About the Author

• Born in the heart of London, UK on a cold March morning in 1969.



• Brought up and educated - along with my big brother - in Harrow, a dreary, middle-class London suburb by remarkably tolerant parents.
  
  
• Escaped from the suburban nightmare in 1987 and fled to Manchester, to study sociology for 3 years and live off lentils.



• Graduated with flying colours in 1990 and returned south to the parental home in search of non-existent work in a land irreversibly tainted by more than a decade of conservative rule.



• 1990: Hit on the brilliant idea of deserting the sinking ship and leaving my unpaid poll tax bill behind.



• July 1991: the Great Escape. I arrive in the Netherlands and set up home in Amsterdam, where I have lived ever since.



• Studied for a year at the University of Amsterdam. Got an MA, learned Dutch, acquired three cats, a low-rent flat, a job as a researcher and peace of mind.




• I spent four years working as a potgraduate researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research , University of Amsterdam. I defended my doctoral thesis The Burden of Beasts on 5th December 1997. If you want to read all about my completed doctoral research, you know where to click...
  
  

• After getting the doctorate I worked as a freelance researcher (one of my major freelance projects was on livestock keeping and public health issues) and as a volunteer on the Amsterdam Animal Ambulance.
  
  
• From September 2000-January 2003, I worked as a post-doc researcher at the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Utrecht, researching the social and ethical acceptability of killing animals. Interesting stuff, eh! You can read the results of this study here.
  
  
• Since I generally prefer to work part-time, I also sometimes work freelance as a writer, researcher and Dutch-English translator. Stichting Aap, a fantastic sanctuary for exotic animals in the Netherlands, gets to make use of my talents as a translator for free.
  
  
• In 2004, I decided to get out of the straightjacket of the university world, being tired of professorial hierarchies and chasing after research grants. Although I continue to write on human-animal interactions as an independent scholar, I now work primarily in the field of animal protection.
  
  
• For three years, I was a senior policy adviser for a Dutch animal advocacy organisation Bont voor Dieren, which campaigns for the rights and protection of fur-bearing animals.
  
  
• I left this organisation in September 2007 and am now doing freelance consultancy work for a number of international animal protection organisations.

  And that's my life pretty much in a nutshell...