Kirstie Philpot

With a degree in Animal Sciences and a PostGrad diploma in Wildlife Biology and Conservation, Kirstie’s former life in academia was working with some of the leading universities - the Malaria Group at Imperial College London, the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and the Animal Behaviour Group at Oxford University, and with the Ecology and Epidemiology Group at Warwick University. She worked on Bovine tuberculosis and badgers, farm animal welfare, disease spillover from domestic dogs to wildlife and anti-malarial drugs. She travelled through Brazil and Costa Rica visiting biological research stations and national parks, witnessing the realities of conservation and societal problems in local areas. She then spent over a decade working up to a senior role within the public healthcare industry, being a slave to mortgages, experiencing 9-5 office working and the internal politics of a government funded and regulated environment. She then had a family, sold her house, left her job, travelled some more and re-settled in Frome, Somerset, determined to create a better world for her children. She is now involved in local tree groups and projects, volunteers regularly at her children’s school doing art/creative projects, and grows her own food. Frustrated at the lack of action and progress seen in her lifetime she has started to write and campaign about some of the issues that concern her most - animal welfare, wildlife (in fact the global environmental catastrophe as a whole), food and sustainable living.