For International Women’s Day, Claire Hamlett spotlights a few of the women who are actively advancing the rights of animals, either in their activism or professional work or in their contributions to public thought and discussion on this topic, who you may not have heard of before.

The Royal Horticultural Society, arguably the UK’s foremost gardening charity, has had a change of heart when it comes to our garden gastropods and whether we should be poisoning them. But what about other animals deemed pests, or those who simply don’t have a convenient role or value in our human lives? Claire Hamlett discusses.

ALL ANIMALS: Bringing you a digest of news and opinion pieces you might have missed from the past week, covering all things animal justice.

ProVeg UK’s School Plates programme does exactly that - making school food more sustainable by swapping carbon-intensive meals with nutritious meat-free and plant-based alternatives. ProVeg UK’s Jimmy Pierson discusses the plant-based school food revolution in his guest blog to celebrate International School Meals Day.

Last week, fake meat makers THIS released a video showing vegans taste-testing what they were told were animal products for a “social experiment”. The bizarre advert was the latest in a disturbing anti-vegan marketing trend, following in the footsteps of plant-based brand Oatly, but was there something even more sinister going on? Andrew Gough writes.

The UN’s leading authority on climate issues - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - has issued a stark warning against measures that seem a good idea at first, but can actually be counterproductive. Some of these ‘maladaptive mitigations’ are, unsurprisingly, linked to animal agriculture. Claire Hamlett reports.

THOUGHTS: The situation in Ukraine is worsening day by day, and so too are the many challenges faced by Ukrainians in the midst of an invasion by Russia. For many families and those who do not stay to fight, the answer is of course to evacuate and find safety. But to the people who run animal shelters and sanctuaries, this is simply out of the question. Claire Hamlett shares her thoughts on these brave humans.

NEWS: When humans who abuse animals are taken to court, they get a defence lawyer. But who represents the animals in these cases? The US state of New Jersey thinks our non-human companions should also be represented fairly.

PICTURES: In the grip of a Russian invasion, the situation for everyone in Ukraine is truly terrible. Among the pictures and videos emerging of the pitched fighting and humanitarian crisis, glimpses of pets and other animals caught in the crossfire are helping to tell a different side of the human story.

NEWS: Vegans and vegetarians have a substantially lower chance of developing cancer than people who eat animal flesh, says a new cohort study from researchers at the University of Oxford.

The use of pesticides in crop farming is a very common ‘gotcha’ that meat-eaters use against vegans when comparing the animal death toll and environmental impact of our food systems. But a new report has found that huge quantities of these harmful chemicals are being used to grow crops for animal feed. Claire Hamlett reports.

The UK government is on the verge of backtracking on its proposal to ban imports of fur and foie gras, driven by the will of Jacob Rees Mogg and other Tory cronies. Claire Hamlett reports.