The scale of animal farming is vast, its cruelty horrific, and the environmental damage extensive. Animal Equality is an international organisation working to end the suffering caused by such farming, and to promote a plant-based diet. Its large number of undercover investigations have been instrumental in exposing the reality between farm and slaughterhouse. We talk to its Executive Director, Abigail Penny, about the challenges and the successes, and how each and everyone of us can make a real difference.

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In this episode, we talk to Dr Maureen O’Sullivan who is a law lecturer at the University of Galway, and whose academic interests include intellectual property law, particularly the morality of granting patents for biotechnology ‘inventions’, including genetically altered animals. Maureen has a particular interest in vegetarianism and veganism in Ireland. At the recent summer school run by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, of which she is a Fellow, she presented on the animal rights sympathies of Irish authors such as George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. We also talked about her involvement in the successful campaign to ban fur farming in Ireland.

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Few individuals have played such a central role in the modern animal rights movement as Kim Stallwood, whose career stretches back nearly half a century. From working as a holiday job in a slaughter house, to his role as executive director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA], Kim's journey provides a shining example of commitment to the values of truth, justice and compassion. We talk to him about how much has changed, from when a London vegetarian restaurant called Cranks in the 1970s epitomised public perceptions about vegetarianism, to how a plant-based diet has become mainstream, and also what remains to be done to change radically the moral status of animals.