The Drowned Dove

The murmur of the seaside, waves-upon rocks, scuttling, clicking crabs as they dash across baking sand: winter on the Cape. All the white picket houses snooze along the bay and distant brown beachheads, dotted with boulders give way to dark, foreign trees. We saw a mongoose at the Green Hole once. Since then I always

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

I wouldn’t say I love animals. Do not misunderstand me here: I am exceptionally fond of the little beasts. I certainly love my pets and I am constantly reminded of the fact that animals can be charming, adorable, fun and comforting. Yet still, despite all that, if someone asked me to divulge my interests and

Pig-Headed – Our Hypocrisy over Animal Cruelty has led to Flat House Farm

Flat House Farm is the latest revelation in a long series of exposés of the meat industry. It suffices to say that the images that have come from this ‘high-standards’ farm are nothing short of horrific. The emaciated skeletons of dead and dying piglets litter the floors of the barn, older pigs weighed down with

The Cygnet and the Lion

When I read that a cygnet, who had been brutally kicked in a London park, had died of its injuries I felt a flicker of sadness. The photos of the still creature, thick with fluff, as grey as a pensioner though perhaps not even a year old, with its wet, squinting eyes moved me. It

The Shortcomings of Environmental Veganism

Adopting veganism is, in my view, the greatest moral imperative of our age. When it comes to the perpetration of suffering there are no bigger culprits than the world’s meat and dairy industries. In terms of sheer numbers this simply must be the case: with 70 billion farmed animals on the planet, 50 billion of