The big generalist animal welfare charities are fine, but one of the things I loved when researching my book was finding those individuals who have come to focus on a particular area or species. Prime examples are the likes of Sue Joyce (pigeons – above), Rita James (greyhounds), and Dene Stansall (horse racing).

They come to deeply understand their areas of expertise, which makes them such eloquent and powerful advocates. They are typically raising awareness and fighting for species that are largely neglected by the rest of the movement. And as each has shown, that doggedness and understanding of the issues can have a big impact.

Pigeons

Pigeons are an absolute case in point. I might have vaguely thought that pigeon racing was bad, if I’d given it any thought at all, but talking to Sue Joyce was an eye-opener, about the cruelty of traditional racing but also the multi-million pound ‘One-loft racing’ that has arisen in recent years. The birds are just disposable, Sue explained, the practices are inherently cruel and the races have high mortality races. Sue has received a couple of ‘credible’ death threats.

There’s also the wider view of pigeons as ‘vermin’. Sue has a veterinary background and her interest in pigeons began with housing birds for rehabilitation. The sheer number of pigeons coming in, often with stringfoot or salmonella, and the challenges of rehabilitating them led her to specialise here. She set up the National Pigeon Advocacy Association in 2024 to create and support a network of rehabilitators as well as seeking to change the polices of councils and others away from ‘pest control’.

Greyhounds

Greyhounds have a somewhat higher profile but Rita James has been fighting their corner for many years, founding the Campaign Against Greyhound Exploitation & Death (Caged). Once more, what Rita doesn’t know about greyhounds and their exploitation probably isn’t worth knowing. Time and time again, Caged has shone a light on the appalling practices and death toll within the ‘sport’.

Rita had been particularly horrified by the case of a builder’s merchant in Durham who provided a paid service to dispose of racing’s unwanted dogs using a bolt gun and burying the bodies in his garden. Over 15 years, he was believed to have killed at least 10,000 dogs. Caged has carried out undercover investigations, has brought legal actions, was an early adopter of advertising billboards, and bought a digital screen vehicle – “the industry hated it!” The good news is that there has been a steep decline in the popularity of greyhound racing, with many tracks closing, but there is also ‘underground’ racing, typically on waste ground and attracting a fairly unsavoury set of punters.

Marches to end dog racing are taking place in London and Manchester on 25th July – see the events section – and there are regular protests outside the UK’s remaining tracks.

Horse racing

Everyone I asked about horse racing said I needed to speak to Dene Stansall. And they were right. Sadly, the demise of horse racing is less clear-cut than greyhound racing. Dene has been running Race Horse Death Watch since 2007, with the grim and time-consuming task of identifying and recorded every horse that dies on a racecourse in Britain (3094 named deaths to the end of 2025). And 2026 did not start well, with three fatalities in one day (10 January) at Kempton Park.

Out of sight, thousands are killed or dumped every year when they fail to make the grade or when their racing days are over, while others die in training. As with greyhounds, they are mostly regarded as commodities. Dene’s grandfather was a bookie and Dene was, briefly, a racing enthusiast but he was an animal lover and became involved in other areas of animal rights, which made him question where he stood on horse racing. “I thought, this isn’t right and someone needs to start standing up for the horses.” In the early 1990s, he formed a group called ‘Action to Abolish the Grand National’.

There have been protests and disruption of meetings, most notably by Animal Rising, plus exposés in the national media. Dene predicts that horse racing will have a slow demise, ‘death by a thousand cuts’, and it could certainly be argued that he has helped to administer some of these himself, with the high-profile Death Watch and also his deep subject knowledge, that makes him such a powerful advocate for change.