Caught up in the day to day activity of working for animals, it’s all too easy to forget that there are many other people who are also rescuing at-risk animals or campaigning for them one way or another or quite simply ‘doing their bit.’ It’s even easier to forget those who preceded us even if we knew or remember them. It’s a cliche but it’s true (as they mostly are): we stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us. Ruth Plant is one such of these people. As is her biographer, Jenny Remfrey, as they’re both ‘pioneers in animal welfare,’ as the book’s subtitle states. I recall meeting Ruth Plant but I don’t remember much. Frankly, she was one of those (cliche warning here) dotty old ladies who loved cats and would do anything for them. Tenacious and innovative, and no doubt difficult, Ruth helped to pioneer trap, neuter and return as an effective policy for feral cats. In Remfrey’s affectionate and brief but authoritative account of Ruth Plant’s life, the focus is more on cats than other aspects of her most likely dotty life. For example, Ruth wrote one book about her ‘forty years communication with a brother in the after life’ and another called ‘Nanny and I.’ Nonetheless, this is a must-read for those who care deeply about cats and want to learn about the history of feral cat management, particularly TNR. There’s a useful timeline and bibliography as well as information most likely unavailable anywhere else about the torturous history of cat advocacy organisations. Don’t ask.
Ruth Plant by Jenny Remfrey
Ruth Plant: A Pioneer in Animal Welfare by Jenny Remfrey. Self-published in 2001.

In this section:
- A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey
- A Life for Animals by Christine Townend
- About A Son by David Whitehouse
- Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra
- All About Love by bell hooks
- Animal Ethics: the basics by Tony Milligan
- Azadi by Arundhati Roy
- Beastly by Keggie Carew
- Beef by Andrew Rimas and Evan D.G. Fraser
- Bleating Hearts by Mark Hawthorne
- Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic
- Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild
- Call of the Cats by Andrew Bloomfield
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
- Empathy by Roman Krznaric
- Even Vegans Die by Carol J Adams, Patti Breitman and Virginia Messina
- Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Love Notes by Philip McKibbin
- Love Soup by Anna Thomas
- Makers and Manners by Andrew Holden
- Model Animal Welfare Act by Janice Cox and Sabine Lennkh
- Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
- Moti: An Indian Elephant
- Nim Chimpsky by Elizabeth Hess
- No Time to Lose by Pema Chodron
- On Editing by Helen Corner-Bryant and Kathryn Price
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Pets in America by Katherine C. Grier
- Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq
- Please Take Me Home by Clare Campbell
- Ruth Plant by Jenny Remfrey
- Second Nature by Jonathan Balcombe
- Story Craft by Jack Hart
- Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
- The Animal Ethics Reader and Social Creatures
- The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto by Sue Coe
- The Chernobyl Privileges by Alex Lockwood
- The Elephant Conspiracy by Peter Hain
- The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis
- The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Masson
- The Four Loves by C S Lewis
- The Great Cat & Dog Massacre by Hilda Kean
- The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
- The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah
- The Inner Life of Cats by Thomas McNamee
- The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker
- The New Wild by Fred Pearce
- The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
- The Pig in Thin Air by Alex Lockwood
- The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Scarlett & Sophie Rickard
- The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller
- The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
- The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy
- To the River by Olivia Laing
- Topsy by Michael Daly
- Walking With Ghosts by Gabriel Byrne
- Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition by Sue Coe and Stephen Eisenman