It began with a small blackberry bush. Just a slender, spiked vine growing by the roadside at the western entrance to my town. At first, it was barely visible. Something you could easily pass by without notice. But I saw it. And I knew what it meant. Blackberry.

A plant that is both patient and persistent, and one that does not ask for permission.

And I knew all too well the damage it could do. The way it creeps, takes hold and spreads. How quickly one small bush can become a thicket. And how much harder it is to undo once its roots settle deep into the earth.

And yet, I did nothing.

I told myself I would stop one day. Pull it out. Do my small part for the land and for the community. But days passed, then weeks. Each time I drove by, I noticed it. Each time, I thought the same thought.

I should do something about that.

But I didn’t.

Perhaps someone else would. A council worker. Another concerned passerby. I softened my inaction with quiet reasoning. It wasn’t my responsibility. It was only one bush.

And so it grew.

Until one day, I stopped. Took a shovel, a pair of gloves and some dogged determination. It was after all, a blackberry bush. And I set about removing it.

What could have been a simple act months earlier had become something far more demanding. The roots had taken hold. Its resilience borne out in the thorns that had multiplied. The work now was far harder than it needed to be if only I had acted earlier.

Standing there looking at my blisters, I realised something I have not forgotten since.

Inaction has a way of growing too.

There is an old truth in this. That what we delay, we deepen. That the space between knowing and doing is where most of life’s problems take root. As the modern stoics so often remind us, the obstacle is not what stands before us, but what we choose to do about it.

Or not.

Because the truth is, the world is full of blackberry bushes.

Some grow in soil. Others in systems, in habits and in silence. In the quiet spaces where something calls for action and is met instead with hesitation or excuses.

And like that roadside bush, they rarely remain small for long.

The causes we care about. The injustices we see. The opportunities to act with courage, compassion and conviction. They are often not grand or sweeping moments. More often, they are small, inconvenient or easy to defer.

Until they are not.

For those of us who advocate for animals, we know this well. Change does not come from waiting for the right time, the right conditions or even the right person. It comes from someone choosing to act, even when the act feels small.

Especially then.

Because every moment of action interrupts the spread of something that would otherwise grow. And every moment of inaction allows it.

So perhaps the question is not whether we are capable.

But whether we are willing.

“If not you, then who? If not now, when?”

So choose your shovel.

I was about fourteen, standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the thin morning light, toothbrush in one hand and my mum’s words in the other: “Don’t forget to brush your teeth.” And so I dutifully scrubbed away at my pearly whites, just as I had been told to do since childhood.

But then those cheesy words from the television commercial I had seen the night before niggled at me. I paused and actually looked at what I was doing. The toothbrush wasn’t really spending much time on my teeth at all. Instead, it honed in on the spaces between each tooth and traced the soft pink line of my gums.

That was the moment it dawned on me.

All those years I’d heard “brush your teeth”, never realising how much of it was really about what sits between them and the gums that hold everything in place. The teeth, it turns out, are merely the visible part. Everything else is the roots holding them in place. Neglect that, and eventually the teeth themselves begin to fail.
It struck me then how curious language can be. We repeat instructions so often that we stop noticing what they really mean. “Brush your teeth.” One simple instruction and yet, not entirely true.

As the years passed, that small realisation returned to me more than once. Especially when I began rethinking the way we speak about animals. Most of us grow up hearing another instruction just as familiar.

“Be kind to animals.”

It sits comfortably among the lessons of our childhood. Feed the dog. Be gentle with the family cats. And somewhere in the background, we know that laws exist to protect animals through something called the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

Yet walk through a supermarket or glance at a restaurant menu and something inside you awakens. The animals have disappeared and in their place are tidy words and comfortable rituals. Pork. Bacon. Ham. Not a pig or someone whose nose is waiting to nudge your heart.

On the surface, everything appears perfectly normal. And so we go about our lives, rarely stopping to question what lies beneath.
But sometimes, just as with brushing our teeth, it helps to look a little closer—for them and for us.

Because beneath the visible layer lies the deeper structure that holds the whole system together. A structure built not on kindness, but on distance, euphemism and suffering so routine it has become almost invisible.

Perhaps that is the curious thing about human animals. We polish the visible parts of our lives with our words, our labels and our rituals, while the foundations beneath them quietly erode.

That morning in the mirror taught me something simple that I have never forgotten, though it would take many years to fully understand. The most important truths are often hidden just below the surface. We may think we are brushing our teeth. But all along, it was what lay between and beneath that truly mattered.

And perhaps the same is true of kindness.

Perhaps kindness has never really lived in the words we use, or the stories we tell ourselves, or even our animal protection laws, but in our willingness to look beyond the polished surface and face what has been hidden there all along.

Because it is not what we say about animals that defines us.

It is who lies beneath the choices we make.

But that story only holds if you’re standing on the bank. From the other end of the line, the experience looks very different. Scientific research over the past two decades has shown that fish are sentient beings. They feel pain and experience stress and fear. They also show signs of positive states and social preferences.

Studies have demonstrated that fish possess nociceptors, learn from negative experiences and can show long-term behavioural changes after injury. A barbed hook tearing through a mouth is not a momentary inconvenience.

It is trauma.

Dragged from the water into the air, fish don’t simply “stop moving”. They suffocate, their gills collapse and their bodies fight desperately for oxygen that isn’t there (fish cannot breathe gaseous oxygen in the air).

And the suffering doesn’t end with the fish.

Discarded hooks and fishing line linger long after the angler has gone home. They drift unseen beneath the surface, turning lakes and rivers into silent traps. Left along banks and shorelines, they can entangle animals who pass through. Waterbirds can be snared by line around their legs or wings while hooks embed in necks, beaks and throats. Many of these animals die slowly, out of sight, their suffering never counted because they were never the intended catch.

Which raises a difficult question.

When this harm becomes visible, whose responsibility is it to act?

Recently, we received a call about a goose at a local lake. A fishing hook was embedded in their neck. As a non-native animal, they fell outside of the scope of wildlife carers; government bodies did not attend, and this wasn’t technically within our usual scope of work. And at the time, we were hundreds of kilometres away, responding to the Longwood bushfires and caring for fire-impacted farmed animals.

Still, concern doesn’t switch off just because a case falls outside a neat category.

We offered advice, suggested alternative avenues for help and trusted that someone closer would be able to intervene.

But days passed. And no one did.

Then, as the heat finally broke one evening and we were able to attend, the goose emerged from the reeds at dusk. We suspect they had been sheltering there during the hottest part of the day, hidden and hurting and trying to survive.

What followed was not heroic. It was awkward, loud and briefly chaotic. The goose made it very clear that they valued their body exactly as it was and had no interest in our plans of kindness. Despite our repeated, gentle assurances of “We’re here to help, buddy,” the goose was clearly unconvinced.

Eventually, with care and patience and a set of pliers, we were able to cut the barb and delicately remove the hook. On examination, there was no sign of lasting damage, no infection and no tearing beyond the entry point.

The goose was last seen waddling back to the water. Free, still wild and still with their buddies.

This is the part of the story that stays with us.

Fishing is described as a recreational pursuit. The word itself implies renewal and restoration—an activity that leaves both the person and the place no worse than before.

If a pastime relies on another being’s pain, fear or death, can it still claim that meaning?

And if the tools of that pastime continue to harm long after the fun has ended, entangling animals who never consented to the game, what responsibility do we carry for the unseen consequences?

This story isn’t about blame. It’s about angles.

The angler’s angle. The fish’s angle. The goose’s angle.

And the invitation for us all to pause long enough to look again.

When we close ourselves off to the experiences of others, especially those who do not speak our language, it becomes easier to ignore harm. That distance dulls our empathy, and what we don’t feel, we are less likely to question.

Recreation, at its best, should deepen our care for the world we move through. It should not require someone else to suffer quietly so we can feel at peace. Sometimes change begins not with condemnation, but with noticing and with choosing a different angle.

Yet my heart and thoughts drift to those whose worlds have been changed forever by the merciless fires. While we were fortunate to be spared—this time—many others were not. Driving through fire-affected landscapes to lend what help and hands we could, I was met by a haunting familiarity: the scorched earth, the smell of smoke and the hollow silence after the roar.
And still, amid the blackened ground, there it was—the unmistakable glimmer of hope.

Because in moments like these, we witness the very best of humanity. Have you ever wondered why that is? Why, when all seems lost, people reach deep down inside and shine so brightly for others? Perhaps it is because the fire strips things back to their essence. It burns through our differences, our opinions and our fears. It reveals a fundamental truth that lies beneath the ash and grief. Something that has always been there: a beating heat, a desire to protect and a longing to help.

It’s a knowing that extends beyond our own kind.

We don’t have to have lived the experiences of others to recognise ourselves in them. We don’t need to know every detail to their story to understand their pain. The same is true for non-human animals who share this world with us. Their hearts beat with the same urgency; their fear is just as real and their relief just as profound when kindness finds them.

The fire reminds us how fragile everything is. But it also reminds us how powerful we can be when we let empathy be our guide. Compassion is not a finite resource and it grows best when it is shared.

The challenge, perhaps, is not finding kindness when tragedy forces us beyond our comfort zone, but learning how to keep it alive when the smoke clears. To let it guide our everyday choices. To allow it to shape the world we are building, moment by moment.

And as we reflect on the year that has been, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your belief, your support and your compassion throughout 2025. None of this work is possible without you walking alongside us.

As we step into 2026, my hope is simple and steadfast. That together, we will continue to choose kindness. That we keep walking, hand in hand, towards a more humane and just world for humans and non-humans alike.

Because even from the ashes, kindness has a way of catching light again.