And the Hello everyone and welcome back to the next episode of the Disclosure

podcast I am your host Ed and today I am very fortunate and

grateful to be joined by Rich Hardy. So thank you so much for coming

on to the podcast Rich and I think we're going to have a really interesting

discussion today because I know that you've done some incredible things and by

incredible I mean brave and courageous and and life affirming and vegan affirming in

so many ways.

And so without maybe telling your story,

perhaps I could ask you, well, tell me a little bit about yourself

and kind of what encouraged you to get into what you used to do which was undercover

investigations.

Hey, yeah, thanks very much for the intro Ed.

Yeah, it's been a bit of a long journey. I got into sort of activism around 1993 as a teenager, but before though I was very much involved in day-to-day life with a vegetarian family which actually kind of all made the switch during my sort of teens.

So it was a family that grew its own food, had a lot of rescued animals and I would actually be involved with actions and protests so fairly grassroots levels.

So, you know, from a small child I was, you know, hanging out with my folks at

the sort of house protests and I'm not really being completely aware, I guess, of everything,

but, yeah, gradually like with the animal. not really

with the animals around the family I got more connected with them and

Yeah, it's uh investigations came a little later. It was like more mainstream campaigning first, but it started

I think probably around about the age I was 15 and I was about to sign, well I was about to sign with a professional football club.

And I was the only vegan in the squad at the time, so this was like 1988.

And I got dropped last minute and that's absolutely fine because I think what it did do was like put me back and focus about like my veganism and my family and our animals and yeah I

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