Positive News · 2 hours ago

Volunteers Became salmon, Deer and earthworms. Then They Set Out to Save Their River - Positive News

Something shifts when you stop asking what an animal eats and start asking what it fears. In Somerset, eighteen volunteers did exactly that - embodying red deer, kestrel, earthworm, otter, and salmon to experience firsthand the sensory world of wildlife navigating a pollution-damaged landscape. When Jake Lawy swam through the River Tone as an Atlantic salmon, he came back changed: "I think we have a cultural blindness to the harm we cause wild animals, but once you see it, you can't unsee it." What the study quietly reveals is that empathy is not a fixed capacity but an expandable one - that perspective, when deliberately practiced, can dissolve the distance between human convenience and animal suffering. Now that same community is channeling what it felt into a 30-year campaign to restore the Tone, armed with the conviction that caring seriously is itself a form of power.