Roaming Wild : The Founding of Compassion in World Farming

This book explores the paths that led Anna and Peter Roberts to create Compassion in World Farming, the world's largest and most successful animal welfare charity, from a backroom of their own home.

Roaming Wild tells the remarkable true story of Anna and Peter Roberts — the pioneering British couple whose compassion, courage and determination helped transform animal welfare from a fringe concern into a powerful global movement.From a small room in their family home, with little money and at a time when concern for farm animals was dismissed as sentimental and eccentric, Anna and Peter founded Compassion in World Farming — now the world’s leading farm animal welfare organisation. Their journey from conventional farmers to campaigners who challenged the very foundations of modern agriculture is an inspiring story of conviction, sacrifice and extraordinary vision.Born in the 1920s and shaped by war and a rapidly changing world, Anna and Peter met and married in the 1950s before building a life as dairy and poultry farmers in rural Hampshire. Yet as industrial farming expanded through the 1960s, bringing battery cages, intensive livestock production, chemical dependence and the loss of countryside biodiversity, they made a life-changing decision. They gave up farming, became vegetarian, risked their livelihood and reputation, and devoted themselves to exposing the hidden suffering of animals in the food chain.Rejected at first by established animal charities and ridiculed by many in the farming world, the Roberts family built their campaign from the ground up. What followed was a lifetime of activism: legal battles, international campaigns, challenges to governments and corporations, and work alongside influential figures including Spike Milligan, Celia Hammond and Peter Singer. Their efforts helped bring farm animal welfare into mainstream political debate and influenced some of the world’s largest food companies to rethink their practices.But Roaming Wild is also an intimate family story - a portrait of a fifty-year love affair, the challenges of raising three daughters as vegetarians in the 1960s, a lifelong search for spiritual meaning, and the couple’s pioneering commitment to restoring nature on the land around their home.Combining social history, environmental change, activism and personal memoir, Roaming Wild celebrates two people who dared to question accepted ideas and proved that compassion could change the world. It is the story of an ordinary couple with an extraordinary vision and a timely reminder of how individuals can inspire lasting change.