...and why I became vegan

Harriet Kemsley was once peed on by a rhino.

The comic made the revelation on the latest edition of nature podcast Outsiding, hosted by Caitlin Moran and Adam Frost.

She also revealed her reason for becoming a vegan – and it wasn’t because she made the connection between meat and animals as she grew up on a farm,  but because she saw Wicked.

In the film, animals used to speak but lost their ability because they were mistreated – a belief Kemsley has adopted. 

She said: ‘They treat the animals so badly in it. They used to talk and I think I'm not completely sure that animals didn't used to talk and there's no evidence that they didn't.  It's hard to find evidence that they didn't .

‘There's this goat in it called Dr Dillamond and Dr Dillamond goes to speak but because the animals, the humans treat them so badly. He loses his ability and he lets out a bleat. And since then I haven't had a yogurt.

‘This is the situation that we're at and so now I'm vegan and my life is ruined. But I really believe in it.’

She also recalled going to a zoo as a child and peering into a rhino’s enclosure when the animal ‘cocked its leg, and it pissed on my head’.

The comic added: ‘I was drenched in rhinoceros​ urine. I don't know how else to describe it. And my mum, I just remember my mum in the toilets having to wash me off and then drying my head under the hairdryer. And her just being like, "why doesn’t this happen to anyone else?"  A nice day out at the zoo and my daughter is covered in rhinoceros​ piss.’

Kemsley also spoke of her love of sloths, saying: ‘I saw them in Costa Rica and I cried because they're just, you can't believe they're real. The way they move, they're just like magical.’

They were her specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind after her first choice, a series of The  American Office, was rejected as Rhys James had done it the year before.

‘But the reality was I had to learn all the Latin names of sloths, all the history of sloths. It became a full-time job learning about sloths. And it was so stressful and then on the day like the sloth thing actually went really well but the other t problem is you also have to do general knowledge and that's a lifetime's work!’

Published: 5 Nov 2026