I thought I was coming to understand the pain and suffering that horses go through and that I was beginning to make a difference, however small. That is, until I travel to Ethiopia, where 78 per cent of people live on less than £1 a day, and more than six million are in dire need of humanitarian aid. Here, I find myself tipped into hell, realising that when people are desperate, animals suffer even more.

Over the course of the next few days, as we travel south from the capital to the most remote regions of the country, I see so many random, unnecessary acts of cruelty - especially by men and teenage boys, who seem to show their dejected charges no mercy at all - that all the prejudices I didn't even know I had - against men, against women who give birth to child after child after child - bubble to the surface, making me doubt my own humanity as well as theirs.