The UK’s new Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill formally recognises marine invertebrates, including crabs and lobsters, as sentient and with the capacity to feel pain, joy and comfort. While that is excellent news, sadly ministers predict it will have no bearing on the fishing industry as it is now.

The refusal to grant a ULEZ exemption to charity Dogs On The Street could have serious implications not just for dogs, but for their homeless guardians too, writes Claire Hamlett.

There is just one more day to add your name to a parliamentary petition to ban the use, sale, and manufacture of free-running snares for trapping wildlife. In order to secure a debate in parliament, 31,522 signatures are still needed.

SCHOOL OF THOUGHT: Wrestling with the unshakable feeling that you just can’t give up ‘seafood’? We get it, we’ve all been there. For many people considering switching to veganism, giving up aquatic animals is a major challenge. So it might help to learn about this shocking procedure carried out in almost all prawn farms around the world.

PICTURES: World Animal Day was actually on October 4th, but events celebrating the day across many countries go on until November. We’re marking the occasion by bringing you a selection of award-winning photographs from the last 12 months.

SANCTUARIES: Claire Hamlett explains why she chose to join the Pigoneer 2000 Club, a crowdfunding initiative with practical funding of sanctuary pigs at its heart.

WEEKEND READ: The shooting of a rare white stag in Bootle near Liverpool, UK, was met with an outpouring of indignation across social media from animal activists and ‘animal lovers’ alike. The obvious questions arose about whether the police made the right call, but are we missing the real issue? With deer populations around urban areas on the rise, the next shooting is almost inevitable.

NEWS: A farmer in Yorkshire, UK, has killed hundreds of piglets because slaughterhouses aren’t killing adults fast enough due to worker shortages, while other reports warn that 120,000 pigs could be culled to avoid an “acute welfare disaster”.

The owner of the UK’s biggest poultry supplier, Bernard Matthews Foods, has made the absurd claim that a shortage of carbon dioxide gas, which is used to gas turkeys to death, means Christmas could be “cancelled”.

Philosopher Peter Singer has been awarded $1 million as the winner of the 2021 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. As is fitting of both the ‘father of effective altruism’ and the author of the extremely influential book Animal Liberation, Singer plans to donate a third of the money to the most effective organisations working to end factory farming.

Several stories in recent weeks have emerged about wild boar. Together they paint a vivid picture of contradictions in everything from environmentalism to zoonotic diseases, as Claire Hamlett explains.

Animals have been used in medical tests for hundreds of years, and the horrific experiments are common practice in the UK. Here, we break down what the law is, whether the tests work, and what the alternatives are.