Matilda and her nine piglets have been saved from the slaughterhouse and are now a step closer to their forever home thanks to the work of animal rescuers, a grassroots pressure campaign and the huge outpouring of public support.

Nettverk For Dyrs Frihet (Network for Animal Freedom) has released the findings of its groundbreaking six-year investigation into dozens of Norweigian pig farms. With places selected at random, the report has sent shockwaves across the country as people are faced with the stark reality of standard pig farming.

The UK’s top 10 supermarkets are actively encouraging customers to buy meat products despite recent improvements in the companies’ environmental policies, a new supermarket scorecard by campaign group Feedback reveals.

The use on UK pig farms of a class of antibiotics - said to be “critically important” for human health by the World Health Organisation - has more than doubled, according to industry data obtained by the Guardian.

A new collaborative project led by scientists in the US and Canada has identified at least 887 viruses present in wildlife that carry a risk of spreading to humans. Of those listed in the ‘SpillOver’ watchlist, only 38 are known zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19, Ebola and rabies, and the list doesn’t even include influenza or any viruses associated with insect carriers and domesticated animals.

The European Parliament has voted to ban cages for farmed animals, including egg-laying hens, ducks, and rabbits, following huge public support for the proposed ECI ‘End the Cage Age’ legislation. It’s great news at first glance, but as with anything political, there are conditions.

Today is Ban Live Exports International Awareness Day. Now in its sixth year, having started after 13,000 sheep died after suffering a prolonged journey from Romania which finally ended in Somalia on 14 June 2015, it comes a week after the UK government introduced the Kept Animals Bill to Parliament, the second piece of animal welfare legislation introduced this year.

The way we talk about animals devalues the lives of some based solely on their belonging to a particular species. But could this kind of talk be considered hate speech, akin to that directed at people of a certain race, and should animals be protected from it?

Scientists have come up with a bioplastic that uses soy protein to mimic spider silk with all the tensile strength but none of the exploitation associated with other alternatives currently in development. But is it too good to be true?

The argument that foods like avocados, almonds, melons, kiwis, and butternut squash aren’t vegan crops up time and time again - but how true is it, why does it exist, and can you eat them on a vegan diet?

At this moment of reckoning with the destructiveness of the human taste for animal flesh, small, family-run farms are emerging as the cause that everybody from Prince Charles to the European legislature wants to champion. But are they really the environmental panacea everyone makes them out to be?

We know that a plant-based diet is associated with many personal health benefits when it comes to chronic illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, certain forms of cancer and heart disease, but a new study suggests that vegans may also have a defence against Covid-19 when compared to meat-eaters.