"So before I encountered these ideas, whenever I thought about human's relationship to animals, I only thought about the negative parts. I thought the best we could ever achieve would be to maybe erase the impacts we cause and atone for our sins and get back to neutral and be less of a cancer on the Earth. And that was my highest hope was to be a smaller cancer.

But then the wild animal welfare perspective says, well, actually humans have made life much better for ourselves over the last couple centuries. We've drastically decreased child mortality and the prevalence of all sorts of diseases. And stuff actually has been getting better for us. Maybe we could make things better for some wild animals." - Cameron Meyer Shorb

Most of us who care about animals have been focused on one thing, stopping what humans are doing to them. And it makes sense. The harm is enormous and it's ours to fix. But Cameron Meyer Shorb is asking a different question, "what if even without us, wild animals were already suffering? And what if we had the capacity to actually help them?"

Cameron is the executive director of Wild Animal Initiative, a non-profit building the scientific foundations for a field that barely exists yet. Wild animal welfare. Not conservation in the traditional sense. Not just preserving species or protecting biodiversity, but actually asking what individual wild animals experience. Whether they're in pain, whether they're okay. We talk about why nature was never quite the Eden we imagined, what it would mean to study suffering in a fish or a grouse or a pine marten, and why Cameron believes that humans, for all the damage we've done, might actually be capable of making things better.

https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/

"Let's say that you eat meat and you're sitting down and you're biting into a juicy hamburger, and your dining companion turns to you and says, 'Elizabeth, you know that hamburger is actually not made from beef. It's made from golden retrievers.'" – Melanie Joy

Melanie Joy is a psychologist, author, and the person who gave a name to something that most of us have been living with our whole lives without noticing. She coined the term carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals but not others. And her best selling book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows, has been asking people to question that conditioning for over a decade.

We talk about how Carnism works, why even compassionate people resist the information and what it actually takes to change not just what we eat, but how we relate to each other and ourselves. It's a conversation that starts with food and ends with something much bigger.

"I think something that I learned from doing that was that this is all in our heads, like it's all for show just because there's a security guard that even if he's right in front of you, it doesn't mean you can't just run past him and carry on. Just because there's a fence doesn't mean you can't climb over or cut through it. And CCTV like it doesn't matter. We're doing this openly anyway. We're not hiding anything. So that's like, that's kind of irrelevant." - Rose Patterson

Rose Patterson is co-director of Animal Rising, one of the UK's most visible and disruptive animal advocacy movements. Over the years, she's helped lead open rescues, mass direct actions and investigations that have forced national conversations about factory farming, animal testing and the systems designed to keep animal suffering out of public view.

Animal rising has blockaded distribution centers, exposed RSPCA certified factory farms and rescued animals from facilities that most people didn't even know existed. This episode centers on something more immediate. In 2022, Rose and other Animal Rising activists openly rescued beagles from the UK's last beagle breeding facility for animal testing, fully aware that they could face prison for doing so.

Rose and I talk about what it means to choose open rescue over covert action, how Animal Rising has evolved from headline grabbing moments to sustained, high impact campaigns, and why Rose, facing a potential prison sentence, describes her situation as a win either way. Underneath all of it runs a question at the heart of every justice movement what are we willing to risk when we know suffering is happening?

Since this interview was recorded, Rose's verdict has come in — she and the four Animal Rising campaigners she was accused alongside were all found not guilty. I am very happy to share that news with you!

https://www.animalrising.org/