Animals
The sad death of the pony ride
Pony rides were once a staple of every village, church and primary-school fête. A brusque, horsey mother would swing you…
How an animal psychic helped find a missing dog
The missing dog and the animal psychic
Is your pet killing the planet?
Having a pet is worse for the planet than flying
I won't ever look at cows the same way again: Andrea Arnold's Cow reviewed
The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring…
The West’s moralising over climate change will cost India
On Tuesday, I chaired a session at Policy Exchange addressed by Tony Abbott, the eloquent former prime minister of Australia,…
My battle to be top dog
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…
Animal sentience law has finally caught up with Plutarch’s thinking
Almost no ancients cared whether animals felt pain or not. The classical Stoic belief that man’s reasoning capacity elevated him…
How not to walk a dog
Watching a woman driving a dog past my house like a carthorse is just another ‘new normal’ of lockdown. This…
The ethics of eating octopus
The questionable ethics of eating octopus
Why whales sing: it’s a question of culture
Of course animals have culture
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
How long before Baby Sussex slips down the line of succession?
Endangered species The UN claimed a million species of plants and animals could become extinct. If they all died out,…
![Let there be light: the Atlantic footballfish dwells 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. [Paulo Oliveira / Alamy Stock Photo]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/18augartslead.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
How to live in a world without light: Life in the Dark at the Natural History Museum reviewed
Like most of our ape ancestors, we have really had only one response to the fall of night. We have…
Why the scream of the elephant is much more chilling than the roar of a lion
Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living…
When will the Tories learn: murdering animals isn’t a vote-winner
Buoyed by its huge popularity in the opinion polls and the fact that it is managing Brexit so well, the…
Do animals really have feelings? Plutarch thought so
Whatever the government decides about post-EU regulations on animal sentience, the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch (died c. ad 120)…
An exceptional new film about Jane Goodall unearths a remarkable love story
There are times when our national passion for cutting people down to size is a little tiring. I left Brett…
It’s hard to preserve the primacy of head over heart while watching this doc about refugees
Anybody who wants to maintain a strong and untroubled stance against mass migration to Europe should probably avoid BBC2’s Exodus:…
Voting in? You have the blood of Spanish bulls on your hands
Britain’s animals would be solidly for Leave. Here’s why
What do we gain by burning ivory?
Burning stockpiles of ivory was meant to wipe out poaching. After nearly 30 years, is it working?
The Spectator, 1916: To win the war, lose the dogs
From ‘Food dictatorship’, The Spectator, 27 May 1916: Nobody would like to see the whole race of dogs exterminated, but…
David Attenborough used to steal the animals he found in the jungle and take them home
Let me start this week with an admittedly hard quiz question: in 1954, how did the sudden illness of Jack…
Meet London’s senior mayor (no, it’s not Sadiq)
London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially…
Elephants are special – the Romans knew it too
In order to deter poachers, hundreds of tons of elephants’ tusks are being incinerated in Kenya. But even for Romans,…
Beautiful, wilful, never dull: in praise of Clumber spaniels
For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith,…
