Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the Webinar vet. So pleased to have one of my gurus on, somebody I look up to in the whole area of sustainability. It's Sean McCormick, who has had a very varied career, which I'm sure you're going to share with us, Sean, but, I have to tell everybody my slightly embarrassing story to start off with, which was, I myself and Robin Hargreaves went in early March up into the dunes in Sefton, and we were very pleased with ourselves to see all these.

Toads mating with each other and of course thought they were, natterjacks and you quite rightly when I showed you the photograph, pointed out that these were a bit too early and they were common toads, so, . You, you're a guru, you know your toads, you know your reptiles, you know your birds and everything. You you're just a renaissance man, aren't you?

I'm I'm a bit of a toad nerd now, Anthony, so you know you caught the right thing there. Yeah, no, just a bit of a nature nerd in general, I think, all my life to to varying degrees, but yeah, I like the small little detailed stuff. I think I'm the same as you, and it's really interesting before we sort of go too much into your background.

And, you know, I'm writing a bit now for various magazines and the the the way that everything's connected, you know, the number of people who are asking me to write an article on how nature benefits mental health, for example, and, you know, all these sort of things. So everything is connected and it's just why it's so important. I know we talk about sustainability a lot, but.

It's sustainability not only in in the planets, but it's also for the people and the animals. If we don't get the planet right, you know, it's not great for anybody's mental health, is it, if we're, if we're seeing a denuded planet, you know, all the time. Yeah, absolutely.

I did another podcast recently actually, and I was asked, you know, what is it about nature and the natural world that like fascinates you or that you find most kind of interesting. And for me it is that thing of everything being completely connected and joined up. Like you can learn about a single species of plant or animal and what it does and what its natural history is and its biology is, but actually when you start to delve into that and start to join the dots and see how everything is so intricately linked.

And actually the, the difficult part is seeing how we've sort of started pulling elements out or putting pressure on certain elements and then all of those chains and webs and complex relationships start to fall apart. That's when, you know, it gets really interesting and and you start to see the damage that we can do, you know. And it starts very much from the bottom.

I've just finished a little while ago Dave Gulson's book Silent Earth, and you know very much about that insect apocalypse, how insects are crashing. But how with little things that, you know, we can, we can start bringing them back again. And then how that affects the birds if the insects aren't there, suddenly you're seeing birds like house sparrows diminishing one of my sort of key facts is I remember listening to sparrows when I was a little boy outside my window on a very busy road in Liverpool.

Actually wants to become a vet because one of my friends had accidentally killed a sparrow while we were playing in the playground. And then 50 years later, you know, there's 50 million less sparrows in the country than there were in the, in the 60s and early 70s. So we're in really sort of troubling times, but I know, I, you know, you were, you were also at COP 26.

I mean, perhaps tell us a little bit about. The journey before that, obviously you're a vet like myself, with a love of animals, and you've done some fabulous webinars for us both on pet nutrition, but also you have that love of exotics as well. Perhaps tell us a little bit about that and then we'll, we'll talk a bit about COP 26 and how you found that and how you got there as well.

Yeah, it's a bit of a convoluted journey, I suppose. It starts really with the fact that I was a lifelong naturalist, I suppose, and then started getting more into kind of conservation on a very local level, you know, even as a teenager growing up, getting involved with local bird group and local nature groups and things and just being again fascinated by being outdoors in nature and discovering what it had to offer. And so I would say I kind of was a biologist and naturalist before I just said, you know, what job do I want, what career do I want?

I want to be a vet. Being a vet was kind of one of the few jobs I knew of that, you know, could involve animals and biology and science combined. Had a lot of pets growing up, won't bore everyone with the details.

We all have similar stories as vets, I think, in how we got in there. But I did my undergrad degree in animal science and did veterinary as a graduate in Dublin, and the animal science degree kind of gave me a really broad experience of kind of evolutionary biology, anatomy and physiology. And I was fascinated by kind of anatomy of a wide range of species and how those species basically were ultimately adapted to their ecological niche and their biology and natural history, and that side of things really fascinated me and then In the later years studying kind of ecology and habitat and conservation management and things, again, seeing kind of joining those dots of how the individual species in an ecosystem all join up and all are connected.

So it kind of came out of my veterinary degree with fairly broad knowledge of how animals work, both in the kind of pet and livestock and kind of human realm, but really how animals work in the wild realm as well. And to be honest, you know the story, but I got increasingly frustrated in a clinical setting. I was doing domestic and exotic pets in private practise, and I did that for about 6 years and really loved exotics because it kind of catered to my like of the weird and unusual and small smaller interesting things like reptiles and amphibians and birds that I was really fascinated with as a kid.

But I got increasingly frustrated with actually the, the issue of keeping these pets, many of them essentially wild animals, in suboptimal conditions in captivity for human entertainment, and a lot of the problems that we got with them were entirely avoidable by improving their nutrition or their captive husbandry. And I got really Frustrated with just, you know, talking to owners over and over again about why temperature is important for your pet reptile, or why, you know, this diet is not a balanced diet for X, Y, or Z species. So, kind of got a little bit frustrated, got a little bit burnt out in clinical practise after 6 years.

Again, a familiar story to many of your listeners, I'm sure. But I decided to take some time back and actually before I went into a veterinary industry role. Believe it or not, I started up a garden design business or replenished, rejuvenated a garden design business because I worked in a garden centre as a kid.

I worked while I was doing my animal science degree with a lot of my horticulture friends in the summers and things, doing landscaping and garden maintenance. And then when I was in vet school, I had my own garden design and maintenance business for, you know, the beer money. And I, yeah, yeah, fingers in many pies all along, but I basically, I just wanted a break from the veterinary space for a while and get outdoors and My hands in the earth again and start working with plants and start talking to people about how we could garden in a more friendly way for the planet and more friendly way for biodiversity.

And that break actually did me the world of good because it really clarified for me where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my time and energy, and it wasn't about no offence to anyone else who it is about, but it wasn't about Pampered pets, you know, in, in Richmond in Surrey, and it wasn't about, you know, dealing with exotic species in small tanks that I was just, you know, despairing at because I was getting nowhere. I was firefighting rather than actually solving the issues. It was really about taking a broader look at again, our planet health and particularly kind of wild animals and ecosystems and how it could help there.

So you've got a really Important role to play in that whole area of conservation and sustainability because if we as vets don't embrace that, you know, who is going to lead it, I think it's really important that we're seen as leaders in this whole field of, you know, ecology and climate action. Yeah, I mean, if you think about one health, you know what I mean, a lot of human medics, you know, have not fully embraced the concept of one health. One health is about human health, animal health, and environmental health, and I think as vets, you know, we are dealing with the kind of confluence of all three of those things.

I don't think there's a better profession. Really to be leading on global one health. So you know we're in an amazing position and we have, you know, a lot of knowledge and a lot of know-how on how to tackle those three things together.

We're often doing it at a micro scale, you know, in our daily practise, but doing it at a macro scale, I think we have a really important kind of place at the table as well. We have A lovely Costa Rican vet works with us called Theo, and she was over the last week, and it really brought back memories of when I was in Costa Rica about 15 years ago. When you see 5 scarlet macaws flying across the forest clearing, and then, you know, find them in or find one in a small aviary on its own, you cannot give that bird what it needs in that setting, can you?

No, no, I've seen it myself, I've been to Australia and seen, you know, cockatoos flying in flocks of 20 and 30 birds, and just thinking about the patients I had and was treating and Trying to get them over the psychological issue of feather plucking and frustration behaviours in a small cage in someone's living room for 60, 70 years. It's like actually it made me examine my conscience and what I'm contributing to and what I'm potentially glamorising, you know, on Twitter, my old handle was exotic petvet, and I just found actually by showcasing all of these interesting and amazing cases and species I'm dealing with, am I just glamorising, you know. The micro scale of exotic pets and how we interact with them.

And there's obviously some pets that I think, you know, exotic pets can be kept well. But you know, it's like with the rabbits, sometimes people get it as the first child's pet. I mean a rabbit is a complicated creature to keep well, a cat is much easier, you know, we've had a cat that's adopted us during the pandemic.

His needs are actually very small. You feed him, he occasionally jumps on your lap for a cuddle, but it's a very short cuddle. You know, he can kind of look after himself compared with a rabbit, which is a, you know, you need to keep a very close watch on a rabbit, don't you?

Yeah, well, first things first, you shouldn't have a rabbit. They're social species. Exactly, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, we're getting it wrong with a lot of pets unfortunately, but yeah, look, not to say that you can't keep certain pets very, very well, but I think a lot of the time what I was dealing with in practise was pets being kept suboptimally and you know, it got to me over time and I thought I want to do bigger picture stuff. So I moved into industry and at the same time I For the first time ever, had some time on my hands and, and I decided to set up a local wildlife conservation group where I live in London and that's grown into something much bigger than I anticipated. We will, we will talk about that in a minute because that is an exciting story, but Obviously COP 26, I went to it.

I mean, you'll be pleased to know Sean, I didn't fly up in my private jet left that at home that day, yeah. I, I, I let the Prime Minister borrow it for the day, you know, so he was I can't speak louder than words, so being the president of the COP 26, it probably meant he should. Have used to train, but we will move on.

We don't want to make it too political. And I went up on train, that's pretty, pretty carbon neutral. I mean it's pretty good going up on a train, but you, you went one better, you actually sailed up there.

Tell us about that story. I did. I sailed up took 2 as well, didn't you?

You're not the best sailor, I think if I remember correctly. Well, I highlighted the first trip which was in seas that we probably shouldn't have undertaken the first leg of the trip and so yes, I did vomit off the side of the boat, but generally I was pretty good. So I think 3 out of 6 of us on the boat gave something to the sea, let's put it that way, on that leg.

Yeah, yeah, but no, that was an interesting project and it's hopefully going to come out as a documentary in the near future. Fingers crossed there will be some news on that soon. But basically myself and another vet, Dr.

Paul Ramos, I'm not sure if you're aware of him, he has done some television work with Nat Geo Wild and Animal Planet, and a producer he knew was interested in putting something together, and he's American but has lived a lot of his life in Australia, and he asked me to come along because he didn't know much about British wildlife and British ocean health and things. But basically what we wanted to do was put together a documentary but also bring the message of ocean health to COP 26 because believe it or not, it wasn't on the main agenda. And when the ocean is producing, you know, over half of our oxygen and absorbing a lot of carbon and keeping the temperature of the planet stable and things and has a huge amount of biodiversity, we were kind of left scratching our heads as to why it wasn't on the main agenda, COP 26.

So we decided to undertake a challenge sailing from Cornwall up to Scotland to COP 26, and we were set another challenge within that by Dr. Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol, who is a marine biologist and studying the effects of climate change on, on kind of our ocean ecosystems, and he set as a challenge to record the longest kind of country length, underwater sound transect. So we were making sound recordings under the ocean on the entire trip up and kind of looking at what species were in British waters.

And one of the fascinating things we found was a little tiny species of shrimp called a snapping shrimp. It's about the size of your little finger. It's got one massive big claw and it uses it to kind of punch an air bubble and stun its prey, and it's a very distinctive sound on a hydrophone when you, when you hear it.

It's almost like crackling bacon. You just hear this snaps, crackle and pop kind of bacon sizzling sound. And he thought that it's a Mediterranean shrimp species.

He thought maybe it's reached, you know, southern waters of Britain 10 years ago. It might be as far as mid Wales by this stage, but we actually found that shrimp had made its way all the way up to the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. And then common dolphins, which were also a southerly species historically of of fairly warm water, they had reached the Hebrides as well, and we're now the most common cetacean whaler dolphin species spotted in the Hebrides from zero in the year 2000.

To over 2000 last year. So we're seeing that actual temperature shift, and ecosystem shift of warm water species northwards, which means a lot of the cold water species are going to be struggling and being pushed northward as well into kind of narrower, narrower bands. So we did a lot with that and we produced an audio music track using all the recordings we had got and we released it on Spotify and we managed to get it played into the blue zone to the world's leaders at COP 26, which is a great finale for a fairly challenging month on a boat with 5 guys, and I learned the meaning of cabin fever.

Let's put it that way. No, that was brilliant, and I think you're right, you know, COP 26 obviously was There's a there's another cop going on at the moment, which is more around biodiversity, but. I think there is a, my concern worry is that we become.

Obsessed with carbon and don't think about biodiversity, and if we don't marry the two things up and think about them holistically, we'll probably get it wrong, because as you say, things like, you know, the sea grasses can actually hold a lot of carbon as well and then they're really important for things like seahorses and so on. So it is so important that we have a holistic approach to this because otherwise we start planting trees in all the wrong places and you know, none of the animals will go into those forests, will they? Absolutely.

I think like the biodiversity crisis is just as important, but I often describe it as, you know, the kind of poorer cousin of the climate crisis and the car and carbon emissions and things. We get obsessed with that because it's measurable, you know, tree planting has almost become this, you know, sexy solution to to our planet's crisis and actually woodland cover, you know, we Believe it or not, we don't need to plant trees for woodland cover to happen where it's meant to happen. Trees will kind of plant themselves.

We need regeneration of landscapes. We need to allow landscapes to restore themselves and actually going out and doing mass tree planting on, you know, sensitive grassland habitats is the last thing we should be doing, you know, so the, the whole trees and carbon and carbon offsetting, world. Has become a little bit kind of commercial and capitalistic within itself and it's got some flaws actually, as you say, you know, things like sea grass meadows, and natural grasslands, freshwater wetland systems as well, capture a lot more carbon than than woodland cover a closed woodland canopy does.

So I think we need to think outside the box, but also, as you say, marry up the two, the climate crisis and the carbon crisis is one thing. But biodiversity is in freefall, you know, for the last few decades, and 1 in 7 species of plant or animal in the UK is now facing extinction. How incredible is that?

Incredibly depressing, but 1 in 7 species now is threatened with extinction. It's actually unbelievable, but most people don't really connect with that or don't really know what to do about that, I suppose. What's really interesting, we have Lun buy us, which is a Lancashire Wildlife Trust.

Reserve and it is beautiful. It's, it's like a little paradise, obviously a wetland, obviously doing all those great things, but also during the big storm that we had, the, the banks of the river are broken. We probably would have ended up with a huge flood in Magull, which is one of the suburbs on the north of Liverpool, but this actually protected Magull.

So again it's a holistic example of we're doing it for, You know, for the wetlands, for the carbon, for the animals, but actually one health wise it's also stopped us potentially loss of human life, but certainly damage to property as well. So yeah, it's totally connected and that's a good example of nature-based solutions, you know, there's a lot of buzzwords flying around, but some of them are really important and need to get into the kind of public vernacular of of what they mean and kind of how to do them. So, you know, wetland creation, especially urban wetland creation now is going to make our urban centres a lot more resilient to climate change and to flood risk and things like that because they're going to hold back, not only hold back and slow down flood waters, but also, you know, sink carbon and cool the air and things like that.

So and provide a haven for biodiversity as well. Everything is interlinked, but Nature Based Solutions, something that I think our government really needs to get their head around and employ a little bit better and build into legislation and planning of how we progress. I, I was very lucky in, I think it was 2012, to go to Vancouver for the World Congress of that and they have a park in Vancouver called Stanley Park, which I know it well, yeah.

Where I was brought up was also Stanley Park between the two football grounds in Anfield, so there was a but what Stanley Park in in Anfield doesn't have it although it has beautiful great crested greaves and and some really exciting stuff which, I suppose the football fans as they're walking past, plus it's also had a new wildflower meadow planted, so it is fantastic place, but people won't necessarily recognise that if they're not open to it. But what it didn't have, which Stanley Park had in Vancouver, and I actually saw one, was a, was a beaver. So a nice little beaver swam past in Stanley Park and.

Of course beavers are, are such fabulous creatures, all the good work that they do, and I'm sure people have heard about the Yellowstone story and things. But tell us your exciting news. I, we're perhaps going a bit early to press, but there is potentially exciting news from, from, from West London, isn't there?

There is, yeah, yeah. We have great beaver shaped plans, basically. So, I run Ealing Wildlife Group and we started as a very kind of grassroots volunteer led, kind of small scale conservation group, but we've grown quite a lot and we've grown in our aspirations as well.

And one of the things we did last year was we reintroduced Britain's smallest rodent back to Ealing. We think it's been extinct since the 1980s, which is the harvest mouse, that little cute mouse that you often see in photos, you know, on an ear of corn or barley or something. And then we said, right, we've, we're reintroducing Britain's smallest rodent.

We actually want to reintroduce Britain's largest native rodent as well, which has been extinct for over 400 years, which is the Eurasian beaver. So we actually, we don't have news news on that yet, but we have submitted our licence application to Natural England to do that, and it would be a 5 year enclosed trial to see what kind of effects beavers can have as ecosystem engineers and as nature-based solutions really in the urban context. So it'll be the first time that we've, this has been done in like truly urban context.

And the main aims of it are to look at flood mitigation. So like you said, with, you know, that wetland near you holding back water and storing water in times of flood and releasing it slowly, beavers do the same. They slow the flow through a landscape by damming it up and almost the landscape around them acting as a sponge for flood flood.

Waters. The second thing is we want to see how urban communities will interact with nature-based solutions and beavers in the urban context and learn how we can mitigate some of the damage that beavers can do, you know, tree protection and things like that, which is very easy and a lot of cities already have beavers Vancouver, Berlin, Munich. Perth in Scotland, you know, has wild free living beavers, and the third thing we want to do is see what the biodiversity benefits will be of bringing beavers back because it's been shown over and over again that they do provide habitat for lots and lots of other things as well.

So really, really exciting and and the unique thing about this project that we've kind of put together is that it will be the first time it's an immersive experience for the public. It's part of the capital ring. So pedestrians and cyclists will be able to walk through the beaver landscape.

It's about 10 hectares in total, and they'll be able to see, you know, with no fences around them what beavers are doing and hopefully there'll be massive educational potential there. So it's down to natural England now. The deadline actually to hear back from them is this Friday, so we're waiting, you know, hotly anticipated emails coming our way, hopefully.

And if they say no, we will really want to have a very, very good reason and rationale why they say no, because there's been lots of enclosures done. We think ours is unique because it's actually looking at beavers coming back into our cities, and that's an inevitability. Beavers are out there now living in Britain again, which is fantastic.

It's only a matter of time before they start to encroach on cities, and we need to learn to live alongside them. So why not try that in a controlled way first. Well then the scientific experiment, so to speak, where we can get really great data from it.

I know, very close to them when I was travelling last year. I think it's the River Otter, isn't it, down in Dorset and where they, where they are and all the work there seems to have been really positive, doesn't it, that there, there's, there's only really positives. I know, going back to the tree thing, one of the Big problems for the trees is our is our plague of deer, which of course we don't have a we don't have an apex predator apart from ourselves to control deer.

So I think deer do a lot more damage to trees than the odd beaver would do. Yeah, the thing with beavers is and our trees, you know, beavers have only been gone from the landscape for a few 100 years, and that's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, but they've evolved alongside our trees for millions of years. So, you know, our trees are all designed and the beavers' favourite tree species are the ones that are absolutely designed to withstand coppicing to the ground.

So things like willow, alder, birch, they get coppice to the ground on their main stem and they throw up more again. And what happens is the beavers create a kind of A succession of different age vegetation structures and that's what brings in the biodiversity. They're kind of described as a biodiversity magic pill.

Because they introduce, you know, kind of varied structures in the landscape, and our trees do fine without them. The problem with, you know, the massive tens of thousands of excess deer in the landscape is they don't allow any of the saplings to regenerate or any of the trees to regenerate, and you get this bare denuded land, you know, the uplands of Scotland and and things like that. We see them as normal because it's shifting.

Baseline syndrome, it's just what we've always thought of as upland Scotland to look like, but actually where they've sectioned out areas and excluded deer or they're applying high culling pressure on deer, we're seeing regeneration of what, you know, Scottish Caledonian forests should be now in their infancy again and the associated bursts of biodiversity that happens when we allow that natural process to take place again. So yeah, I think bringing back the links. Bringing back wolves, they're controversial concepts and rewilding, but, you know, we were great in this country at telling other other countries what they should do to manage their wildlife, but actually we're one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, and actually if we can't live a life alongside lynx and wolves, then actually can we really talk to other countries about what they're doing with their wildlife?

I don't know. No, I absolutely agree, and I think it's, it's an interesting concept that Benedict McDonald talked about in the revering book very much. You know, people are now used to not seeing many sparrows, whereas 50 years ago when I was growing up, there were many more sparrows in the environment and probably if I had I gone back another 100 years, there would have been even more sparrows.

So you know that. And the world's changed, hasn't it? We obviously we, we developed agriculture, so each generation is different, but .

We have to, we have to start thinking about systems that will allow us to feed everybody, but at the same time, it's, it's good quality meat rather than the sort of factory farm stuff that isn't necessarily that healthy for us either. Yeah, and less meat and more kind of regenerative agricultural practises that build soil and take care of our soil, which is the base of every food chain. Also, like the, the example of that shifting baseline that everyone will identify with that when you say it, you're like, oh yeah, that's true, whatever age you are.

If you think about the insects on your windscreen when you were a kid, you know, if you were going in a car journey, you'd be wiping them off. You'd be hearing them thud thud thud. On the windscreen and the headlamps, especially at nighttime, and you'd have to wipe it down when you got home.

Nowadays you get home from an hour's drive in the countryside and there's barely a mark on your windscreen. So we've actually caused this huge colossal decline like Dave Golson describes as the insect apocalypse. And once we've taken out that base layer of the food chain, everything else further up collapses, and our ecosystem suffers for it.

So it's hard sometimes to explain that link to people of what if we have fewer mosquitoes or fewer ladybirds or fewer of some obscure solitary bee. We might not know the impact of that, but the rate we're damaging those little tiny things is actually causing a cumulative effect over time and Our climate and our environments are getting less resilient as a result, you know. And the insecticides we now produce, you know, very tiny amounts will kill, you know, large numbers of insects, whereas, you know, we went back to the 60s, there was DDT, but you know, there are much more sophisticated.

Insecticides now and you know, we have to obviously manage those. I think there's something, Anthony, as vets, you know, something that's come up in the last couple of years and research studies on some of the chemicals that we prescribe as vets, which is a real conflict, you know, our pet parasiticides like fipronil and emmitocloprid, you know, those in tiny quantities have the potential to wipe out massive amounts of insects and invertebrates. And if you look at fipronil itself, you know, they did a study on rivers, I think it was 2020, and they found that there were fipronil residues in 98% of UK rivers that they surveyed, and it's one of the breakdown compounds of that called fipronil sulfone, I believe that was found at something like 38 times higher, the recommended safety limit for the environment, and that's due to our pets, our dogs mainly going into rivers and that wash-off effect.

Or a wash off effect down the drain and into our waterways that way. But you know, even us as vets, we're directly prescribing some insecticidal compounds that are banned for agricultural use because of their detrimental effects on the food chain, and we're recommending putting it on our pets on a monthly basis prophylactically, where it does have an impact in the environment. So, Hard, you know, I'm not in clinics anymore, and I do understand the pressure of making sure our clients don't have a flea infestation by prophylactic treatment.

And I understand as well, let's be honest, the, the bottom line and the revenue generation that we need to keep vet practises alive and open and profitable. Some of that is, you know, monthly treatments. But as vets and if we're really truly one health practitioners, we need to examine what we're doing there and are there better ways, you know.

Exactly, I mean, you know, obviously I, I did dermatology, so I prescribed a lot of flea treatments in my time. I think, you know, we need to get very clear about that, and this is why I think bringing the profession together to discuss these issues. To make sure that if it is harmful, we stop doing it, or we change the way we prescribe, we prescribe it a much more targeted way, you know, on an as and when necessary basis.

So I think it's really satisfying to see that that discussion is starting to develop and hopefully it will develop more over the next year or two. To finish off, Sean, obviously, you know, your, your day job. Which, we, we all know you as, as one of the vets at Tails, fascinating company, very much that personalised, medicine, personalised food approach.

But again, I suppose we need to look at, you know, the effects that pet food has as well, you know, the the the every pet. I, I, I got adopted by a cat over the pandemic and one of my good friends, Chantel Bramwood runs Eco Offset. So I've offset, my, my cat, or I can't even say he's my cat.

I mean, I'm a member of the class for the cats. But also my, my sister's dog. I, I offset it for a present for her.

What, what's your thoughts on, on how the pet food industry can, can become a real part of the sustainability story? Yeah, I have lots of thoughts on this. This could be a whole another webinar, Anthony, but I think briefly, yeah, we need to recognise, as vets, I think we need to recognise the Luxury, I suppose, Western luxury of pet ownership and especially how much we indulge our pets and how much our pets consume.

They have what's called a carbon paw print rather than carbon footprint. You know, we often have multiple pets, and we do often lavish them with goods and consumables and energy and things. So there is an onus on us as vets, I suppose, to kind of bring up how to be more sustainable in terms of pet ownership.

Pet food is a big one. It's a very, big topic and sometimes contentious topic in terms of sustainability. And, just to put it out there as, you know, conflict of interest at tails.com, we produce cooked, dry and wet food and treats ranges.

We don't currently produce any vegan or vegetarian diets or whole diets at least. We don't produce raw food and we don't produce insect protein food, which are some of the trends, arguably fads in terms of pet food. We are working towards Bcorp Tails.com, and one of the things there is our kind of environmental impact obviously.

And I think a lot of people focus on pet foods in terms of their sourcing of ingredients or their packaging. Is it recyclable and things like that. The biggest we've looked into this in detail and examined the kind of science on it.

The biggest thing that we can do to reduce the carbon footprint or ecological footprint of our food that we produce for pets is the type of ingredients we use and where we get it from. And I think there's huge trend in pet food marketing and the pet owning community to be over-humanizing our pets or misunderstanding what they actually need in terms of nutrition and going, I only want High meat content or human grade meat or only breast tissue, you know, or the choice cuts because my dog is very important to me and I wouldn't feed them off cuts or scram or organs or whatever and that's driven a lot by, you know, certain trends in pet food like raw feeding, vilifying traditional cooked pet food and brands that have been around a long time. And vilifying meat and animal byproducts or animal derivatives, whatever way you want to say it, but at the same time feeding those exact same things in raw form to dogs and claiming that that's magically beneficial and that's what we should be feeding.

So there's a lot of confusing messaging out there in terms of pet food, but we adopt a nose to tail approach and this is where also some of the Arguments of like vegan and vegetarian diets for pets falls down, because it, it claims to replace all of the meat or animal products that our pets consume as a like for like comparison, when in fact, most of the meat and animal products traditionally that we've fed to our pets are the parts of the carcass that we don't eat as humans. They are from human grade animals. They've come off the human food chain.

And they're delicious, they're nutritious. They're biologically appropriate because our pets in their ancestry would have eaten whole prey and every part of it that we don't necessarily eat nowadays. So this kind of flawed logic that, you know, animal byproducts, which is just a legal labelling term for byproducts of the human food chain, are somehow harmful or somehow junk food for our pets, is completely biological nonsense.

So actually the biggest thing we should be doing is taking that waste product from the human food chain and feeding it to our pets because it should be used. It shouldn't be going into landfill. It shouldn't be.

Exactly. That's that's the biggest thing in terms of carbon impact of our pets. And then there are exciting things coming out like insect protein, which has massively lower carbon footprint if produced correctly, lower water usage, lower carbon emissions, but at the moment it's in its infancy in terms of producing it at scale and at a kind of affordable cost.

It's very, it's very pricey. It's imported from the Netherlands now for any kind of UK brands that are using insect protein. So we're, we're, again, it's really good we're having these conversations.

The industry is having to keep up with being held to account and things, but there's a lot of kind of fads and misconceptions and marketing stuff, kind of convincing people that this is the way to go if you want to feed your pet more. Sustainably. Actually, I think, you know, nose to tail approach and feeding biologically appropriate balanced diet to our pets can happen in lots of different ways.

It doesn't have to be kind of the extremes of like just feeding them raw meat or feeding them, you know, high, high protein content that they don't actually need, but vegan vegetarian stuff, you know, that has problems as well with monocultures and sprays and detrimental. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, there's a lot of good, good buzzwords out there and and a lot of it is marketing rather than kind of evidence-based.

For me it's all, it's as you say, it's the provenance because if you're producing pet food from perhaps, you know, I'm bringing that meat over from Brazil and that meat is being grown by soya, which has been produced on Amazon rainforest. Then clearly that is not good, whereas if you're producing that meat in a way that's much more sustainable, then you know, clearly that, and I think this is where it's very difficult on a bank to put all of that down, but as part of, you know, hopefully your successful application for Bor, they're the sort of discussions that I'm sure you're having at the moment, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, it's sourcing your ingredients as locally as possible, utilising them in a non-wasteful way.

And producing food that is, you know, balanced, nutritious, complete, using, you know, the, the having the least carbon footprint, as you can, you know. And 30% of all food is wasted and, you know, that's a kind of criminal thing if we, if we can cut down on that, as you say, we're putting less into landfill and, and then also for any factory-based business, you know, how you're producing your energy, do you have solar panels, are you getting sustainable energy from a. You know, a good energy or ecotricity type producer.

Yeah, yeah. And that's something as vets that you know we can do in any area that we work in, you know, for practise owners, you know, changing energy suppliers and trying to be more eco-friendly and And kind of having a position on this, whatever area of industry or practise you're in, having a position on this and influencing not only your clients, but also your team and your staff and things as well, and putting that, you know, sustainability message at the core of what you do. If anyone listening hasn't heard of Vet Sustain, I'm sure they have to listen to this podcast, but Vet Sustain have produced a really great kind of checklist of, you know, being a greener practise and and how to implement small changes to become Accredited as an environmentally conscious practise, you know.

It's been great also to see so many people in the veterinary profession embracing investors in the environment as an accreditation scheme, obviously Bigcore is fantastic. We're actually one of the few green accredited businesses, but it's actually, you know, it isn't difficult to get to the bronze or silver level. It just needs that sort of commitment from the top if you like, but also, You need that involvement from everybody, the more, as you say, you can get a team involved, the better, isn't it?

Yeah, definitely, yeah. Sean, it's been great to speak to you. I, I suppose as a final thing, are, are the adders still out or are they well and truly in the undergrowth now?

The adders are hidden away now. The growth is too lush. We keep missing the opportunity to see them and I keep saying to come down.

But maybe next year with the beavers. We've got a, we've got a short window of adders emerging from hibernation and the grass getting too long to see them and they're busy preoccupied with finding a mate rather than avoiding us. So if you come down March to April next year, I'll guarantee to show you some urban adders.

Fantastic. We did have a moment last month. One of our friends had come for dinner and I told her we get a lot of hedgehogs in the front garden.

It's a very small garden, urban garden, but I obviously encourage wildlife into the garden. And as she was walking out, I said, no, hold on, I will check to see if there's a hedgehog in the garden. As I opened the door, one hedgehog was running up the path, closely followed by another one.

We ended up with about 20 minutes of hedgehogs mating, which I don't think many people see as they say, how do hedgehogs mate? Carefully, but we've got, we've got a much better example now and and Sean, if you're very lucky, you might even get a little video from me after the after the podcast. It's quite a vocal affairs.

Sean, as always, it's great to speak to you. Thank you so much for everything that you're doing for the environment and . Yeah, I'm sure we'll be speaking again very soon.

Take care. Cool. Thanks for having me on, Anthony.