast news:

• We now have a Substack where we’ll soon be sharing summaries and key takeaways from all episodes! We’ll also be doing polls where you can vote on the next guests. Sign up here.
• After our last episode with Sjir from Giving What We Can, we’ve had some people take a pledge to donate between 5-10% of their income to effective charities – this is incredible! But I said I would give up to £1000, and most of this is still up for grabs. So if you’re considering pledging, now is a great time as I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge of 1% or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly.
  • The 🔹Trial Pledge
  • The 🔸10% Pledge

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Cold Intro
00:09:38 - Challenges and lessons in being a first-time CEO
00:20:40 - Vicky's experience running 100+ person THL
00:26:45 - Challenges in running large organisations
00:39:02 - Misconceptions around running large teams
00:42:55 - Advice for running 20+ person orgs
00:46:41 - The downsides of scale
00:56:04 - What makes a good leader
01:02:05 - Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome
01:05:55 - Madre Brava's strategy on protein split ratios

Resources:

• Entangled life: How fungi make our world
• Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast
• Rich Roll podcast
• Madrebrava.org and LinkedIn
• The secret thoughts of successful women

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!